Thursday, 21 May 2015
Thursday, 19 February 2015
Goodness
Goodness – Franklin Marsh
The rain fell, hard and cold, but also seemed to burn. He walked through the mean streets of Chiba City, the white silk jacket and trousers clinging to his limbs, the black pom-poms drooping. He turned into a dark, stinking, tiny alley, and the flashing neon stung his retinas. Mr. P’s. Two satyrs on the door. Paul and Paul. Dinner jackets and furry legs.
“Hey Charlie,” sneered the bigger Paul, “Where ya bin? He’s waitin’’.”
“I’m here,” said the sad-faced clown, squeezing past them, into the darkness. He nodded at the hag behind the ticket counter and entered the main room.
A weary, glazed faery was going through the motions of a strip-tease on the postage-stamp stage, a herd of jeering trolls heckling with venom before her.
As he made his way towards another Paul-guarded door at the back, he risked a glance at the bar. Behind it stood a defeated looking billy-goat. The animal saw him and raised its eyebrows. It was too dark to see if there was a spark of hope in its eyes.
Charlie detoured across to the bar.
“She’s comin’,” he whispered, “but she’s changed.”
The goat placed a half-full tumbler of amber fluid on the bar.
“The good stuff,” he whispered back.
As Charlie picked up the glass, a tuxedo’d arm reached around and took the glass from him.
“Boss won’t want you likkered, Clown,” rasped the Paul adding “Shame on you, Pop.”
Charlie shrugged and led the satyr towards the back door. The Goat knocked back the Scotch and raised the glass to the Clown’s back.
The Paul nodded down the black corridor.
“You know the way.”
Charlie had never felt so alone as the door closed. He walked down the corridor to the next door and raised his fist to knock. The door opened. He walked in.
It was semi-dark in the room. A table lamp threw a pool of light onto the green baize-topped desk.
The Clown could make out the shape behind the light. There were two others further back. Charlie swallowed. It must be the corrupt vice cop, and the guy with the elongated jaw and the teeth. The one they called ‘Croc.’
“Siddown, Charlie.”
The Clown walked forward , sat on the simple wooden chair in front of the desk and clasped his white-gloved hands.
The figure behind the lamp leaned forward, and his face entered the pool of light. It was a deliberate act. Charlie couldn’t breathe for a minute.
The hideously rouged cheeks. The flat, huge teeth, like yellow gravestones. The mad, staring, soulless eyes seemingly painted on to the face. Worst of all, the gigantic hooked nose, and the upward-curving chin, almost meeting.
“What’s the news, Charlie?”
Here goes, thought the Clown.
“She’s coming back, Mr Punchinello. Here. To Chiba City. To this club. To see you.”
******************************************
The Bullet Train pulled up, dead on the white painted lines on the platform. She alighted, looking around in disappointed awe. What a dismal, dreary, dead dump! Was she doing the right thing?
Leaving the station, she pulled up the collar of her white trench coat against the rain. What would this do to her hair? She took temporary shelter under the awning of a burger van. She looked at the kid flipping the meat and did a double take.
“Gustav?”
He squinted, looked shocked, then smiled.
“Shit, Lor’.”
“Language!”
“What? What the fu…”
She removed a small plastic container of liquid soap and squirted some into the boys mouth.
”Argfgrgggrgrggh” he gargled through a mouthful of bubbles.
“No profanity, Gustav. We’re turning over a new leaf.”
He looked at her in surprise as she rattled a tin marked Swear Box under his nose. Against his better nature he took a ten yen piece from his black and white checked trousers and dropped it into the receptacle.
Was it really her? Clad in white? That white hair? If it wasn’t for the two thin black streaks, one either side of her head, the cheeky smile, and the positively devilish wink, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“Thank you, Gustav. Now shut up your gastrodome and follow me. We’re going clubbing.”
“Christ, Lor’.”
She turned looking shocked, and produced a tin marked Sacred Heart Church.
“No blasphemy.”
“You gotta be sh…kiddin’ me.”
“ I kid you not. We’re going to clean up this city.”
‘******
The Clown stood up. Punchinello produced a large, heavy, smooth wooden stick from behind his desk.
“I didn’t give you permission to leave, Chas.”
“I gotta go, Mr. P. The wife and kids?”
“Get outta here,” growled the shadowy figure, tossing a thousand yen note onto the baize.
The Clown ignored it and headed for the door. Once outside the room, he slumped briefly against the wall, trying to control his shaking limbs, then decided to head for the back door, hoping no Pauls would be on guard. As he reached the exit, another door opened.
“Charlie,” a muffled voice mumbled, “Take me with you.”
The Clown turned. He could just make out her face in the darkness. The puffed, bloodied lips, the black eye, tears falling from the other.
The Clown looked around desperately.
“Come on, then,” he whispered, knowing he was burning boats.
She emerged, clutching the baby to her chest.
The Clown saw bruises on the tiny, slumbering face.
“Christ, Jude. Not him too?”
She nodded sadly.
The Clown was about to close the door when he heard a pitiful whimpering. Looking down he saw the black and white dog, holding up a bloodied paw, and trying to wag its broken tail.
The Clown choked back a curse.
“Come on, Toby,” he said, through gritted teeth.
The exit door opened, and the Clown peeked out into the rain. No guard. They slipped out and headed towards a rickshaw tricycle parked at the kerb.
Jude and the baby climbed into the back, the Clown lifting the little dog onto the seat.
As he began to pedal away, he saw the sky brightening over by the railway station.
***************************************
Gustav watched the rain recede ahead of them as he and the woman walked through the streets.
They entered the alley, and approached the satyrs.
“Hi, honey,” leched the bigger one. “Ditch the kid and we’ll have a good time. Work for you in here too, if you want.”
Both half-goats guffawed.
“Paul, you should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
The satyr looked puzzled.
“Who…?”
To Gustav’s surprise, she seized the Paul by the lapels of his DJ and hurled him over her shoulder. He hit the opposite wall horns first, and collapsed into a heap of rotting garbage.
The other Paul looked on amazed, and took a roundhouse left, right on the goatee. He sank back against his wall and slid into temporary oblivion.
“Well,” said Gustav, “Cussin’ and blasphemin’ are no-nos, but violence is OK?”
“In the furtherance of good,” she replied with a charming smile, entering the club.
They ignored the ticket hag and moved into the stage area. Gustav gasped in horror at a frightened girl, attempting to remove her clothes before the baying trolls.
The woman gestured vaguely in their direction. The girl’s clothes flew back on to her in a comical reverse speeded-up fashion. The audience’s seats collapsed, and they writhed in a shocked heap. The Paul on the back door walked towards the melee, not quite sure what had happened, and soon fists and hooves were flying.
The woman walked up to the bar.
“Hi, GB. How’s about a root beer?”
The Goat seemed to drop years, and stood erect.
“Lor’?”
“Just a root beer,” she cut in sharply.
“Well, shit, I…”
The Swear Box appeared on the bar. The stunned Goat picked up a hoovefull of Euros, Dollars and buttons from his tip saucer and dropped them in. He poured a root beer, and grabbed a bottle of Jack from the shelf behind him.
“Just the root beer,” said the woman, covering her glass with a hand.
“This is for me,” said the Goat, and took a hefty slug straight from the bottle.
Two more collecting tins appeared on the bar. Alcoholics Anonymous and Hygiene First.
The Goat groaned.
Gustav laughed.
“She’s back, but she’s different.”
“You’re telling me,” said the Goat.
“Can I get one of them root…”
The woman banged her empty glass on the bar.
“Come, Gustav.”
The boy shrugged at the Goat and followed the woman towards the door. The Paul had subdued all of the unruly trolls, bar one. Exhausted they clung together in a bizarre dance, each trying to raise the strength to land a knockout blow on the other.
The woman strode into the black corridor and pushed open the first door, switching on the light as she entered. She crossed the room and released the window blind. Sunlight flooded into the room, causing the three occupants to scream and shield their eyes.
Gustav and the Goat, standing in the doorway, were reminded of insects scurrying for cover when a rock was lifted.
“Gentlemen,” said the woman. “Chiba Sanitation. We’re cleaning up the city, and thought this a good place to start.”
Punchinello grabbed his stick. She seized the other end, and hauled him across the desk. Gustav grabbed a spatula from his stained apron and sprinted across the room, bringing the utensil down on the wrist of the cop. The .38 S&W dropped to the floor.
As the woman slammed Punchinello into the wall, the Goat smashed an I (heart) Being Bad Mug from the desk, retrieved an elastic band, and snapped it over Croc’s jaws. He then jammed a couple of pencils into the creature’s eyes.
Gustav and the Goat turned to the woman, both wincing as she brought down the stick on the prostrate Punch. One crack! for his nose. Another for his chin.
She tossed the stick into a far corner of the room, and dusted her hands.
“Let’s go, boys.”
The Goat sprinted off towards the stage area, and returned with the two strippers.
“Fausta,” said Gustav, and hugged the frightened young girl.
“Val,” said the Goat, hugging the dazed Faery. Her wings perked up, and she absent-mindedly rubbed his furry groin.
The woman removed her trench-coat and draped it over the faery’s shoulders. Gustav walked to a cupboard-cum-wardrobe at the back of the room. He removed a large coat, in which he enfolded Fausta, who smiled gratefully, and a long string of sausages, which he stowed in his apron pocket.
“I’ll rustle us up something later,” he muttered.
They trooped into the corridor, and made for the exit. The woman opened a door beside the way out and looked in. She closed the door, and walked out of the club.
They followed her through now brightening streets, the rain retreating before her advance, eventually turning into a narrow by-way after what seemed like hours.
A tricycle rickshaw was nestling beside the kerb in front of a large but non-descript semi-detached house. The Clown was seated in the back of it, flicking through Neil’s Wild Flower Guide.
“Charlie,” said the woman, with relief.
He looked up, and smiled sheepishly. The Goat snorted.
“Lor’.”
She pressed a finger to his unnaturally red clown lips.
“Hush now.”
They both thought of what could have been for a few moments, then hugged.
The woman walked towards the house, past the sign that read Battered Women Refuge, and entered.
The Goat and Val slipped behind a hedge. Soon moans of ecstasy floated from behind the foliage.
Gustav reached into his coat, which still adorned Fausta, and produced two large slices of Mississippi Mud Pie. They ate hungrily, eyeing each other, kissing and sharing the symbolic repast.
The woman walked slowly from the house. She joined the others at the gate, both pairs having satisfied their needs.
“The bastards,” she said quietly.
“Swear box!” piped up Gustav. “I want my money back!”
“I’ve donated it to the Refuge,” she replied.
“Oh.”
A sombre mood descended. The rain began again. The woman ran a hand through her hair. The five boggled as the white hair turned black, the black streak white.
“What…?”
She ran her other hand through the other side of her hair with the same result.
“Who you looking at?”
Gustav and the Goat looked at one another with a smile.
“Fuck. I need a drink. Where’s the nearest bar? Let’s get shitfaced.”
The two couples cheered and whooped. Even the Clown managed a sad smile.
She began to stride off down the street, towards a dive called Dickie & Dino’s.
She looked back over her shoulder.
“What are you waitin’ for? An engraved fuckin’ invitation?”
“Welcome back, Lorelei,” said the Clown. He began to pedal the rickshaw toward his home.
The rain fell, hard and cold, but also seemed to burn. He walked through the mean streets of Chiba City, the white silk jacket and trousers clinging to his limbs, the black pom-poms drooping. He turned into a dark, stinking, tiny alley, and the flashing neon stung his retinas. Mr. P’s. Two satyrs on the door. Paul and Paul. Dinner jackets and furry legs.
“Hey Charlie,” sneered the bigger Paul, “Where ya bin? He’s waitin’’.”
“I’m here,” said the sad-faced clown, squeezing past them, into the darkness. He nodded at the hag behind the ticket counter and entered the main room.
A weary, glazed faery was going through the motions of a strip-tease on the postage-stamp stage, a herd of jeering trolls heckling with venom before her.
As he made his way towards another Paul-guarded door at the back, he risked a glance at the bar. Behind it stood a defeated looking billy-goat. The animal saw him and raised its eyebrows. It was too dark to see if there was a spark of hope in its eyes.
Charlie detoured across to the bar.
“She’s comin’,” he whispered, “but she’s changed.”
The goat placed a half-full tumbler of amber fluid on the bar.
“The good stuff,” he whispered back.
As Charlie picked up the glass, a tuxedo’d arm reached around and took the glass from him.
“Boss won’t want you likkered, Clown,” rasped the Paul adding “Shame on you, Pop.”
Charlie shrugged and led the satyr towards the back door. The Goat knocked back the Scotch and raised the glass to the Clown’s back.
The Paul nodded down the black corridor.
“You know the way.”
Charlie had never felt so alone as the door closed. He walked down the corridor to the next door and raised his fist to knock. The door opened. He walked in.
It was semi-dark in the room. A table lamp threw a pool of light onto the green baize-topped desk.
The Clown could make out the shape behind the light. There were two others further back. Charlie swallowed. It must be the corrupt vice cop, and the guy with the elongated jaw and the teeth. The one they called ‘Croc.’
“Siddown, Charlie.”
The Clown walked forward , sat on the simple wooden chair in front of the desk and clasped his white-gloved hands.
The figure behind the lamp leaned forward, and his face entered the pool of light. It was a deliberate act. Charlie couldn’t breathe for a minute.
The hideously rouged cheeks. The flat, huge teeth, like yellow gravestones. The mad, staring, soulless eyes seemingly painted on to the face. Worst of all, the gigantic hooked nose, and the upward-curving chin, almost meeting.
“What’s the news, Charlie?”
Here goes, thought the Clown.
“She’s coming back, Mr Punchinello. Here. To Chiba City. To this club. To see you.”
******************************************
The Bullet Train pulled up, dead on the white painted lines on the platform. She alighted, looking around in disappointed awe. What a dismal, dreary, dead dump! Was she doing the right thing?
Leaving the station, she pulled up the collar of her white trench coat against the rain. What would this do to her hair? She took temporary shelter under the awning of a burger van. She looked at the kid flipping the meat and did a double take.
“Gustav?”
He squinted, looked shocked, then smiled.
“Shit, Lor’.”
“Language!”
“What? What the fu…”
She removed a small plastic container of liquid soap and squirted some into the boys mouth.
”Argfgrgggrgrggh” he gargled through a mouthful of bubbles.
“No profanity, Gustav. We’re turning over a new leaf.”
He looked at her in surprise as she rattled a tin marked Swear Box under his nose. Against his better nature he took a ten yen piece from his black and white checked trousers and dropped it into the receptacle.
Was it really her? Clad in white? That white hair? If it wasn’t for the two thin black streaks, one either side of her head, the cheeky smile, and the positively devilish wink, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“Thank you, Gustav. Now shut up your gastrodome and follow me. We’re going clubbing.”
“Christ, Lor’.”
She turned looking shocked, and produced a tin marked Sacred Heart Church.
“No blasphemy.”
“You gotta be sh…kiddin’ me.”
“ I kid you not. We’re going to clean up this city.”
‘******
The Clown stood up. Punchinello produced a large, heavy, smooth wooden stick from behind his desk.
“I didn’t give you permission to leave, Chas.”
“I gotta go, Mr. P. The wife and kids?”
“Get outta here,” growled the shadowy figure, tossing a thousand yen note onto the baize.
The Clown ignored it and headed for the door. Once outside the room, he slumped briefly against the wall, trying to control his shaking limbs, then decided to head for the back door, hoping no Pauls would be on guard. As he reached the exit, another door opened.
“Charlie,” a muffled voice mumbled, “Take me with you.”
The Clown turned. He could just make out her face in the darkness. The puffed, bloodied lips, the black eye, tears falling from the other.
The Clown looked around desperately.
“Come on, then,” he whispered, knowing he was burning boats.
She emerged, clutching the baby to her chest.
The Clown saw bruises on the tiny, slumbering face.
“Christ, Jude. Not him too?”
She nodded sadly.
The Clown was about to close the door when he heard a pitiful whimpering. Looking down he saw the black and white dog, holding up a bloodied paw, and trying to wag its broken tail.
The Clown choked back a curse.
“Come on, Toby,” he said, through gritted teeth.
The exit door opened, and the Clown peeked out into the rain. No guard. They slipped out and headed towards a rickshaw tricycle parked at the kerb.
Jude and the baby climbed into the back, the Clown lifting the little dog onto the seat.
As he began to pedal away, he saw the sky brightening over by the railway station.
***************************************
Gustav watched the rain recede ahead of them as he and the woman walked through the streets.
They entered the alley, and approached the satyrs.
“Hi, honey,” leched the bigger one. “Ditch the kid and we’ll have a good time. Work for you in here too, if you want.”
Both half-goats guffawed.
“Paul, you should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
The satyr looked puzzled.
“Who…?”
To Gustav’s surprise, she seized the Paul by the lapels of his DJ and hurled him over her shoulder. He hit the opposite wall horns first, and collapsed into a heap of rotting garbage.
The other Paul looked on amazed, and took a roundhouse left, right on the goatee. He sank back against his wall and slid into temporary oblivion.
“Well,” said Gustav, “Cussin’ and blasphemin’ are no-nos, but violence is OK?”
“In the furtherance of good,” she replied with a charming smile, entering the club.
They ignored the ticket hag and moved into the stage area. Gustav gasped in horror at a frightened girl, attempting to remove her clothes before the baying trolls.
The woman gestured vaguely in their direction. The girl’s clothes flew back on to her in a comical reverse speeded-up fashion. The audience’s seats collapsed, and they writhed in a shocked heap. The Paul on the back door walked towards the melee, not quite sure what had happened, and soon fists and hooves were flying.
The woman walked up to the bar.
“Hi, GB. How’s about a root beer?”
The Goat seemed to drop years, and stood erect.
“Lor’?”
“Just a root beer,” she cut in sharply.
“Well, shit, I…”
The Swear Box appeared on the bar. The stunned Goat picked up a hoovefull of Euros, Dollars and buttons from his tip saucer and dropped them in. He poured a root beer, and grabbed a bottle of Jack from the shelf behind him.
“Just the root beer,” said the woman, covering her glass with a hand.
“This is for me,” said the Goat, and took a hefty slug straight from the bottle.
Two more collecting tins appeared on the bar. Alcoholics Anonymous and Hygiene First.
The Goat groaned.
Gustav laughed.
“She’s back, but she’s different.”
“You’re telling me,” said the Goat.
“Can I get one of them root…”
The woman banged her empty glass on the bar.
“Come, Gustav.”
The boy shrugged at the Goat and followed the woman towards the door. The Paul had subdued all of the unruly trolls, bar one. Exhausted they clung together in a bizarre dance, each trying to raise the strength to land a knockout blow on the other.
The woman strode into the black corridor and pushed open the first door, switching on the light as she entered. She crossed the room and released the window blind. Sunlight flooded into the room, causing the three occupants to scream and shield their eyes.
Gustav and the Goat, standing in the doorway, were reminded of insects scurrying for cover when a rock was lifted.
“Gentlemen,” said the woman. “Chiba Sanitation. We’re cleaning up the city, and thought this a good place to start.”
Punchinello grabbed his stick. She seized the other end, and hauled him across the desk. Gustav grabbed a spatula from his stained apron and sprinted across the room, bringing the utensil down on the wrist of the cop. The .38 S&W dropped to the floor.
As the woman slammed Punchinello into the wall, the Goat smashed an I (heart) Being Bad Mug from the desk, retrieved an elastic band, and snapped it over Croc’s jaws. He then jammed a couple of pencils into the creature’s eyes.
Gustav and the Goat turned to the woman, both wincing as she brought down the stick on the prostrate Punch. One crack! for his nose. Another for his chin.
She tossed the stick into a far corner of the room, and dusted her hands.
“Let’s go, boys.”
The Goat sprinted off towards the stage area, and returned with the two strippers.
“Fausta,” said Gustav, and hugged the frightened young girl.
“Val,” said the Goat, hugging the dazed Faery. Her wings perked up, and she absent-mindedly rubbed his furry groin.
The woman removed her trench-coat and draped it over the faery’s shoulders. Gustav walked to a cupboard-cum-wardrobe at the back of the room. He removed a large coat, in which he enfolded Fausta, who smiled gratefully, and a long string of sausages, which he stowed in his apron pocket.
“I’ll rustle us up something later,” he muttered.
They trooped into the corridor, and made for the exit. The woman opened a door beside the way out and looked in. She closed the door, and walked out of the club.
They followed her through now brightening streets, the rain retreating before her advance, eventually turning into a narrow by-way after what seemed like hours.
A tricycle rickshaw was nestling beside the kerb in front of a large but non-descript semi-detached house. The Clown was seated in the back of it, flicking through Neil’s Wild Flower Guide.
“Charlie,” said the woman, with relief.
He looked up, and smiled sheepishly. The Goat snorted.
“Lor’.”
She pressed a finger to his unnaturally red clown lips.
“Hush now.”
They both thought of what could have been for a few moments, then hugged.
The woman walked towards the house, past the sign that read Battered Women Refuge, and entered.
The Goat and Val slipped behind a hedge. Soon moans of ecstasy floated from behind the foliage.
Gustav reached into his coat, which still adorned Fausta, and produced two large slices of Mississippi Mud Pie. They ate hungrily, eyeing each other, kissing and sharing the symbolic repast.
The woman walked slowly from the house. She joined the others at the gate, both pairs having satisfied their needs.
“The bastards,” she said quietly.
“Swear box!” piped up Gustav. “I want my money back!”
“I’ve donated it to the Refuge,” she replied.
“Oh.”
A sombre mood descended. The rain began again. The woman ran a hand through her hair. The five boggled as the white hair turned black, the black streak white.
“What…?”
She ran her other hand through the other side of her hair with the same result.
“Who you looking at?”
Gustav and the Goat looked at one another with a smile.
“Fuck. I need a drink. Where’s the nearest bar? Let’s get shitfaced.”
The two couples cheered and whooped. Even the Clown managed a sad smile.
She began to stride off down the street, towards a dive called Dickie & Dino’s.
She looked back over her shoulder.
“What are you waitin’ for? An engraved fuckin’ invitation?”
“Welcome back, Lorelei,” said the Clown. He began to pedal the rickshaw toward his home.
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
Lorelei And The Scourge Of Nokomis
Lorelei and the Scourge of Nokomis
Wendell McKay
(6422)
Lorelei gave a couple of passing early morning risers the stink eye and tried to focus on the wider surroundings, nonplussed as she’d rarely been at the situation. It was still the same: widely spaced fir trees, tents, nascent campfires, and campers like the one they’d mysteriously been landed with as far as the eye can see. At least fifteen guitars were being tuned within a hundred yards of her.
“Fucking hippies,” she whispered, shaking her head and then turning it as Goat Boy emerged from behind, a pair of brightly colored shorts concealing his bounteous genitals. “Hecate’s monthlies, friend! Why the hell are you wearing those?”
“I don’t know. They were there.” Goat Boy coughed meaningfully. “We might want to be quiet, let Valerie sleep. I’m surprised I’m not asleep.”
“After what I heard last night, I’m surprised you’re not dead.”
Goat Boy laughed. “There’s a time for everything. Where’s Chef, anyway?”
“I think he decided to make a recon, try and figure out where we are the hard way.”
“And where do you think that is?” Goat Boy shook his head. “They’ve got American accents, but it can’t be America. It’s so green and dull. I haven’t heard a gunshot or seen anyone praying in an entire day.”
“Canada?” Lorelei wondered out loud.
The sounds of machinery being smashed erupted from inside the camper.
“Stupid radio!” screamed Valerie. “It won’t play anything but Dave Matthews!”
“Okay, I guess it is America,” admitted Goat Boy.
Chef bought a bagel with some of the strange wooden tokens he’d been given in exchange for a couple of ratty old ten-dollar bills. He’d expected the pleasantly malodorous girl at the token counter to raise an eyebrow at his outfit or demeanor, but she’d smiled at him and said “thank you” for the mince pie he’d impulsively given her. The whole place threw him so far out of whack that he almost gave her the old dollar piece that had saved his life all those years ago from that Rebel bullet at Spotsylvania. Remembering the Bloody Angle and those nightmarish few hours threw into further contrast the almost eldritch bucolic peace of their current position.
He chuckled and wondered what Lorelei and the others must have thought of it. He didn’t think he’d been there before, and yet there was a nagging feeling of something familiar that simply wouldn’t let go.
“There’s rats in my brain,” he told a passing pair of early morning risers, who smiled politely.
“The minibar isn’t bad,” Valerie admitted, “though they could have done better with the furnishings. Don’t you think so, sweetie?” Her energy apparently restored by her brief nap, she enveloped Goat Boy in a savage hug as Goat Boy felt inclined to agree in any case.
The camper could have been used by the Partridge Family. That was all the description any of the three really felt the place needed.
“Hell yeah,” said Goat Boy, inspecting the bottle of nectar—Lotophagonis ’23, no less—that his lover held up, its amber glow seeming to illuminate the entire room, making the camper’s interior a colossal mixed drink.
“Someone’s brought us here, and not just for our health,” Lorelei announced.
“It couldn’t be… you know…” Goat Boy found himself unwilling to say “your dad.”
Lorelei’s eyes took on a faraway look, almost misting over. “Isn’t really his style, G.B. We may eternally seek for each other across the trackless wastes of time and space,” she drawled sarcastically, “but I’m not speaking to him unless he quits that moron political talk show.” She knew he was just doing it to piss her off.
“Should we go look for Chef?” Valerie looked towards the door with fascination. “Maybe if we take a look around we’ll get more answers.”
“Yeah,” said Goat Boy, “and I’m hungry.”
Chef saw them walking past the biodegradable balloon stand and smiled, wondering if they felt as out of place as he did. What made it weirder than anything else was that there didn’t seem to be danger of any kind.
“Hey guys,” he called, waving an omelet at them and realizing that, since he could wave it, he’d cooked it too long on the hot rock behind him. He blamed it on the distractions.
The others noticed them too as they emerged from the wood, finding a bluff that stretched away beneath them to a vast clearing of about a mile in circumference surrounded by trees of the kind they’d just left. A lazy little river passed beneath, ruins of wharves here and there, with scrubby grassland on either side. The sun hadn’t quite finished rising, and a dewy mist still held on for dear life in the bottomlands.
“It’s beautiful,” whispered Valerie, nibbling Goat Boy’s ear. “Where are we? This place reminds me of Hy-Brasil back before the zoning regulations scandal.”
“Near enough,” laughed Chef. “We’re in Michigan—the Upper Peninsula. A mile down that way,” he continued with another wave of the omelet, “is Lake Superior. Beyond that, Canada.”
“You were close,” Goat Boy told Lorelei.
“How did you find all that out?” asked Valerie.
“I asked.”
“Oh,” Lorelei responded, an impish smirk starting to steal across her face. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your new friend?”
“Ah.” Chef blushed, deciding it was too late to pretend the “other distraction” didn’t exist. “Guys, this is Fausta.”
“Hey.” The woman stood and took off her straw hat like a Victorian gentleman greeting a lady. She was in her mid-to-late twenties, with a half-assed Louise Brooks bob, smoky dark blue eyes, and an appealingly sharp, good-natured face that kept sliding into a lazy grin no matter how hard she tried to stop it happening. Her old-fashioned floral print pink dress clung to a number of shapely curves, terminating at the bottom in a pair of striped socks and work boots. “Gustav here was just telling me about you guys.”
Gustav? Lorelei mouthed to Chef.
No real names, Chef mouthed back, too dangerous.
Lorelei tried to repress a fit of laughter, and then wondered with a shock when the last time was that she’d done that.
“Yeah, old Gustav’s a great talker,” Goat Boy managed, unsure what else to say.
“When do you go on?” asked Fausta. “Your band, I mean?”
“We’ll have to check,” Lorelei smoothly replied, making a mental note to kick Chef’s ass at some point in the extremely near future. “So are you here for…”
“Oh, it’s my vacation,” said Fausta. “Actually, I’m gonna sit down, if you don’t mind,” she added in obviously mock dudgeon, “as… it’s my vacation.” She smiled brightly at Chef, who coughed and turned to hide the unusually fierce blush that erupted all over his face.
“I don’t usually go in for this kind of thing, you know, it’s like ‘hippie camp’ or something. I mean, shit, a folk festival? I don’t think so. A couple of my colleagues were kind of into it, though, so I figured what the hell. I’m going to go to a conference in Rome later this year, so I guess this is slumming, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”
“Yeah,” replied Goat Boy, who looked frantically at Valerie, the latter lost in the scenery.
“Fausta’s a lecturer,” Chef told them.
“I come out here to read every morning,” Fausta told them, laughing, “and this morning I find Gustav doing this super-cool ‘slow food’ thing with that omelet. That’s one thing I don’t really seem to find in Chicago that much anymore, just being able to meet really interesting people by chance without being afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
Lorelei shivered. All the excessive tranquility was starting to get to her.
Chef sighed heavily.
“I hate to interrupt your morning, Gustav, but we do need to rehearse,” Lorelei told him, with just the hint of steel in her voice. She got to watch Chef’s face fall very leisurely, like an apartment building demolition in slow motion.
“Can I watch?” Fausta chirped excitedly.
“We’d love to have you,” Lorelei improvised, “but Goat Boy has this… religious thing about our rehearsals.”
“Oh, no, please, forget I asked,” Fausta hurriedly averred. “It was great to meet you guys and I can’t wait to see you play. I’ll see you tomorrow night, Gustav?”
Chef nodded with a “hrm-hrm” sound.
“Come on, Gustav,” she said, trying not to make it sound like an order and trying not to make it look like she was yanking him to his feet like a Greek fisherman about to brain an octopus.
They left to find some open ground in the bottomlands, Lorelei looking back for a second to see Fausta hugging her knees and staring back at them with a wistful smile.
“Chef, Chef, Chef,” she laughed. His discomfiture almost made the “band” thing worth it.
“Hey, come on, girl, I was desperate. It was the best way to explain… us, especially with this bein’ a folk festival and all. We can always suddenly break up over ‘artistic differences.’”
“I can’t believe you said that about me back there, Lorelei,” cackled Goat Boy. “‘Religious about rehearsals,’ indeed. And Gustav?”
They found a crevice in the bluffs likely to conceal them from prying eyes and sat to discuss their bizarre situation.
“So we’re at a folk festival in Michigan,” Lorelei conceded. “Why?”
Chef breathed deeply. “You ever think someone just wants us to have a vacation? Shit, Lorelei, breathe that fresh air!”
“What do you think, baby?” Goat Boy asked Valerie, who was staring off into space.
“I… I don’t know.”
“Are you all right?” Lorelei asked.
“Sure, I’m fine, I just… this is all so strange.”
“I know how you feel, Val.” Lorelei shook her head. “We don’t just show up places for no reason at all.”
Valerie nodded distractedly, but couldn’t take her eyes off the far bluff to the south, where the mysterious stranger with the disheveled hair and flannel shirt wielded his guitar like an artist’s brush, mixing and warping the colors and hues of space and time into a single hypnotic beat kept together by a mere five strings. She felt herself sing inside in a way she wasn’t sure she had since she was a girl and Uncle Oisin told her stories of the mortal world before he decided to go back there himself and never returned.
Someone might have noticed, but the other three found them far too preoccupied with the swirling green mist that began to flood their meeting place, a mist that thickened and glistened until it took on a vaguely human shape. It was a woman of indeterminate years and attractive form, almost almond-shaped black eyes boring into each of their battle-ravaged beings.
“Who are you?” demanded Lorelei.
“I… am Nokomis.”
“This was my lake,” spoke Nokomis, “or, rather, it was sacred to me. In days long gone by the shores would sing with hymns of praise to my bounty. As time passed, the invaders from beyond the great water came, the Ojibwa died out or dispersed, and my worship was neglected or forgotten. I am not a vengeful being by any means. What I have described, sadly, has been the way of the world from its inception. I can look down on such things and give them the attention they deserve—that is to say, none.”
Hard luck for your worshippers, thought Lorelei, who remained silent.
“Someone seeks to manipulate the psychic energies of this place for their own purposes,” spoke Nokomis. “This shows disrespect and must stop.”
“And you want us to stop it?” asked Goat Boy, furry brows furrowed.
“I had a choice of… agents,” spoke Nokomis. “The astral tides pulled your way, and there was a certain… reputation I found convincing.”
“What if we refuse?” asked Lorelei.
Nokomis giggled in a distinctly threatening manner and evaporated into the air above her former holy place.
“Well, let’s refuse, then,” Goat Boy suggested. “Eh?”
Lorelei refused. Chef caught himself glancing back at the bluff where he’d met Fausta. Valerie searched anxiously for the strange musician, but he had vanished.
“Maybe we do need a holiday,” said Lorelei, suddenly frowning as she remembered something Fausta had said. “What is tomorrow night, anyway, Chef?”
“Ha! Line dancing.”
Goat Boy and Valerie went to go “take a walk,” leaving Lorelei and Chef watching a halfway decent klezmer band play to a handful of spectators on one of the smaller stages. The park stretched from Bad River south for about a mile, the festival attendees numbering about five or six thousand.
Chef put on his sunglasses and basked, eventually giving up and turning to Lorelei.
“So what’s up, sister? You ain’t usually this quiet. We’ve been in weird spots before, and a hell of a lot less pleasant.”
“Come on, Chef, let’s face it. If there is something weird out there, it’ll find us. Like to like, as per fucking usual.” She folded her arms after adjusting her bikini, looking a little like a healthy, unmarked Amy Winehouse with white streaks in her hair. She found herself surprised at how much she didn’t mind the drooling teenage boys and men that somehow knew to keep a distance with their leering.
“That’s the thing I’m worried about.”
“Yeah? You don’t usually—ah. Fausta.”
“Oh, man, Lore. What were the odds? And now, just when I meet somebody who might just know her way around a kitchen, that Nokomis has to throw this in our lap.”
“What were the odds? You don’t think—”
“Nah, I didn’t catch that vibe.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Lorelei squinted, putting on her glasses. “You got a cigarette?”
“Fausta says it’s actually hip to roll your own nowa—oh.” Chef grinned sheepishly and handed her a Lucky Strike. “I don’t want her to get hurt, you know? When the shit hits the fan, and she happens to be around…” He shook his head vigorously.
“Hey, relax. Just keep your eyes open. We’ve all come through for each other in the past—one human woman shouldn’t be too much extra effort.”
Chef coughed and giggled. “Cute, Lorelei. And thanks.”
Lorelei shook her head in mock disapproval. “Look at you,” she said, laughing.
“Look at you, girlfriend. You look good laughing.”
Lorelei stopped laughing and simply smiled.
Goat Boy looked around to make sure that nobody was watching and started loping through the woods in the manner of his animal brethren, his eyes and ears distended and alert for the slightest trace of his lover. Valerie had gone missing. It was bad enough—sort of—that they had no idea where the kids were, but this was vastly worse.
One minute he and Valerie had been rolling along a stray slab of granite in post-coital glee, the next she seemed to slide away and vanish. Her gorgeous faery smell still stained him all over, and was able to spin in the residue traces like an unrolling blanket as he tracked her. She was still in the earthly plane, and not too far away, he knew that much. Keeping the campers and tents in sight as a geographical reference, he leapt through the wood in a fury and worried himself sick.
Valerie spun and spun and spun until she was the sun and the trees the planets. The clearing was alive and bright with magic she’d long thought gone from the world, sparkling and vital with shimmering forms, half visions and half ghosts. Her hair lashed around her like flares as her entire body lived and breathed with unprecedented force.
“It’s been long since you heard the music, my child,” came the voice, a husky, honeyed baritone that filled her with a feeling of comfort and safety. “It’s been long since you were among your proper kind. Soon I shall come, and take you there, and you shall be the love of a king.”
Everything cut out, as if a light switch had gone off, and Valerie hit a tree with the centrifugal force from her spinning, crying out and giggling as if she’d been drunk.
“Valerie!” Goat Boy bounded to her side and rooted around her as if pulling up grass. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“I don’t know… this is so strange.”
A curious music sounded in her head.
The man swanked arrogantly across the stage, his leather pants audibly creaking out past the pretzel stands where Lorelei and the Chef regarded him warily.
“I fucking hate metal,” hissed Chef.
“You just never hear it live,” scolded Lorelei.
“This is a folk festival, for Curnonsky’s sake! What the hell is that guy doing here? I mean, I’m not that big on folk music, really, but it’s better than this shit.”
The man unslung his guitar from his shoulder, pointing it like a weapon at the audience, the latter emitting a mix of hostile groans and appreciative titters. He winked and pumped a fist, revealing an indistinct tattoo.
“See, the guitar’s supposed to be his cock,” Chef lectured, temporarily mastering the obvious.
“Did you see that?” whispered Lorelei.
“Not really,” said Chef, who was trying to look everywhere but at the hair-metal interloper. “What was it?”
“His tattoo. There was something familiar about it…”
After an exhibitionistic warmup session, the man started to play an ear-shattering, cacophonous song about dragons and midnight and riding free on the wings of eternal and infernal love. Chef went to go take a piss and see if there was another klezmer band around while Lorelei sat on the edge of her seat, torn between admiration at the song and mystification at her memory of the man’s wrist tattoo.
“Mannannan’s Weir,” she whispered to herself. “Where have I heard of it before?” Images came to her of fathomless depths and slimy things worming their way through an ancient and rotten world. The Cells Beyond. The Lockup of Faery.
“Valerie,” she cried, looking around in a sudden worry.
Goat Boy worried equally as he watched his lover all but drool as Bad River’s answer to Bret Michaels worked his way through a number of songs to the increasing interest and approval of the audience. Certainly not the most natural crowd for his stuff, the music lovers stopped barbecuing or playing hackysack and began to congregate in greater clumps around the stage.
“Who is this guy?” Goat Boy asked a girl dancing next to her.
“That’s Alex Dread,” she chirped excitedly. Goat Boy found her refusal to roll her eyes when saying such a name certain evidence of some kind of hypnosis. “He used to be in Pain Market.”
“You like him?”
“I didn’t think so; actually, I used to think he sucked. Now, though… this stuff is so real!”
“Hey!” Chef whirled around to see Fausta approaching, her straw hat fastened at a rakish angle with an old-fashioned scarf. “I didn’t think I’d see you again until tomorrow night.”
Chef was torn between the urge to run away and take her in his arms.
“You don’t think I’m scared of you, do you?” he laughed.
“Man, I hope not. No, it’s just that you guys seem like you have this crazy tight bond, you know? I know people in bands and they haven’t been nearly as close.”
“We are kind of a family.” Chef laughed inside at the understatement.
Fausta made a charming motion with her mouth and looked around. “So, you and Lorelei, you’re not, like, you know—”
Chef almost exploded with laughter at the notion. “No, no… she’s sort of like… a mildly abusive but loving sister.”
“Listen,” said Fausta, “do you have to rehearse now? I was going to eat, and…”
“I’d love to, frankly.”
They found a spot under a tree and spoke generally and awkwardly about a great many things until Fausta came to the subject of the festival’s present lineup.
“And so in the middle of all this hippie stuff we get this Alex Dread guy, the one who used to be in Pain Market?”
“Him.” Chef rolled his eyes and laughed. “Yeah, I noticed him earlier. You’re not a fan, are you?”
“No, but it turns out one of my friends was, back in the day. You’d never believe it to look at her. She actually dragged me up to talk with him, give her moral support, you know?” Fausta giggled, a sound Chef found breathtakingly pleasant. “We got onto this whole weird discussion; my friend specializes—or will specialize, I guess—in Celtic mythology, and apparently this Alex Dread guy used to be in some weird outfit called Mannannan’s Weir.”
Chef’s heart skipped a beat. “Mannannan’s Weir.”
“Yeah. Mannannan was the Celtic god of the sea, apparently.”
“Oh, man.” Chef wiped his brows, as if he’d just made the biggest pot of chicken broth in the universe.
“I know. Isn’t that the cheesiest thing you’ve ever heard?” Fausta started to warm to her subject. “Why the hell do people always go for Celtic mythology, anyway? It seems like half the fantasy novels out there are Celtic,” she said, waving her hands with sarcastic melodrama at the last word. “I mean, it’s not like there aren’t a fucking jillion other traditions to exploit.”
“Fausta.” Chef leaned forward and took her hands, wondering what he was doing. “I hate to do this to you, but—”
“No. No, I’m gonna do this to you,” snapped Fausta. “I’m sick and tired of guys telling me I talk too much. It’s such a double fucking standard—”
“What?” He reeled from the unexpected onslaught, exasperated and exhilarated at the same time. “No, that’s not it, I mean… I could listen to you forever.” Chef reddened and tried to continue. “The thing is, I have to go for a bit.”
“Back to Lorelei, you mean.” Fausta’s eyes clouded over.
“That’s not it, either. I can’t explain why or how, but my… band’s in trouble, and if you see me in the next few hours or so, I need you to keep away. It’s for your own safety.”
“What the hell…” The air grew very thick and dense between them, Fausta’s eyes like the dusk. She tightened her hands around his, and looked as if she might say something.
“Aw, goddamnit.” Chef leaned forward and kissed her, taking her in his arms and holding her close, unable to suppress a moan of delight. After entirely too short a time, they stopped and looked at each other.
“Well,” Fausta finally said.
“If… if everything goes well, I’ll meet you at nine, over by the bluff where we met this morning. If I’m not there… it might be a good idea if y’all cleared out of here.”
“What’s going on, Gustav?” There was no disbelief or suspicion in her voice, just a simple and understandable desire to know.
“I wish I knew.” He kissed her hand somewhat impulsively and left, doubting he’d be able to do so if he stayed a second longer.
Fausta rocked back on her haunches and pondered the tree for a minute, wondering how a perfectly ordinary dawn had turned into such a remarkable day. Her eyes strayed to the river, ambling lazily among the rushes and the rock.
“Oh, fuck this,” she howled, scrambling to her feet and charging off.
Goat Boy sat next to Valerie and watched her with the worry that seemed to have become his stock in trade as of late. On any regular day, she’d have grabbed his pretzel and thrown him onto the ground, doing a variety of things with it before finally chugging the bugger.
Nokomis’ commission seemed to have had an unpleasantly sedative effect on her. She kept staring into space, her eyes and consequently Goat Boy’s consistently straying to the stage where Alex Dread hammered out heavy-metal gut punchers to the unexpected delight of the audience.
“Maybe we should go back to the camper,” he suggested, hoping that the savage light in her eyes would come back at a suggestion of his.
“Maybe,” was all she said, glancing longingly at the stage again.
“Folks, that was Alex Dread,” explained a portly, balding, middle-aged man with a ponytail in a Hawaiian shirt. “We thought we’d surprise you by shaking things up a little this year,” he said a little sheepishly. “Now we’ve got a talented young man from Washtenaw County who you may have heard of… folks, give it up for Lighthorse!”
A scruffy, sandy-haired fellow in a flannel shirt ambled up onto the stage, puffing on a cigarette and laying aside his bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon for safety’s sake.
“I’m Lighthorse,” he charmingly mumbled.
Alex Dread sauntered into his trailer to receive a killer uppercut, staggering against the wall and accidentally ripping down a poster for Yuengling.
“What the hell do you want with her?”
Alex tried to focus, grinning foolishly when he saw a pretty girl in a bikini standing over him, and then turning pale as he saw who it was.
“Lorelei… damn, thought I recognized that hair.” Alex tried to raise himself to a sitting position. “How’s your dad?”
“Don’t ask. Answer my question.”
“Sure, just tell me who you’re talking about when you say ‘her.’”
“Valerie.”
“Val—Oisin’s ‘niece?’ She’s ridin’ with y’all nowadays?”
“You’re trying to tell me you didn’t know?”
“Little girl, it may surprise you to know that you and your travelin’ circus of hippie terrorist monkey-junk aren’t really a tremendous topic of concern in my world.”
“Have you heard of Nokomis?”
“Sure. This is her backyard, or used to be, at any rate.” Alex stared mournfully at the torn poster for Yuengling. “You want a beer?”
“Let’s give him a hand,” the portly guy advised as the feedback from the microphone lacerated eardrums across the clearing. “And now…”
“Well, if you don’t want to go back to the camper, we’d better find Lorelei, don’t you—” Goat Boy trailed off as he turned to find Valerie gone. Gritting his teeth, he dashed off in search of her, almost forgetting himself and using his natural locomotive skills. Those could wait for the wood.
Chef neared the stage just in time to see him leave.
“Why can’t we have nice things?” he sighed, following in hot pursuit.
“So you don’t have any interest in Valerie?” asked Lorelei, carefully sipping her bottle of Yuengling and watching Alex Dread through narrowed eyes.
“Hell no. Nice looker, sure, but I’m Alex Dread, girl,” Alex said, throwing his arms wide and touching his guitar neck fondly. “I’ve got the pick of the litter all over America! Faery-land was never like this!”
“Thank you, Tommy Steele.” Lorelei hunched forward. “What the hell was Nokomis warning us about, then? And why’s Valerie been so spooked recently?”
A knocking came at the door.
“Fans?” Lorelei asked disdainfully.
“They can wait,” Alex conceded. “Part of my parole deal with the Weir. I gotta keep a lookout for any suspicious and unauthorized activity. What they expect me to do about it I don’t know. But I suppose I could help—”
The knocking came again, now more insistently.
“Hell.” Alex opened the door to find Fausta.
“Hi. We met earlier—I’m Renee’s friend—and I need to ask you—oh.” She saw Lorelei and her face fell.
“Hey, Fausta.” Lorelei noted the confusion on her face as she turned from one to the other. “Mutual acquaintances, that kind of thing.”
“What exactly is going on? Gustav took off and I think he might be in trouble. I mentioned something about Mannannan’s Weir and he started acting real… uh, weird, and then just left.”
“Just like that?” Lorelei asked, somewhat surprised.
“No, not just like that,” replied Fausta with the hint of a smile, “but—”
“Well, I don’t have anything to do with it,” insisted Alex, “or at least I didn’t until now. So if you—” He stopped and went very still for a moment, hurrying to the rear of his camper and pressing his hands to the window. “Do you two hear that?”
The women shook their heads.
“That’s it,” breathed Alex. “That music… haven’t heard that in many a day. The Jongleur’s Magick.”
“Tell me you don’t spell that with a ‘k’.”
“Fausta, let him speak.”
Fausta nodded, a little shame-faced but her eyes wide and shining.
“They roam the planes and use music as a weapon, feeding off souls and the energy from physical attraction. Haven’t you ever felt it,” he asked Fausta, realizing his appeal would be lost on Lorelei, “seeing a musician whose music you really liked and who you thought was just the hottest thing ever?”
Fausta nodded, fascinated but deciding not to reveal the specific example.
“The Jongleurs refine that to a ‘t.’ They’ve been doing this for so long that they’ve made it into a science, and just in time for MySpace, YouTube, Facebook… their power’s increasing with the internet, and they’re growing more dangerous.” He frowned, obviously puzzled. “I don’t know what one would be doing at some over-the-hill folk festival.”
“What are you doing at some over-the-hill folk festival?”
“Been livin’ too hard; thought this would be a bit of a vacation.”
“So did we,” admitted Lorelei ruefully.
“Maybe he’s like a sport fisherman,” Fausta suggested. “You know, someone who decides to go for the quiet streams instead of the big rivers.”
Alex and Lorelei stared at her, impressed.
“Wait, you believe all this?” Lorelei suddenly realized.
“It’s pretty obvious you guys were out of the ordinary to begin with,” explained Fausta. “From that point, it wasn’t much of a jump to this stuff. Besides, it feels right here, for some reason.”
The power of Nokomis, Lorelei thought to herself, and then realized that her own crew was behaving a little out of the ordinary as well.
“Yeah… I know what you mean.” Snapping out of it, Lorelei turned her attention to Alex. “But if the music’s playing now… you think the Jongleur’s after Valerie?”
“The beauty, power, and energy of a Faery?” Alex whistled appreciatively. “If I were a Jongleur, I’d be all over that sweet… stuff,” he said, deciding for Lorelei’s benefit—and his own—to amend the final word just in time.
“Can you find the Jongleur?” asked Fausta. “Do you think that’s where Gustav went?”
“And can you stop him?”
“Ladies, please,” Alex chastened as if refusing autographs. “Let’s rev up the truck first.”
Goat Boy stopped at a clearing by what seemed to be a long-overgrown dirt road, scraps of prairie and forest alternating off into the distance, for all he knew, all the way to Wisconsin. A tiny stream trickled through, beside which stood Valerie on tiptoe, looking as if she’d just been kissed by moonlight.
“Hey,” said Lighthorse. “What’s up?” He played a few chords on his guitar, amidst some dimension where Elliott Smith and Ryan Adams prominently figured. “You want a beer?” A cold bottle of Stroh’s rolled on its own across the clearing until it clinked next to Goat Boy’s left hoof.
“I was looking for my girlfriend.”
“Oh. We were just talking.”
“Valerie, come on, we need to find Lorelei.”
Valerie didn’t move.
“I don’t think she wants to go with you,” Lighthorse placidly observed. “You want a cigarette?” A pack of Parliament Lights dropped from the sky next to Goat Boy.
“Who are you?” asked Goat Boy in sudden horrified realization.
“I’m Lighthorse,” he answered, with a modest duck of the head. A loathsome “aw, shucks” vibe slithered around the reply.
“You can’t take her!” Goat Boy planted himself in front of Valerie.
“Funny expression,” Lighthorse smirked. “ ‘Over my dead body.’ Of course, you made me say it, but—”
A rubbery omelet sailed past Lighthorse’s face.
“Shit,” they heard Chef swear.
Lighthorse’s guitar neck swung away from Goat Boy and at the bushes where Chef had obviously planted himself, sending forth music almost without his hands touching the strings.
Chef tried to make a dive for it, but found himself caught in the beguiling mix of traditional and contemporary that Lighthorse’s music presented, challenging its audience to forget rote, stereotyped notions of themselves as “urban hipsters” and reclaim their true spiritual selves as children of the soil, waiting out the mild sunsets on clapboard front porches and swapping tall tales over a barrel of cider with three “X”s incongruously marked on the side. Guitar lines and vocal layering thankfully outmatched the set’s more deeply produced moments, the rhythms and melodies clear mountain streams between ridges of reverb and feedback.
Chef screamed.
Lorelei bounded into the clearing to see Chef writhing in quirky, introspective alt-country overload and realized she had just gotten there in time.
Lighthorse arched an eyebrow, his attention to Valerie faltering temporarily, as he plainly wondered about forging some kind of erotic connection between the world of thoughtful nű-sarsparilla and midnight-movie psychobilly.
“Hey, what’s up?” Lighthorse adorably mumbled, charmingly running a hand through his artistically tousled hair. “I’m Lighthorse.”
“Don’t try it on, son,” snapped Lorelei, letting loose a jarring wolf whistle.
A battered old Chevy truck roared into the clearing, circling the four and swerving so that its bed faced the confrontation. Alex Dread stood atop the side like a conquering pirate, his guitar aimed steadily at the group. Behind him was a large machine gun that, whatever its make, caliber, and specifications, could probably still kill lots and lots of people regardless. At its trigger…
“Oh, my God! Gustav! What’s happened to him?”
“Fausta?” cried Goat Boy. “Now that’s more like it,” he crowed, eyeing the machine gun.
“I figured it’d be interesting to learn,” Fausta shrugged with some embarrassment, staring worriedly at Chef’s supine form beneath her. “Lorelei thought… oh shit, is that Lighthorse?”
“You know him?” asked Lorelei.
“My friend Renee went out with him for two weeks while he was playing Chicago,” snarled Fausta. “He promised her the harvest moon and then took her for…” Fausta shook her head at an unpleasant memory. “She was a mess.”
“Hey, c’mon, man, there were issues.” Lighthorse turned to face Alex Dread. “What’s he doin’ here?” he asked, his mask of bashful bonhomie slipping. “Looks like Kip Winger’s hemorrhoid.”
“Now, Lorelei?” asked Alex, the eagerness in his voice palpable.
“Now.”
Ear-splitting guitar chords roused Chef from a curious existence where he lay against a log-chopping tree stump in flannels and denims, a strand of hay between his lips and a copy of McSweeney’s lying on his face to shield it from the midday sun.
Before he could quite register the charmingly melodic nature of the quirky self-deprecation that seemed to surround him like a metatextual miasma, the air was rent with the bloodcurdling assault of pure industrial grade sludge rock. The carefully sculpted hills and fields gave way before surging trace work of lightning and the descent of fleets of unicorns as black as the night with gaseous flames for breath.
The biggest unicorn leapt onto a rock that split the ground and unfurled great leathery wings from its scaly back.
“Yeahhhhh!” it wailed in a guttural falsetto, playing frenetic air guitar and turning to the bleary-eyed Chef and grinning, shooting its stupefied spectator double guns with its blood-stained hooves. “Rock out wit’ your cock out,” it drawled, licking its nostrils with a forked tongue.
Chef screamed and flailed about, before realizing he was lying in Fausta’s arms.
“Hey, hey, shhh…” Fausta held him close and ran a caressing hand through his hair. “It’s okay, sweetie.”
“What happened?” asked Chef, wondering if his dream had taken a sudden pleasant turn.
“I… I don’t think I understand,” Fausta replied in mock astonishment.
“It’s not over, friend, said Lighthorse, circling with Alex like a diffident shark, ducking his head and scratching his hair. “Don’t much matter to me what happens to Vic Tayback over there. Little Titania, though…” He laughed unpleasantly, all the ersatz sincerity leached from his voice. “She’s mine.”
“I owe this lady a favor,” said Alex, indicating Lorelei, “and you’re not takin’ Valerie without a fight.” He thought for a millisecond. “Hippie,” he added.
Lighthorse wove a deceptively simple skein of cornpone lyrical whimsy, searching, gem-like songs both heartfelt and guarded, both musically sophisticated and down-home, mapping ordinary highs and lows through the common humor of reality.
Alex pointed his guitar straight at Lighthorse, let loose a series of chthonic, thunderous chords that betokened the death of things, and screamed “Rock!!!!!”
A colossal wall of black light slammed across the clearing to the sound of car-shattering music. When they came to, Lighthorse was nowhere to be seen and everyone had a faint taste of malt liquor in their mouths.
“Steel Reserve?” Chef loudly wondered as Fausta nodded.
“Is he gone?” asked Lorelei, clearly impressed.
“He’s gone,” growled Alex with grim cheer. “Not for good, but for now.”
Chef grimaced at the taste in his mouth. “Can I have your Stroh’s, G.B.?”
Goat Boy and Valerie spent the night in the camper, sounding as if the latter was back to her old self and with a vengeance.
Chef and Fausta collapsed into their seats, their acquaintance with line dancing done for good.
“At least we know now, right?” laughed Fausta.
“What do you want to do now?” asked Chef as they walked off.
“Nice big fire sounds about right. My tent’s… a little ways away from the fire.” She crinkled her nose. “Safer that way, more private, and what the fuck is your real name, anyway?”
Chef told her.
“Fausta,” she replied, shaking his hand and laughing.
Later that evening, to the immense amusement of their neighbors, they’d scream both names for a number of enjoyable reasons.
Lorelei and Alex watched them from a distance and laughed.
“This really is turning into a proper vacation,” Lorelei observed, inspecting her hot dog with interest. “I’m gonna have to learn how to relax for a change.”
“You need someone to teach you?” Alex asked with an inescapable emphasis.
“There is someone else,” she told him, raising a hand to show that wasn’t all, “but it’s complicated. Sometimes we’re together and sometimes we aren’t.”
“Life on the planes,” Alex laughed mirthlessly. “It can be like that.”
“We have an understanding,” Lorelei mulled, remembering the music, “and we can turn to other people to…”
“Learn?”
“Learn,” responded Lorelei, the look in her eyes refusing to rise to Alex’s laughing face, “but there won’t really be anybody else. Do you understand?”
Alex stopped laughing and nodded, taking her hand and looking at it closely.
From far across the river, Nokomis watched and smiled, giving everyone a week.
Wendell McKay
(6422)
Lorelei gave a couple of passing early morning risers the stink eye and tried to focus on the wider surroundings, nonplussed as she’d rarely been at the situation. It was still the same: widely spaced fir trees, tents, nascent campfires, and campers like the one they’d mysteriously been landed with as far as the eye can see. At least fifteen guitars were being tuned within a hundred yards of her.
“Fucking hippies,” she whispered, shaking her head and then turning it as Goat Boy emerged from behind, a pair of brightly colored shorts concealing his bounteous genitals. “Hecate’s monthlies, friend! Why the hell are you wearing those?”
“I don’t know. They were there.” Goat Boy coughed meaningfully. “We might want to be quiet, let Valerie sleep. I’m surprised I’m not asleep.”
“After what I heard last night, I’m surprised you’re not dead.”
Goat Boy laughed. “There’s a time for everything. Where’s Chef, anyway?”
“I think he decided to make a recon, try and figure out where we are the hard way.”
“And where do you think that is?” Goat Boy shook his head. “They’ve got American accents, but it can’t be America. It’s so green and dull. I haven’t heard a gunshot or seen anyone praying in an entire day.”
“Canada?” Lorelei wondered out loud.
The sounds of machinery being smashed erupted from inside the camper.
“Stupid radio!” screamed Valerie. “It won’t play anything but Dave Matthews!”
“Okay, I guess it is America,” admitted Goat Boy.
Chef bought a bagel with some of the strange wooden tokens he’d been given in exchange for a couple of ratty old ten-dollar bills. He’d expected the pleasantly malodorous girl at the token counter to raise an eyebrow at his outfit or demeanor, but she’d smiled at him and said “thank you” for the mince pie he’d impulsively given her. The whole place threw him so far out of whack that he almost gave her the old dollar piece that had saved his life all those years ago from that Rebel bullet at Spotsylvania. Remembering the Bloody Angle and those nightmarish few hours threw into further contrast the almost eldritch bucolic peace of their current position.
He chuckled and wondered what Lorelei and the others must have thought of it. He didn’t think he’d been there before, and yet there was a nagging feeling of something familiar that simply wouldn’t let go.
“There’s rats in my brain,” he told a passing pair of early morning risers, who smiled politely.
“The minibar isn’t bad,” Valerie admitted, “though they could have done better with the furnishings. Don’t you think so, sweetie?” Her energy apparently restored by her brief nap, she enveloped Goat Boy in a savage hug as Goat Boy felt inclined to agree in any case.
The camper could have been used by the Partridge Family. That was all the description any of the three really felt the place needed.
“Hell yeah,” said Goat Boy, inspecting the bottle of nectar—Lotophagonis ’23, no less—that his lover held up, its amber glow seeming to illuminate the entire room, making the camper’s interior a colossal mixed drink.
“Someone’s brought us here, and not just for our health,” Lorelei announced.
“It couldn’t be… you know…” Goat Boy found himself unwilling to say “your dad.”
Lorelei’s eyes took on a faraway look, almost misting over. “Isn’t really his style, G.B. We may eternally seek for each other across the trackless wastes of time and space,” she drawled sarcastically, “but I’m not speaking to him unless he quits that moron political talk show.” She knew he was just doing it to piss her off.
“Should we go look for Chef?” Valerie looked towards the door with fascination. “Maybe if we take a look around we’ll get more answers.”
“Yeah,” said Goat Boy, “and I’m hungry.”
Chef saw them walking past the biodegradable balloon stand and smiled, wondering if they felt as out of place as he did. What made it weirder than anything else was that there didn’t seem to be danger of any kind.
“Hey guys,” he called, waving an omelet at them and realizing that, since he could wave it, he’d cooked it too long on the hot rock behind him. He blamed it on the distractions.
The others noticed them too as they emerged from the wood, finding a bluff that stretched away beneath them to a vast clearing of about a mile in circumference surrounded by trees of the kind they’d just left. A lazy little river passed beneath, ruins of wharves here and there, with scrubby grassland on either side. The sun hadn’t quite finished rising, and a dewy mist still held on for dear life in the bottomlands.
“It’s beautiful,” whispered Valerie, nibbling Goat Boy’s ear. “Where are we? This place reminds me of Hy-Brasil back before the zoning regulations scandal.”
“Near enough,” laughed Chef. “We’re in Michigan—the Upper Peninsula. A mile down that way,” he continued with another wave of the omelet, “is Lake Superior. Beyond that, Canada.”
“You were close,” Goat Boy told Lorelei.
“How did you find all that out?” asked Valerie.
“I asked.”
“Oh,” Lorelei responded, an impish smirk starting to steal across her face. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your new friend?”
“Ah.” Chef blushed, deciding it was too late to pretend the “other distraction” didn’t exist. “Guys, this is Fausta.”
“Hey.” The woman stood and took off her straw hat like a Victorian gentleman greeting a lady. She was in her mid-to-late twenties, with a half-assed Louise Brooks bob, smoky dark blue eyes, and an appealingly sharp, good-natured face that kept sliding into a lazy grin no matter how hard she tried to stop it happening. Her old-fashioned floral print pink dress clung to a number of shapely curves, terminating at the bottom in a pair of striped socks and work boots. “Gustav here was just telling me about you guys.”
Gustav? Lorelei mouthed to Chef.
No real names, Chef mouthed back, too dangerous.
Lorelei tried to repress a fit of laughter, and then wondered with a shock when the last time was that she’d done that.
“Yeah, old Gustav’s a great talker,” Goat Boy managed, unsure what else to say.
“When do you go on?” asked Fausta. “Your band, I mean?”
“We’ll have to check,” Lorelei smoothly replied, making a mental note to kick Chef’s ass at some point in the extremely near future. “So are you here for…”
“Oh, it’s my vacation,” said Fausta. “Actually, I’m gonna sit down, if you don’t mind,” she added in obviously mock dudgeon, “as… it’s my vacation.” She smiled brightly at Chef, who coughed and turned to hide the unusually fierce blush that erupted all over his face.
“I don’t usually go in for this kind of thing, you know, it’s like ‘hippie camp’ or something. I mean, shit, a folk festival? I don’t think so. A couple of my colleagues were kind of into it, though, so I figured what the hell. I’m going to go to a conference in Rome later this year, so I guess this is slumming, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”
“Yeah,” replied Goat Boy, who looked frantically at Valerie, the latter lost in the scenery.
“Fausta’s a lecturer,” Chef told them.
“I come out here to read every morning,” Fausta told them, laughing, “and this morning I find Gustav doing this super-cool ‘slow food’ thing with that omelet. That’s one thing I don’t really seem to find in Chicago that much anymore, just being able to meet really interesting people by chance without being afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
Lorelei shivered. All the excessive tranquility was starting to get to her.
Chef sighed heavily.
“I hate to interrupt your morning, Gustav, but we do need to rehearse,” Lorelei told him, with just the hint of steel in her voice. She got to watch Chef’s face fall very leisurely, like an apartment building demolition in slow motion.
“Can I watch?” Fausta chirped excitedly.
“We’d love to have you,” Lorelei improvised, “but Goat Boy has this… religious thing about our rehearsals.”
“Oh, no, please, forget I asked,” Fausta hurriedly averred. “It was great to meet you guys and I can’t wait to see you play. I’ll see you tomorrow night, Gustav?”
Chef nodded with a “hrm-hrm” sound.
“Come on, Gustav,” she said, trying not to make it sound like an order and trying not to make it look like she was yanking him to his feet like a Greek fisherman about to brain an octopus.
They left to find some open ground in the bottomlands, Lorelei looking back for a second to see Fausta hugging her knees and staring back at them with a wistful smile.
“Chef, Chef, Chef,” she laughed. His discomfiture almost made the “band” thing worth it.
“Hey, come on, girl, I was desperate. It was the best way to explain… us, especially with this bein’ a folk festival and all. We can always suddenly break up over ‘artistic differences.’”
“I can’t believe you said that about me back there, Lorelei,” cackled Goat Boy. “‘Religious about rehearsals,’ indeed. And Gustav?”
They found a crevice in the bluffs likely to conceal them from prying eyes and sat to discuss their bizarre situation.
“So we’re at a folk festival in Michigan,” Lorelei conceded. “Why?”
Chef breathed deeply. “You ever think someone just wants us to have a vacation? Shit, Lorelei, breathe that fresh air!”
“What do you think, baby?” Goat Boy asked Valerie, who was staring off into space.
“I… I don’t know.”
“Are you all right?” Lorelei asked.
“Sure, I’m fine, I just… this is all so strange.”
“I know how you feel, Val.” Lorelei shook her head. “We don’t just show up places for no reason at all.”
Valerie nodded distractedly, but couldn’t take her eyes off the far bluff to the south, where the mysterious stranger with the disheveled hair and flannel shirt wielded his guitar like an artist’s brush, mixing and warping the colors and hues of space and time into a single hypnotic beat kept together by a mere five strings. She felt herself sing inside in a way she wasn’t sure she had since she was a girl and Uncle Oisin told her stories of the mortal world before he decided to go back there himself and never returned.
Someone might have noticed, but the other three found them far too preoccupied with the swirling green mist that began to flood their meeting place, a mist that thickened and glistened until it took on a vaguely human shape. It was a woman of indeterminate years and attractive form, almost almond-shaped black eyes boring into each of their battle-ravaged beings.
“Who are you?” demanded Lorelei.
“I… am Nokomis.”
“This was my lake,” spoke Nokomis, “or, rather, it was sacred to me. In days long gone by the shores would sing with hymns of praise to my bounty. As time passed, the invaders from beyond the great water came, the Ojibwa died out or dispersed, and my worship was neglected or forgotten. I am not a vengeful being by any means. What I have described, sadly, has been the way of the world from its inception. I can look down on such things and give them the attention they deserve—that is to say, none.”
Hard luck for your worshippers, thought Lorelei, who remained silent.
“Someone seeks to manipulate the psychic energies of this place for their own purposes,” spoke Nokomis. “This shows disrespect and must stop.”
“And you want us to stop it?” asked Goat Boy, furry brows furrowed.
“I had a choice of… agents,” spoke Nokomis. “The astral tides pulled your way, and there was a certain… reputation I found convincing.”
“What if we refuse?” asked Lorelei.
Nokomis giggled in a distinctly threatening manner and evaporated into the air above her former holy place.
“Well, let’s refuse, then,” Goat Boy suggested. “Eh?”
Lorelei refused. Chef caught himself glancing back at the bluff where he’d met Fausta. Valerie searched anxiously for the strange musician, but he had vanished.
“Maybe we do need a holiday,” said Lorelei, suddenly frowning as she remembered something Fausta had said. “What is tomorrow night, anyway, Chef?”
“Ha! Line dancing.”
Goat Boy and Valerie went to go “take a walk,” leaving Lorelei and Chef watching a halfway decent klezmer band play to a handful of spectators on one of the smaller stages. The park stretched from Bad River south for about a mile, the festival attendees numbering about five or six thousand.
Chef put on his sunglasses and basked, eventually giving up and turning to Lorelei.
“So what’s up, sister? You ain’t usually this quiet. We’ve been in weird spots before, and a hell of a lot less pleasant.”
“Come on, Chef, let’s face it. If there is something weird out there, it’ll find us. Like to like, as per fucking usual.” She folded her arms after adjusting her bikini, looking a little like a healthy, unmarked Amy Winehouse with white streaks in her hair. She found herself surprised at how much she didn’t mind the drooling teenage boys and men that somehow knew to keep a distance with their leering.
“That’s the thing I’m worried about.”
“Yeah? You don’t usually—ah. Fausta.”
“Oh, man, Lore. What were the odds? And now, just when I meet somebody who might just know her way around a kitchen, that Nokomis has to throw this in our lap.”
“What were the odds? You don’t think—”
“Nah, I didn’t catch that vibe.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Lorelei squinted, putting on her glasses. “You got a cigarette?”
“Fausta says it’s actually hip to roll your own nowa—oh.” Chef grinned sheepishly and handed her a Lucky Strike. “I don’t want her to get hurt, you know? When the shit hits the fan, and she happens to be around…” He shook his head vigorously.
“Hey, relax. Just keep your eyes open. We’ve all come through for each other in the past—one human woman shouldn’t be too much extra effort.”
Chef coughed and giggled. “Cute, Lorelei. And thanks.”
Lorelei shook her head in mock disapproval. “Look at you,” she said, laughing.
“Look at you, girlfriend. You look good laughing.”
Lorelei stopped laughing and simply smiled.
Goat Boy looked around to make sure that nobody was watching and started loping through the woods in the manner of his animal brethren, his eyes and ears distended and alert for the slightest trace of his lover. Valerie had gone missing. It was bad enough—sort of—that they had no idea where the kids were, but this was vastly worse.
One minute he and Valerie had been rolling along a stray slab of granite in post-coital glee, the next she seemed to slide away and vanish. Her gorgeous faery smell still stained him all over, and was able to spin in the residue traces like an unrolling blanket as he tracked her. She was still in the earthly plane, and not too far away, he knew that much. Keeping the campers and tents in sight as a geographical reference, he leapt through the wood in a fury and worried himself sick.
Valerie spun and spun and spun until she was the sun and the trees the planets. The clearing was alive and bright with magic she’d long thought gone from the world, sparkling and vital with shimmering forms, half visions and half ghosts. Her hair lashed around her like flares as her entire body lived and breathed with unprecedented force.
“It’s been long since you heard the music, my child,” came the voice, a husky, honeyed baritone that filled her with a feeling of comfort and safety. “It’s been long since you were among your proper kind. Soon I shall come, and take you there, and you shall be the love of a king.”
Everything cut out, as if a light switch had gone off, and Valerie hit a tree with the centrifugal force from her spinning, crying out and giggling as if she’d been drunk.
“Valerie!” Goat Boy bounded to her side and rooted around her as if pulling up grass. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“I don’t know… this is so strange.”
A curious music sounded in her head.
The man swanked arrogantly across the stage, his leather pants audibly creaking out past the pretzel stands where Lorelei and the Chef regarded him warily.
“I fucking hate metal,” hissed Chef.
“You just never hear it live,” scolded Lorelei.
“This is a folk festival, for Curnonsky’s sake! What the hell is that guy doing here? I mean, I’m not that big on folk music, really, but it’s better than this shit.”
The man unslung his guitar from his shoulder, pointing it like a weapon at the audience, the latter emitting a mix of hostile groans and appreciative titters. He winked and pumped a fist, revealing an indistinct tattoo.
“See, the guitar’s supposed to be his cock,” Chef lectured, temporarily mastering the obvious.
“Did you see that?” whispered Lorelei.
“Not really,” said Chef, who was trying to look everywhere but at the hair-metal interloper. “What was it?”
“His tattoo. There was something familiar about it…”
After an exhibitionistic warmup session, the man started to play an ear-shattering, cacophonous song about dragons and midnight and riding free on the wings of eternal and infernal love. Chef went to go take a piss and see if there was another klezmer band around while Lorelei sat on the edge of her seat, torn between admiration at the song and mystification at her memory of the man’s wrist tattoo.
“Mannannan’s Weir,” she whispered to herself. “Where have I heard of it before?” Images came to her of fathomless depths and slimy things worming their way through an ancient and rotten world. The Cells Beyond. The Lockup of Faery.
“Valerie,” she cried, looking around in a sudden worry.
Goat Boy worried equally as he watched his lover all but drool as Bad River’s answer to Bret Michaels worked his way through a number of songs to the increasing interest and approval of the audience. Certainly not the most natural crowd for his stuff, the music lovers stopped barbecuing or playing hackysack and began to congregate in greater clumps around the stage.
“Who is this guy?” Goat Boy asked a girl dancing next to her.
“That’s Alex Dread,” she chirped excitedly. Goat Boy found her refusal to roll her eyes when saying such a name certain evidence of some kind of hypnosis. “He used to be in Pain Market.”
“You like him?”
“I didn’t think so; actually, I used to think he sucked. Now, though… this stuff is so real!”
“Hey!” Chef whirled around to see Fausta approaching, her straw hat fastened at a rakish angle with an old-fashioned scarf. “I didn’t think I’d see you again until tomorrow night.”
Chef was torn between the urge to run away and take her in his arms.
“You don’t think I’m scared of you, do you?” he laughed.
“Man, I hope not. No, it’s just that you guys seem like you have this crazy tight bond, you know? I know people in bands and they haven’t been nearly as close.”
“We are kind of a family.” Chef laughed inside at the understatement.
Fausta made a charming motion with her mouth and looked around. “So, you and Lorelei, you’re not, like, you know—”
Chef almost exploded with laughter at the notion. “No, no… she’s sort of like… a mildly abusive but loving sister.”
“Listen,” said Fausta, “do you have to rehearse now? I was going to eat, and…”
“I’d love to, frankly.”
They found a spot under a tree and spoke generally and awkwardly about a great many things until Fausta came to the subject of the festival’s present lineup.
“And so in the middle of all this hippie stuff we get this Alex Dread guy, the one who used to be in Pain Market?”
“Him.” Chef rolled his eyes and laughed. “Yeah, I noticed him earlier. You’re not a fan, are you?”
“No, but it turns out one of my friends was, back in the day. You’d never believe it to look at her. She actually dragged me up to talk with him, give her moral support, you know?” Fausta giggled, a sound Chef found breathtakingly pleasant. “We got onto this whole weird discussion; my friend specializes—or will specialize, I guess—in Celtic mythology, and apparently this Alex Dread guy used to be in some weird outfit called Mannannan’s Weir.”
Chef’s heart skipped a beat. “Mannannan’s Weir.”
“Yeah. Mannannan was the Celtic god of the sea, apparently.”
“Oh, man.” Chef wiped his brows, as if he’d just made the biggest pot of chicken broth in the universe.
“I know. Isn’t that the cheesiest thing you’ve ever heard?” Fausta started to warm to her subject. “Why the hell do people always go for Celtic mythology, anyway? It seems like half the fantasy novels out there are Celtic,” she said, waving her hands with sarcastic melodrama at the last word. “I mean, it’s not like there aren’t a fucking jillion other traditions to exploit.”
“Fausta.” Chef leaned forward and took her hands, wondering what he was doing. “I hate to do this to you, but—”
“No. No, I’m gonna do this to you,” snapped Fausta. “I’m sick and tired of guys telling me I talk too much. It’s such a double fucking standard—”
“What?” He reeled from the unexpected onslaught, exasperated and exhilarated at the same time. “No, that’s not it, I mean… I could listen to you forever.” Chef reddened and tried to continue. “The thing is, I have to go for a bit.”
“Back to Lorelei, you mean.” Fausta’s eyes clouded over.
“That’s not it, either. I can’t explain why or how, but my… band’s in trouble, and if you see me in the next few hours or so, I need you to keep away. It’s for your own safety.”
“What the hell…” The air grew very thick and dense between them, Fausta’s eyes like the dusk. She tightened her hands around his, and looked as if she might say something.
“Aw, goddamnit.” Chef leaned forward and kissed her, taking her in his arms and holding her close, unable to suppress a moan of delight. After entirely too short a time, they stopped and looked at each other.
“Well,” Fausta finally said.
“If… if everything goes well, I’ll meet you at nine, over by the bluff where we met this morning. If I’m not there… it might be a good idea if y’all cleared out of here.”
“What’s going on, Gustav?” There was no disbelief or suspicion in her voice, just a simple and understandable desire to know.
“I wish I knew.” He kissed her hand somewhat impulsively and left, doubting he’d be able to do so if he stayed a second longer.
Fausta rocked back on her haunches and pondered the tree for a minute, wondering how a perfectly ordinary dawn had turned into such a remarkable day. Her eyes strayed to the river, ambling lazily among the rushes and the rock.
“Oh, fuck this,” she howled, scrambling to her feet and charging off.
Goat Boy sat next to Valerie and watched her with the worry that seemed to have become his stock in trade as of late. On any regular day, she’d have grabbed his pretzel and thrown him onto the ground, doing a variety of things with it before finally chugging the bugger.
Nokomis’ commission seemed to have had an unpleasantly sedative effect on her. She kept staring into space, her eyes and consequently Goat Boy’s consistently straying to the stage where Alex Dread hammered out heavy-metal gut punchers to the unexpected delight of the audience.
“Maybe we should go back to the camper,” he suggested, hoping that the savage light in her eyes would come back at a suggestion of his.
“Maybe,” was all she said, glancing longingly at the stage again.
“Folks, that was Alex Dread,” explained a portly, balding, middle-aged man with a ponytail in a Hawaiian shirt. “We thought we’d surprise you by shaking things up a little this year,” he said a little sheepishly. “Now we’ve got a talented young man from Washtenaw County who you may have heard of… folks, give it up for Lighthorse!”
A scruffy, sandy-haired fellow in a flannel shirt ambled up onto the stage, puffing on a cigarette and laying aside his bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon for safety’s sake.
“I’m Lighthorse,” he charmingly mumbled.
Alex Dread sauntered into his trailer to receive a killer uppercut, staggering against the wall and accidentally ripping down a poster for Yuengling.
“What the hell do you want with her?”
Alex tried to focus, grinning foolishly when he saw a pretty girl in a bikini standing over him, and then turning pale as he saw who it was.
“Lorelei… damn, thought I recognized that hair.” Alex tried to raise himself to a sitting position. “How’s your dad?”
“Don’t ask. Answer my question.”
“Sure, just tell me who you’re talking about when you say ‘her.’”
“Valerie.”
“Val—Oisin’s ‘niece?’ She’s ridin’ with y’all nowadays?”
“You’re trying to tell me you didn’t know?”
“Little girl, it may surprise you to know that you and your travelin’ circus of hippie terrorist monkey-junk aren’t really a tremendous topic of concern in my world.”
“Have you heard of Nokomis?”
“Sure. This is her backyard, or used to be, at any rate.” Alex stared mournfully at the torn poster for Yuengling. “You want a beer?”
“Let’s give him a hand,” the portly guy advised as the feedback from the microphone lacerated eardrums across the clearing. “And now…”
“Well, if you don’t want to go back to the camper, we’d better find Lorelei, don’t you—” Goat Boy trailed off as he turned to find Valerie gone. Gritting his teeth, he dashed off in search of her, almost forgetting himself and using his natural locomotive skills. Those could wait for the wood.
Chef neared the stage just in time to see him leave.
“Why can’t we have nice things?” he sighed, following in hot pursuit.
“So you don’t have any interest in Valerie?” asked Lorelei, carefully sipping her bottle of Yuengling and watching Alex Dread through narrowed eyes.
“Hell no. Nice looker, sure, but I’m Alex Dread, girl,” Alex said, throwing his arms wide and touching his guitar neck fondly. “I’ve got the pick of the litter all over America! Faery-land was never like this!”
“Thank you, Tommy Steele.” Lorelei hunched forward. “What the hell was Nokomis warning us about, then? And why’s Valerie been so spooked recently?”
A knocking came at the door.
“Fans?” Lorelei asked disdainfully.
“They can wait,” Alex conceded. “Part of my parole deal with the Weir. I gotta keep a lookout for any suspicious and unauthorized activity. What they expect me to do about it I don’t know. But I suppose I could help—”
The knocking came again, now more insistently.
“Hell.” Alex opened the door to find Fausta.
“Hi. We met earlier—I’m Renee’s friend—and I need to ask you—oh.” She saw Lorelei and her face fell.
“Hey, Fausta.” Lorelei noted the confusion on her face as she turned from one to the other. “Mutual acquaintances, that kind of thing.”
“What exactly is going on? Gustav took off and I think he might be in trouble. I mentioned something about Mannannan’s Weir and he started acting real… uh, weird, and then just left.”
“Just like that?” Lorelei asked, somewhat surprised.
“No, not just like that,” replied Fausta with the hint of a smile, “but—”
“Well, I don’t have anything to do with it,” insisted Alex, “or at least I didn’t until now. So if you—” He stopped and went very still for a moment, hurrying to the rear of his camper and pressing his hands to the window. “Do you two hear that?”
The women shook their heads.
“That’s it,” breathed Alex. “That music… haven’t heard that in many a day. The Jongleur’s Magick.”
“Tell me you don’t spell that with a ‘k’.”
“Fausta, let him speak.”
Fausta nodded, a little shame-faced but her eyes wide and shining.
“They roam the planes and use music as a weapon, feeding off souls and the energy from physical attraction. Haven’t you ever felt it,” he asked Fausta, realizing his appeal would be lost on Lorelei, “seeing a musician whose music you really liked and who you thought was just the hottest thing ever?”
Fausta nodded, fascinated but deciding not to reveal the specific example.
“The Jongleurs refine that to a ‘t.’ They’ve been doing this for so long that they’ve made it into a science, and just in time for MySpace, YouTube, Facebook… their power’s increasing with the internet, and they’re growing more dangerous.” He frowned, obviously puzzled. “I don’t know what one would be doing at some over-the-hill folk festival.”
“What are you doing at some over-the-hill folk festival?”
“Been livin’ too hard; thought this would be a bit of a vacation.”
“So did we,” admitted Lorelei ruefully.
“Maybe he’s like a sport fisherman,” Fausta suggested. “You know, someone who decides to go for the quiet streams instead of the big rivers.”
Alex and Lorelei stared at her, impressed.
“Wait, you believe all this?” Lorelei suddenly realized.
“It’s pretty obvious you guys were out of the ordinary to begin with,” explained Fausta. “From that point, it wasn’t much of a jump to this stuff. Besides, it feels right here, for some reason.”
The power of Nokomis, Lorelei thought to herself, and then realized that her own crew was behaving a little out of the ordinary as well.
“Yeah… I know what you mean.” Snapping out of it, Lorelei turned her attention to Alex. “But if the music’s playing now… you think the Jongleur’s after Valerie?”
“The beauty, power, and energy of a Faery?” Alex whistled appreciatively. “If I were a Jongleur, I’d be all over that sweet… stuff,” he said, deciding for Lorelei’s benefit—and his own—to amend the final word just in time.
“Can you find the Jongleur?” asked Fausta. “Do you think that’s where Gustav went?”
“And can you stop him?”
“Ladies, please,” Alex chastened as if refusing autographs. “Let’s rev up the truck first.”
Goat Boy stopped at a clearing by what seemed to be a long-overgrown dirt road, scraps of prairie and forest alternating off into the distance, for all he knew, all the way to Wisconsin. A tiny stream trickled through, beside which stood Valerie on tiptoe, looking as if she’d just been kissed by moonlight.
“Hey,” said Lighthorse. “What’s up?” He played a few chords on his guitar, amidst some dimension where Elliott Smith and Ryan Adams prominently figured. “You want a beer?” A cold bottle of Stroh’s rolled on its own across the clearing until it clinked next to Goat Boy’s left hoof.
“I was looking for my girlfriend.”
“Oh. We were just talking.”
“Valerie, come on, we need to find Lorelei.”
Valerie didn’t move.
“I don’t think she wants to go with you,” Lighthorse placidly observed. “You want a cigarette?” A pack of Parliament Lights dropped from the sky next to Goat Boy.
“Who are you?” asked Goat Boy in sudden horrified realization.
“I’m Lighthorse,” he answered, with a modest duck of the head. A loathsome “aw, shucks” vibe slithered around the reply.
“You can’t take her!” Goat Boy planted himself in front of Valerie.
“Funny expression,” Lighthorse smirked. “ ‘Over my dead body.’ Of course, you made me say it, but—”
A rubbery omelet sailed past Lighthorse’s face.
“Shit,” they heard Chef swear.
Lighthorse’s guitar neck swung away from Goat Boy and at the bushes where Chef had obviously planted himself, sending forth music almost without his hands touching the strings.
Chef tried to make a dive for it, but found himself caught in the beguiling mix of traditional and contemporary that Lighthorse’s music presented, challenging its audience to forget rote, stereotyped notions of themselves as “urban hipsters” and reclaim their true spiritual selves as children of the soil, waiting out the mild sunsets on clapboard front porches and swapping tall tales over a barrel of cider with three “X”s incongruously marked on the side. Guitar lines and vocal layering thankfully outmatched the set’s more deeply produced moments, the rhythms and melodies clear mountain streams between ridges of reverb and feedback.
Chef screamed.
Lorelei bounded into the clearing to see Chef writhing in quirky, introspective alt-country overload and realized she had just gotten there in time.
Lighthorse arched an eyebrow, his attention to Valerie faltering temporarily, as he plainly wondered about forging some kind of erotic connection between the world of thoughtful nű-sarsparilla and midnight-movie psychobilly.
“Hey, what’s up?” Lighthorse adorably mumbled, charmingly running a hand through his artistically tousled hair. “I’m Lighthorse.”
“Don’t try it on, son,” snapped Lorelei, letting loose a jarring wolf whistle.
A battered old Chevy truck roared into the clearing, circling the four and swerving so that its bed faced the confrontation. Alex Dread stood atop the side like a conquering pirate, his guitar aimed steadily at the group. Behind him was a large machine gun that, whatever its make, caliber, and specifications, could probably still kill lots and lots of people regardless. At its trigger…
“Oh, my God! Gustav! What’s happened to him?”
“Fausta?” cried Goat Boy. “Now that’s more like it,” he crowed, eyeing the machine gun.
“I figured it’d be interesting to learn,” Fausta shrugged with some embarrassment, staring worriedly at Chef’s supine form beneath her. “Lorelei thought… oh shit, is that Lighthorse?”
“You know him?” asked Lorelei.
“My friend Renee went out with him for two weeks while he was playing Chicago,” snarled Fausta. “He promised her the harvest moon and then took her for…” Fausta shook her head at an unpleasant memory. “She was a mess.”
“Hey, c’mon, man, there were issues.” Lighthorse turned to face Alex Dread. “What’s he doin’ here?” he asked, his mask of bashful bonhomie slipping. “Looks like Kip Winger’s hemorrhoid.”
“Now, Lorelei?” asked Alex, the eagerness in his voice palpable.
“Now.”
Ear-splitting guitar chords roused Chef from a curious existence where he lay against a log-chopping tree stump in flannels and denims, a strand of hay between his lips and a copy of McSweeney’s lying on his face to shield it from the midday sun.
Before he could quite register the charmingly melodic nature of the quirky self-deprecation that seemed to surround him like a metatextual miasma, the air was rent with the bloodcurdling assault of pure industrial grade sludge rock. The carefully sculpted hills and fields gave way before surging trace work of lightning and the descent of fleets of unicorns as black as the night with gaseous flames for breath.
The biggest unicorn leapt onto a rock that split the ground and unfurled great leathery wings from its scaly back.
“Yeahhhhh!” it wailed in a guttural falsetto, playing frenetic air guitar and turning to the bleary-eyed Chef and grinning, shooting its stupefied spectator double guns with its blood-stained hooves. “Rock out wit’ your cock out,” it drawled, licking its nostrils with a forked tongue.
Chef screamed and flailed about, before realizing he was lying in Fausta’s arms.
“Hey, hey, shhh…” Fausta held him close and ran a caressing hand through his hair. “It’s okay, sweetie.”
“What happened?” asked Chef, wondering if his dream had taken a sudden pleasant turn.
“I… I don’t think I understand,” Fausta replied in mock astonishment.
“It’s not over, friend, said Lighthorse, circling with Alex like a diffident shark, ducking his head and scratching his hair. “Don’t much matter to me what happens to Vic Tayback over there. Little Titania, though…” He laughed unpleasantly, all the ersatz sincerity leached from his voice. “She’s mine.”
“I owe this lady a favor,” said Alex, indicating Lorelei, “and you’re not takin’ Valerie without a fight.” He thought for a millisecond. “Hippie,” he added.
Lighthorse wove a deceptively simple skein of cornpone lyrical whimsy, searching, gem-like songs both heartfelt and guarded, both musically sophisticated and down-home, mapping ordinary highs and lows through the common humor of reality.
Alex pointed his guitar straight at Lighthorse, let loose a series of chthonic, thunderous chords that betokened the death of things, and screamed “Rock!!!!!”
A colossal wall of black light slammed across the clearing to the sound of car-shattering music. When they came to, Lighthorse was nowhere to be seen and everyone had a faint taste of malt liquor in their mouths.
“Steel Reserve?” Chef loudly wondered as Fausta nodded.
“Is he gone?” asked Lorelei, clearly impressed.
“He’s gone,” growled Alex with grim cheer. “Not for good, but for now.”
Chef grimaced at the taste in his mouth. “Can I have your Stroh’s, G.B.?”
Goat Boy and Valerie spent the night in the camper, sounding as if the latter was back to her old self and with a vengeance.
Chef and Fausta collapsed into their seats, their acquaintance with line dancing done for good.
“At least we know now, right?” laughed Fausta.
“What do you want to do now?” asked Chef as they walked off.
“Nice big fire sounds about right. My tent’s… a little ways away from the fire.” She crinkled her nose. “Safer that way, more private, and what the fuck is your real name, anyway?”
Chef told her.
“Fausta,” she replied, shaking his hand and laughing.
Later that evening, to the immense amusement of their neighbors, they’d scream both names for a number of enjoyable reasons.
Lorelei and Alex watched them from a distance and laughed.
“This really is turning into a proper vacation,” Lorelei observed, inspecting her hot dog with interest. “I’m gonna have to learn how to relax for a change.”
“You need someone to teach you?” Alex asked with an inescapable emphasis.
“There is someone else,” she told him, raising a hand to show that wasn’t all, “but it’s complicated. Sometimes we’re together and sometimes we aren’t.”
“Life on the planes,” Alex laughed mirthlessly. “It can be like that.”
“We have an understanding,” Lorelei mulled, remembering the music, “and we can turn to other people to…”
“Learn?”
“Learn,” responded Lorelei, the look in her eyes refusing to rise to Alex’s laughing face, “but there won’t really be anybody else. Do you understand?”
Alex stopped laughing and nodded, taking her hand and looking at it closely.
From far across the river, Nokomis watched and smiled, giving everyone a week.
Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Apocalypso
Apocalypso – Franklin Marsh
Abe and Lyle sat on their bench staring out into the Mojave desert, sipping ice cold Schlitz.
Lyle’s bottle emptied.
“More beer, woman!” he hollered.
Betsy glanced out of the gas station door.
“Can’t you old farts even get your own beer no more?” she jeered, and walked over to the cooler.
Abe almost didn’t notice the resupply. He was squinting out into the heat haze.
Betsy sipped a Coke.
“Somethin’ out there, Abe?”
“Don’t know, Betsy. We got any binoculars?”
Lyle wheezed out a chuckle.
“It’s a mirage, you old fool.”
Abe watched the black blob advancing through the shimmering heat divide and elongate.
“There is somethin’ out there,” said Betsy, an edge of tension in her voice..
The indistinct black shape continued to approach the trio.
“It’s a guy!” said Betsy, relieved.
“Walkin’ through the desert? Must be a major loon,” sneered Abe.
“Here he comes,” said Betsy.
“All dressed in black,” wondered Abe. “In this heat?”
“Stiletto shoes,” gasped Betsy.
“And a big top hat!” bellowed Lyle , finally focusing on the approaching figure.
Abe felt an irrational coldness creeping over him that wasn’t the beer.
“Looks like some kinda mortician,” he said.
“A ringmaster from the circus of Hell,” replied Betsy in an unexpected burst of erudition.
Abe saw that the figure had some kind of playing card stuck in his hat band but it was reversed so that the face of the card could not be seen. He could make out the white edging, an olive green background and a yellow and black shield.
“His eyes,” wailed Betsy. “He must be some kind of vampire!” She edged backwards.
“Walkin' around in broad daylight? What about his eyes?” grumbled Lyle.
“They’re bright red,” said Abe in wonder. He took a quick draught of beer and coughed.
“He’s got white hair,” observed Lyle. “He’s a ‘bino. Nothin’ to worry about.”
Abe wasn’t so sure. This guy didn't even seem to be sweating. Abe was.
“You still got that piece back there, Bets?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “ You proposin’ I shoot one of my customers, Abe?” The light tone was forced.
“Mean lookin’ sumbitch,” said Abe, unconsciously lowering his voice as the man neared the gas station.
Betsy retreated inside, and fluffed her hair in the mirror behind the counter. You never knew.
Abe slugged more beer as his mouth dried up.
“Howdy, stranger!” whooped Lyle. “What brings you…?”
Doctor Dementer snatched the Schlitz bottle from the elderly man, and chug-a-lugged it’s entire contents. He then smashed it over Lyle’s head, grasped the wet hair, jerked the oldster’s head back, and slashed his throat with the jagged neck.
Abe stared, releasing his grip on his own beer in shock. The Doctor kicked one of the bench legs, tearing it free. The seat tipped over, Abe falling on his dead brother. Dementer clutched the broken piece of wood, and rammed the pointed end into Abe’s chest. Abe expired without even a scream.
Betsy yelped as the door to the gas station crashed open.
“Hey, Mister, what…?”
Dementer opened and emptied the till. He saw the Saturday Night Special under the counter. He picked it up and pointed it at Betsy.
“No! You can’t! Just take the money…”
The little pistol made a noise like a cheap firecracker and puffed out blue smoke. A small, dark hole appeared to the left of Betsy’s forehead. Her eyes rolled up, then closed, as she fell surprisingly gracefully to the floor.
The Doctor replaced the gun, and snatched up a set of keys. He kicked down the door to the back entrance, and walked over to a corroded pick up truck, ‘A & L Gorch’ in faded white paint on the side. The keys fitted and she started first time.
The Doc ran her round to the front and filled up with gas. As he climbed back on to the driver’s seat, he saw the Highway Patrol vehicle ease off the blacktop. He crashed the gears and the old rustbucket took off like a spooked mustang. She bounced off the police car’s fender, smashing the metal into the tyre, then bucked onto the highway.
Patrolman Harding hit his head on the windshield and fell back dazed. The car slowly careered into a large Yucca.
The radio blared June Carter Cash. The Doc fiddled with the knobs, eventually locating a would-be subversive college radio station out of Lovelock.
The truck swerved as ‘Sunarise, come every morning…’ warbled from the speakers. The Doc was about to can the Antipodean wobble-boarder when electronic thrashing came from behind the singer. Better Alien Sex Fiend than Rolf.
Rescuing a bouncing packet of Lucky Strike from the dashboard, the Doc jammed a filter into his mouth, and pulled out the cigarette lighter. As the music swelled and the stale smoke filled his lungs, he grinned and put the pedal to the metal.
******************************
Tanith ran up the stone steps, gasping for breath. Her legs and heels hurt as she reached the landing, and tottered towards the desk. The monk looked up in surprise.
“Tanith,” he said gently.
“Brother Francis,” she nodded, gasping for breath. “I have to see the Director.”
“This is highly unusual,” replied the monk.
“Emergency, Code Name Physician,” she retorted.
The monk stabbed a button on the intercom and relayed the message. The huge wooden door opened almost immediately and Tanith hurried in.
***********************************
The Rolls Royce Silver Seraph moved almost silently through the rain swept Essex Marshes. It agilely negotiated the twists and turns of the mud-sodden country road until it reached the tiny church. The driver alighted and rang the bell. The door was opened by a short, squat little priest. Long, black hair parted in the middle framed the chubby face. A black beard obscured the weak chin. A heavily jewelled silver cross hung inverted around his neck. Three tall men climbed from the Rolls and hurried into the small building.
“Welcome, welcome,” chuntered the priest, “This way, Gentlemen.”
They walked down the central passageway. The altar was tilted onto its back, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. The priest led the men down under the earth.
*******************
Tanith walked into the spartanly furnished room and approached the huge teak desk. She knelt on the deep pile red carpet, and genuflected.
“Thank you, Tanith,” said the Director, smiling. “What’s the fuss?”
“Codename Physician has surfaced, Director. He terminated two greybeards and a woman, and injured a Highway Patrolman. He has since destroyed the town of Lovelock.”
“Destroyed a whole town?” cried the Director, incredulously.
“More or less,” faltered Tanith. “He drove an old pick up truck into a gas station, causing an explosion, and widespread property damage. He proceeded to terminate Elias Walter, proprietor of Gun Fury, specialist weapons store, and arm himself with a bewildering variety of pistols, rifles, machine guns, a flame thrower and several LAWS rockets. He stole the late Mr Walter’s Hummer and drove through the town, destroying the police station, cinema and church.”
“Enough,” barked the Director. “Where is he now?”
“He is believed to be travelling through the Mojave, in the direction of the former Nuclear Testing Grounds, now the Oddity Relocation Camps.”
“Believed to be, Tanith?”
“He has temporarily slipped beneath our radar, Sir, but…”
“But me no buts.”
The Director stood up, ran a finger round his dog collar, and kicked his waste paper basket.
“Goddam’ Motherfucking Sonofabitch!”
Tanith blinked and hoped that she hadn’t heard what she had just heard. No one would believe her.
“If I could get my hands on that red-eyed, white-haired frea…”
The Director came out of his fugue, and put his hand on Tanith’s shoulder.
“Let us pray, Tanith. Let us pray that we can apprehend this Godless no-goodnik before he can cause any more harm.”
They knelt together , the Director’s arm slipping around Tanith’s waist.
*******************************
The three men stooped to pass through the tiny aperture in the subterranean wall. They stood erect once inside the crypt. Two large stone slabs stood before them, a naked body upon each.
To their right, an obscenely obese man, rolls of fat cascading from his stomach to conceal his genitalia, hamhock legs, bulging arms, a completely bald head crowning an ugly, stern face.
To their left, a slim, attractive young girl, seemingly unblemished apart fom a shaven head.
“Copley-Syle.” It was the Chinaman who spoke. “Where were they recovered from?”
The long-haired priest stepped forward and removed a mange-tout from the obese man’s ear.
“From a loch in Scotland,” he replied, slipping the green vegetable into his mouth.
“And this one?” enquired the Haitian, the eyes of the Goat’s head atop his own watching the unholy man.
“A shack in Texas.”
The Haitian ran his hand over the girl’s belly, drawing the priest's eyes from the dark triangle with the edging of two white streaks.
“We heard she’d suffered terrible, terrible injuries.”
“She had, oh yes,” murmured the priest, “but…” he gestured, “see for yourself.”
“Are we ready?” The third man, a Native American, asked, surveying his companions.
“Yes! Oh, yes!” whooped the Canon Darren Copely-Syle. He dashed to a nearby cupboard, and removed the mewling infant.
****************************
Hester looked out of the window despite her fears. There was usually some uniformed sadist torturing an orange-uniformed oddity outside. All was quiet tonight. She sighed in relief and stared eagerly at the lightning flashes over the far hills.
“Anything?” asked Dick the midget.
“Not yet, honey,” she replied, “ but soon a real rain’s gonna come.”
A groan from inside their cell drew her away from the window. She’d lost weight again, but not in a good way. They’d shaved her head but left her beard. She must look like a distaff Ming The Merciless. The cell floor was littered with red hair and small scales.
It was hot, even in the dead of night. Claude lay on the floor trying to sleep, his warts oozing. He snuffled uneasily, as if having a bad dream. Leopold and Wade lay together on a sacking-covered pallet. They were so weak. Hester was convinced their cell was built over a nuclear waste facility. Something was slowly wasting them. Klin and Klang, the Siamese twins were unco-ordinated and listless.
“Is he comin’ Hester?”
Wade’s voice could hardly be heard.
“He ain’t comin’. He sold us out in Vegas. He don’t care no more. He just wants his little girl.”
Leopold’s bitterness seemed to have given him a bit of fight.
Hester got angry too.
“He’s comin’. He’ll not leave us no more. He knows we’re his family now, not that murderin’ bitch. He’ll be back.”
“You’re foolin’ yourself, Hester,” coughed Leopold, another clump of fur falling from his head. “We don’t exist for him.”
Hester turned back to the window, and looked forlornly out into the dark.
“Don’t let us down, Doc,” she whispered.
******************
The young woman carried the earthenware bowl of broth to her bed-ridden mother. The old woman’s hair was grey, not a trace of its former flame-red glory.
You’re a good wee girl,” she croaked. Sam spooned the orange liquid into her mother’s mouth. When the bowl was empty, she wiped her mother’s lips.
An ancient wrinkled hand emerged from the bedclothes, and clutched her wrist in a cold grip.
“Im no’ long for this particular world, Lassie. I can foresee trouble. You’re of an age now to know that your sister and her father are about to reappear. There will be violence. Your sister always was a wilful girl. You must go to her. Get her away from her father. She can be redeemed. He cannot. Seek out the Doctor. Your trust fund will provide for you. And I have some books of instruction for you to read. I’ll help all I can, Lassie.”
The old woman tapped her temple.
“It’s all in here, girl.”
****************************************
The helicopter soared across the desert sand. Tanith clutched the Director’s hand tightly and hoped she wouldn’t be sick. He was shouting furiously into the radio.
“What do you mean you can’t find him? Look! He’s in a Hummer packed with weapons. Get more choppers aloft! I don’t care about the budget! Find him!”
He tore off the headphones and glared out of the window.
********************************************
Darren Copely-Syle looked at the three piles of clothes, and then turned shakily to the two figures sitting up on their slabs.
“Master?” he gargled.
“You have done well, novice,” rumbled the obese man. “You will be rewarded.”
He gestured at the cupboard. There was the sound of breaking glass, and an array of small, stunted, hideous, damp creatures emerged from the wooden container, bearing black clothes.
Copely-Syle’s eyes nearly started from his head.
“My homunculi!” he ejaculated. “They’re…”
“Alive,” smiled the man, reaching for the first creatures offering, a pair of Satanic underpants.
More things emerged, bearing satin and leather.
Copely-Syle’s shining eyes turned to the female figure, who had adopted a coy cheesecake pose. The unfrocked priest watched in amazement as long, lustrous black locks sprouted from her bald head to flow down over her shoulders, and shroud her magnificent bustline. Thin white threads twisted through the hair, one on either side of her head. Her demurely crossed legs precluded Copley-Syle running a match downstairs.
The man indicated the vanished Haitian’s headgear, and said to a particularly revolting homunculus, “I say, dear boy, how about some goat’s head soup?”
********************************************************
PFC Butte wondered for the umpteenth time what would happen if he lit up a cigarette. Down here in the underground tunnels. Right next to America’s premier stockpile of obsolete nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons.
As per usual he decided against it, and wondered what Betsy was doing. Whiling away her time at the Godforsaken gas station, with mostly just those two old fogeys for company.
“Evening.”
“Hi.”
Wha?????
Butte struggled to unsling his rifle as the eccentric walked past.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
The white-haired, red-eyed man tipped his black top hat with the blood-stained chicken feather stuck in the band, and stepped through the doorway to the weapon store.
Butte blinked. Through the door. Which wasn’t open. Eighteen inches of steel. His rifle drooped. He stepped forward, tilting back his helmet to scratch his crew cut.
Butte felt something move inside his head and everything went black.
?************************************************************
The Director thumped Commandant Kier’s desk, almost upsetting the pint glass of vodka, ice and lemon.
“I tell you he’s coming here! You’d better be prepared!”
“So?” Kier muttered at the Director whilst simultaneously undressing at Tanith with his heavily-lidded eyes. Tanith shuddered and mentally dressed herself. How could their organisation employ such…Eurotrash?
“So, if he gets in here and releases his buddies, your ass is grass, my dear Commandant.”
Kier sipped the clear liquid, enjoying a mental battle with Tanith over her brassiere.
“Do not worry, Herr Direktor. The Special Oddities are quite safe in their concrete bunker and should be very, very contaminated by now. Even if he should get in, none of them will get out - unless we let them...”
“Why would you do that?” queried the Director, suspiciously.
“Have you never heard of the Most Dangerous Game, Herr Direktor? An Oddity hunt? With them glowing away in the desert blackness? Wunderbar.”
He drained the pint, glassy eyes crawling over and beneath Tanith’s dark business suit. She shuddered, and moved behind the Director.
“We have every conceivable means of extermination here, Herr Direktor. I know you are a man of God, but surely you would rejoice at the chance to remove a few of the Godless? Of Satan’s Rejects?”
“Kier,” said the Director, quietly and menacingly, “I think you’re beginning to lose touch with what’s real, all alone in your personal fiefdom out here. All we want is to capture this man and incarcerate him with his little elves. Then, when I’m sure that you have accomplished that , I can walk away and you can shoot them escaping or something.”
The Commandant pouted.
“Oh, you’re no fun any more, Smithy. Time was, you’d have been leading the pack.”
“Those days are over, Kier, and you know it. Are your perimeters safe? Can we leave one little loophole for Doctor Dipshit to get in?”
“Of course my perimeters are safe!” screamed the Commandant in a vodka frenzy, as all the windows of his office blew in and the earth shook.
*********************************************
Darren Copely-Syle nodded, and the two misshapen homunculi struggled to tilt the carafe of sloshing blood-red liquid. Having filled his glass, they trooped around the table.
Anton Krolok held out his mug.
“What news, my dear Canon?”
“Dementer is in Nevada.”
Krolock slammed down his flagon on a creature’s foot. It hopped in agony until a steak knife pierced its black little heart. Lorelei grinned and bit off the head.
****************************
Samantha studied the books, listened to her mother and practiced. Within hours she could levitate, within days take short trips upon the Astral. She was nervous. She was the good one, her half-sister the bad. She really didn’t want confrontation. Her mother told her it was inevitable.
***************************************************
“It’s happening!” cheered Hester, watching the night sky light up with orange fireballs. “He’s hittin’ the whole damn’ site. Better get ready!”
A rejuvenated Claude, lifted Dick up to one mighty shoulder, then the poorly Wade was draped gently upon the other. Klin and Klang tied Leopold to the monster’s back with ripped bed sheets.
Hester watched in delight as Kier’s uniforms ran around like headless chickens. The Oddities were overcoming them, strangling them with chains, seizing their weapons, the torturers were being tortured in a hellish blood red glow.
The cell floor erupted as a whirring silver screw pulsated through it. It withdrew and a top hat poked through the floor.
“Going underground!” hollered the Doc. “C’mon, you sad sacks. Let’s git while the gittin’s good.”
The Oddities clustered around the escape tunnel, and began the leap into darkness.
***********
“Hey, Pops? We gonna face down the Doc and his guys? With guns? Huh?”
“Lorelei, my dear darling daughter, I sometimes wonder if you aren’t actually related to that quack. You know that a gun obsession is an obsession with the male reproductive organ? I thought you’d exorcised that particular beast in Las Vegas.”
Lorelei shuddered with pleasure.
“What a gas! Can we?”
“No, child. This time it’s magic. It’s time you started thinking beyond your guns.”
Krolok stood up.
“Come, my dear. Time to depart.”
Copeley-Syle looked up, startled. He raised a tremulous hand.
“Hello? Can I come too? I did…”
Krolok contemptuously clicked his fingers. The homunculi fell upon the canon, tearing, biting, ripping.
The quivering bloody mass collapsed to the floor. The screams stopped as the tongue and vocal chords were torn away, the disgusting creatures feeding noisily.
“Not the Astral?” moaned Lorelei.
“The Astral,” confirmed Krolok.
***************************************
Doctor Dementer hummed The Count Bishops’ I Take What I Want as the little electric buggy eased it’s way around the death superstore. He pocketed various test tubes and petri dishes in the Chemical Warfare section.
The Oddities were perplexed. As they had descended through the Doc’s hastily excavated tunnel into the underground storage silos, they noticed the faint yellow glow surrounding them. Hester pulled at her beard anxiously and clumps came off in her hand.
When the Doc returned from his shopping expedition, they voiced their fears. With waves of his hand, he pronounced them cured. Leopold launched into a diatribe about traitors, turncoats, and how long would it take him to desert them again for his offspring. The Doc’s good humour evaporated.
“She’s Krolok’s girl. And she’s coming for us. With her daddy. We’ve got to be prepared.”
“Eat shit,” muttered Leopold.
Wade, head still bandaged from the terrible mutilations of Las Vegas, lay wheezing in the trailer of the buggy. He waved feebly at Dementer. The Doc drew close and listened.
“Doc, gimme my glow back. I can’t take no more. Lay me on one of those,” he indicated a small nuclear warhead, “and I’ll take care of Kier and his boys. Maybe even Smithy. Leave you free to deal with Krolock. And her. I’ll see you in the next world.”
The Doc patted his shoulder.
“Whatever you say, Wade. Noble sacrifice.”
***********************************************
The helicopter buzzed them as they fled across the Mojave in a half-track. The Director radioed Kier, astride a magnificent white Arab charger, as he led the remnants of his battered, tatty army across the sand, swigging from a bottle of Stolichnaya.
“What’s that glow?” queried the Director. Tanith squinted through her binoculars.
“It’s the little Alligator Boy!”
“Hah! He’s one of the Specials. Kier! Get your ass over here.”
Tanith strained to make out Wade’s peculiarly phallic companion. She realised.
“Director?”
“Come on, Kier. Move yourself! The others are getting away.”
“Director?”
“Hush now, Tanith. This is men’s work.”
“SMITHY! You patronising sexist bastard! Get us out of here. He’s lying on part of a tactical nuclear missile.”
The Director grabbed the binoculars, half-strangling his assistant.
“Shit! You’re right! Go, Garcia! Go!”
The pilot rammed the stick forward.
Kier’s steed flew towards the faint glow, then reared neighing above the prostrate Oddity.
“Hah! ‘Gator Boy! Meet your death!” shrieked Kier, leaping from the saddle.
“Meet yours, Asshole. Fuck you,” said Wade, smiling. “And the horse you rode in on.”
He thumbed a red button. A silly farting noise came from under him.
“Shit,” said Wade.
“Die!” bellowed Kier, thrusting his sabre forward. He and his horse were instantly vapourised.
The helicopter jounced in the air. Tanith and the Director prayed. Garcia swore as he fought the controls.
The occupants of the half-track looked back in anger at the mushroom cloud.
“I’ll miss him,” said Hester, her voice breaking.
“He died so that we might live,” said the Doc.
“You lying shit,” groaned Leopold.
*****
Samantha appeared before her mother in a simple, white, ankle-length cotton shift. She leaned over and pecked the old woman on the cheek.
“Have you got your bag, hen?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Godspeed.”
Samantha picked up the bag and held her arms aloft. Smiling at her mother, she was enveloped in sparkling white light, and gracefully rose, passing through the bedroom ceiling.
Morag closed her eyes, lay back and exhaled her last exhalation.
Sam saw the castle recede. Soon she was flying through the Astral at tremendous speeds, still managing to focus on the worlds that lay below. Starting simply, with fluffy white clouds, puppies and kittens, she soon began to enjoy the trip. New born babies, sunlight, wine lakes. Surrounded by chuckling faeries performing stunning aerobatics she looked down as the light from her rained over a Punch and Judy show, a sad clown cleaning his glasses, a chef emerging from a huge overcoat clutching sauteed Sugaraspa, a newspaper editor tearing off his clothes and running naked through woods, hugging moss-covered trees and marvelling at his developing nether regions as fur grew upon his legs. As she glided above Alternative Thailand, a huge drowsy-eyed Caucasian man looked up smiling, his index finger touching his headband in salute. The cobra he should have been concentrating upon saw its chance, and struck at its rival between his thighs.
“Aieeeee!”
Sam’s elation faded as she flew out over a dark desert.
*************************************
Krolok and Lorelei finished sucking on Copely-Syle’s bones. He took her hand.
“Come,child.”
They extended their arms and were encased in shimmering dark light. They flew over war, famine, pestilence, death, overdue library books, football hooliganism. graffiti, vandalism, terrorism. Krolok sang What A Wonderful World, and laughed. Lorelei felt an unexpected tension, and gritted her teeth as they reached the desert.
*************************************************
The Doc brought the halftrack to a halt beside the rippling pool.
“It’s an oasis,” gasped Hester.
“It’s where he’ll abandon us,” moped Leopold.
“Hush,” responded the bearded lady. “What’s that?”
Two figures stood beside the pool.
“It’s them,” groaned Hester.
There was a splash and a shriek. A beautiful blonde girl emerged from the water, her white, now see-through garments clinging to her body.
“This is more like it,” enthused Leopold.
The girl placed her white plastic bag inscribed with five mystic blue bars and five runic red letters upon the sand. She reached inside with both hands and withdrew two large cucumbers.
“No!” Krolok blenched.
“What’s up, Pop? It’s just a coupla tallywhacker shaped vegetables.”
Samantha held one green length upright between her breasts, and held the other crossways, about a third of the way down the first. She closed her eyes and sang a high-pitched note of purest faery-song.
Krolok screamed. He seemed paralysed. Each cucumber released a small ring, which floated across to Krolok and covered his eyes. He vomited diced carrots.
The Doc smiled and, reaching beneath the halftrack’s dashboard, retrieved a bag that matched Samantha’s.
“Doc, what do those runic red letters stand for?” asked Hester.
“Tetragrammaton, Eschaton, Satanae, Conflux, Occultum,” replied Dementer.
He jumped from the vehicle, and produced a huge sweetcorn from his bag. The small yellow particles detached themselves, and floated through the air to attach themselves to Krolok’s exposed skin. His screaming intensified, and Lorelei released his hand, staggering backwards.
Samantha, still singing, produced an apple, that floated into Krolok’s mouth, subduing the screams. A tomato appeared from her bag, and landed upon the black sorceror’s nose.
Dementer’s bag gave up a massive aubergine. It floated slowly behind Krolok, turned, appeared to aim between his buttocks, then sped forward at an amazing speed.
“MMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!”
“Pop!”
Lorelei wept as her father crumbled from inside. Soon he was just loose skin, drifting across the desert.
“No!” Lorelei turned to her adversaries.
Samantha stepped forward proferring a cucumber. An internal battle seemed to rage within Lorelei. A hand moved forward reluctantly and seized the vegetable. Sam offered the other cucmber. Again, despite struggling, Lorelei grasped the green protuberance. The girls screamed. And merged. Two shrivelled gherkins fell to the desert floor.
Lorelei looked down at herself in awe. Her black leather garb was white. She blinked and looked at the Oddities and Doc.
“I feel good,” she said in surprise. Then added “Like I knew that I would.”
The Doc stepped forward, hand reaching for her.
“Here he goes,” grumbled Leopold, reaching for a .357 Magnum. “Doing his Darth Vader act.”
Lorelei raised her arms and levitated. The shimmering white light cascaded around her.
“See youse!” she called joyously, “I’m off to Faery Land!” She disappeared..
Doctor Dementer stumbled forward. Leopold pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him in the centre of his back, bursting through the frilled white shirt. He took one pace forward and fell to his knees. Leopold’s second shot bloodied the white hair, and removed his forehead. The jolt knocked off the top hat, which rolled on the sand. A desert breeze lifted it, and sailed it out over the pool. It came to rest floating upon the surface.
It was as if all of the test-tubes and Petri dishes the Doc had lifted from below the earth had shattered. Horrific boils grew and burst upon his skin. His clothes rotted then his skin, muscle, bones, internal organs, all turning to a putrescent mush which sank into the desert sand with dizzying rapidity.
Hester snatched the Magnum from Leopold’s paw, and placed the still warm barrel against his temple. He closed his eyes and said “Do it.”
She thumbed the hammer down, clicked on the safety catch and placed the pistol on the floor of the halftrack. Seizing Leopold’s sackcloth jacket, she flung him onto the sand, then sat in the driver’s seat and started up the vehicle.
“Kill me!” screamed Leopold. “Just kill me! Don’t leave me here!”
The halftrack roared away in a cloud of dust.
*********************************************
The Director reached under his seat and pulled out an ancient Thompson sub-machine gun. He fitted the drum magazine and leant towards the helicopter pilot.
“Garcia, try and get just in front of them, so I can lead ‘em a little.”
He turned to Tanith.
“Heh, heh. Just like Gangbusters.”
As he leaned out of the open door, trying to aim at the speeding halftrack of Oddities, Tanith removed her shoe, placed her bare foot on his Ecclesiatical rump, and shoved. The Director disappeared into the darkness. Tanith slid into the co-pilot’s seat and smiled at the gaping Garcia. She placed the headphones on her head.
“Hello? Brother Francis? Tanith. Hi. Can you patch me through to Deputy Director Carpenter? Thanks. Hi? J. Edgar? Tanith. I regret to report Director Smith as MIA over the Mojave. However, CodeName Physician is terminated. As are Commandant Kier and Camp Grenada. Oddity problem gone to ground. Guess you’re the big cheese now.”
She switched off the radio and removed the headphones. Sitting back with a sigh, she looked at the pilot.
“Let’s go home, Raoul.”
********************************
The Director let go of the machine gun and clutched empty air. He hit the ground head first, his body and limbs protruding from the sand like some malformed writhing Joshua tree. The halftrack hit him at 60 miles an hour, leaving his head buried in the sand. The torso and extremities were shredded by the rear caterpillar tracks, a hand caught between the links surreally waving farewell to the oasis.
*******************************
As moisture seeped into the material, the top hat slowly keeled over, filled with water and sank, one or two bubbles rising to the surface.
Abe and Lyle sat on their bench staring out into the Mojave desert, sipping ice cold Schlitz.
Lyle’s bottle emptied.
“More beer, woman!” he hollered.
Betsy glanced out of the gas station door.
“Can’t you old farts even get your own beer no more?” she jeered, and walked over to the cooler.
Abe almost didn’t notice the resupply. He was squinting out into the heat haze.
Betsy sipped a Coke.
“Somethin’ out there, Abe?”
“Don’t know, Betsy. We got any binoculars?”
Lyle wheezed out a chuckle.
“It’s a mirage, you old fool.”
Abe watched the black blob advancing through the shimmering heat divide and elongate.
“There is somethin’ out there,” said Betsy, an edge of tension in her voice..
The indistinct black shape continued to approach the trio.
“It’s a guy!” said Betsy, relieved.
“Walkin’ through the desert? Must be a major loon,” sneered Abe.
“Here he comes,” said Betsy.
“All dressed in black,” wondered Abe. “In this heat?”
“Stiletto shoes,” gasped Betsy.
“And a big top hat!” bellowed Lyle , finally focusing on the approaching figure.
Abe felt an irrational coldness creeping over him that wasn’t the beer.
“Looks like some kinda mortician,” he said.
“A ringmaster from the circus of Hell,” replied Betsy in an unexpected burst of erudition.
Abe saw that the figure had some kind of playing card stuck in his hat band but it was reversed so that the face of the card could not be seen. He could make out the white edging, an olive green background and a yellow and black shield.
“His eyes,” wailed Betsy. “He must be some kind of vampire!” She edged backwards.
“Walkin' around in broad daylight? What about his eyes?” grumbled Lyle.
“They’re bright red,” said Abe in wonder. He took a quick draught of beer and coughed.
“He’s got white hair,” observed Lyle. “He’s a ‘bino. Nothin’ to worry about.”
Abe wasn’t so sure. This guy didn't even seem to be sweating. Abe was.
“You still got that piece back there, Bets?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “ You proposin’ I shoot one of my customers, Abe?” The light tone was forced.
“Mean lookin’ sumbitch,” said Abe, unconsciously lowering his voice as the man neared the gas station.
Betsy retreated inside, and fluffed her hair in the mirror behind the counter. You never knew.
Abe slugged more beer as his mouth dried up.
“Howdy, stranger!” whooped Lyle. “What brings you…?”
Doctor Dementer snatched the Schlitz bottle from the elderly man, and chug-a-lugged it’s entire contents. He then smashed it over Lyle’s head, grasped the wet hair, jerked the oldster’s head back, and slashed his throat with the jagged neck.
Abe stared, releasing his grip on his own beer in shock. The Doctor kicked one of the bench legs, tearing it free. The seat tipped over, Abe falling on his dead brother. Dementer clutched the broken piece of wood, and rammed the pointed end into Abe’s chest. Abe expired without even a scream.
Betsy yelped as the door to the gas station crashed open.
“Hey, Mister, what…?”
Dementer opened and emptied the till. He saw the Saturday Night Special under the counter. He picked it up and pointed it at Betsy.
“No! You can’t! Just take the money…”
The little pistol made a noise like a cheap firecracker and puffed out blue smoke. A small, dark hole appeared to the left of Betsy’s forehead. Her eyes rolled up, then closed, as she fell surprisingly gracefully to the floor.
The Doctor replaced the gun, and snatched up a set of keys. He kicked down the door to the back entrance, and walked over to a corroded pick up truck, ‘A & L Gorch’ in faded white paint on the side. The keys fitted and she started first time.
The Doc ran her round to the front and filled up with gas. As he climbed back on to the driver’s seat, he saw the Highway Patrol vehicle ease off the blacktop. He crashed the gears and the old rustbucket took off like a spooked mustang. She bounced off the police car’s fender, smashing the metal into the tyre, then bucked onto the highway.
Patrolman Harding hit his head on the windshield and fell back dazed. The car slowly careered into a large Yucca.
The radio blared June Carter Cash. The Doc fiddled with the knobs, eventually locating a would-be subversive college radio station out of Lovelock.
The truck swerved as ‘Sunarise, come every morning…’ warbled from the speakers. The Doc was about to can the Antipodean wobble-boarder when electronic thrashing came from behind the singer. Better Alien Sex Fiend than Rolf.
Rescuing a bouncing packet of Lucky Strike from the dashboard, the Doc jammed a filter into his mouth, and pulled out the cigarette lighter. As the music swelled and the stale smoke filled his lungs, he grinned and put the pedal to the metal.
******************************
Tanith ran up the stone steps, gasping for breath. Her legs and heels hurt as she reached the landing, and tottered towards the desk. The monk looked up in surprise.
“Tanith,” he said gently.
“Brother Francis,” she nodded, gasping for breath. “I have to see the Director.”
“This is highly unusual,” replied the monk.
“Emergency, Code Name Physician,” she retorted.
The monk stabbed a button on the intercom and relayed the message. The huge wooden door opened almost immediately and Tanith hurried in.
***********************************
The Rolls Royce Silver Seraph moved almost silently through the rain swept Essex Marshes. It agilely negotiated the twists and turns of the mud-sodden country road until it reached the tiny church. The driver alighted and rang the bell. The door was opened by a short, squat little priest. Long, black hair parted in the middle framed the chubby face. A black beard obscured the weak chin. A heavily jewelled silver cross hung inverted around his neck. Three tall men climbed from the Rolls and hurried into the small building.
“Welcome, welcome,” chuntered the priest, “This way, Gentlemen.”
They walked down the central passageway. The altar was tilted onto its back, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. The priest led the men down under the earth.
*******************
Tanith walked into the spartanly furnished room and approached the huge teak desk. She knelt on the deep pile red carpet, and genuflected.
“Thank you, Tanith,” said the Director, smiling. “What’s the fuss?”
“Codename Physician has surfaced, Director. He terminated two greybeards and a woman, and injured a Highway Patrolman. He has since destroyed the town of Lovelock.”
“Destroyed a whole town?” cried the Director, incredulously.
“More or less,” faltered Tanith. “He drove an old pick up truck into a gas station, causing an explosion, and widespread property damage. He proceeded to terminate Elias Walter, proprietor of Gun Fury, specialist weapons store, and arm himself with a bewildering variety of pistols, rifles, machine guns, a flame thrower and several LAWS rockets. He stole the late Mr Walter’s Hummer and drove through the town, destroying the police station, cinema and church.”
“Enough,” barked the Director. “Where is he now?”
“He is believed to be travelling through the Mojave, in the direction of the former Nuclear Testing Grounds, now the Oddity Relocation Camps.”
“Believed to be, Tanith?”
“He has temporarily slipped beneath our radar, Sir, but…”
“But me no buts.”
The Director stood up, ran a finger round his dog collar, and kicked his waste paper basket.
“Goddam’ Motherfucking Sonofabitch!”
Tanith blinked and hoped that she hadn’t heard what she had just heard. No one would believe her.
“If I could get my hands on that red-eyed, white-haired frea…”
The Director came out of his fugue, and put his hand on Tanith’s shoulder.
“Let us pray, Tanith. Let us pray that we can apprehend this Godless no-goodnik before he can cause any more harm.”
They knelt together , the Director’s arm slipping around Tanith’s waist.
*******************************
The three men stooped to pass through the tiny aperture in the subterranean wall. They stood erect once inside the crypt. Two large stone slabs stood before them, a naked body upon each.
To their right, an obscenely obese man, rolls of fat cascading from his stomach to conceal his genitalia, hamhock legs, bulging arms, a completely bald head crowning an ugly, stern face.
To their left, a slim, attractive young girl, seemingly unblemished apart fom a shaven head.
“Copley-Syle.” It was the Chinaman who spoke. “Where were they recovered from?”
The long-haired priest stepped forward and removed a mange-tout from the obese man’s ear.
“From a loch in Scotland,” he replied, slipping the green vegetable into his mouth.
“And this one?” enquired the Haitian, the eyes of the Goat’s head atop his own watching the unholy man.
“A shack in Texas.”
The Haitian ran his hand over the girl’s belly, drawing the priest's eyes from the dark triangle with the edging of two white streaks.
“We heard she’d suffered terrible, terrible injuries.”
“She had, oh yes,” murmured the priest, “but…” he gestured, “see for yourself.”
“Are we ready?” The third man, a Native American, asked, surveying his companions.
“Yes! Oh, yes!” whooped the Canon Darren Copely-Syle. He dashed to a nearby cupboard, and removed the mewling infant.
****************************
Hester looked out of the window despite her fears. There was usually some uniformed sadist torturing an orange-uniformed oddity outside. All was quiet tonight. She sighed in relief and stared eagerly at the lightning flashes over the far hills.
“Anything?” asked Dick the midget.
“Not yet, honey,” she replied, “ but soon a real rain’s gonna come.”
A groan from inside their cell drew her away from the window. She’d lost weight again, but not in a good way. They’d shaved her head but left her beard. She must look like a distaff Ming The Merciless. The cell floor was littered with red hair and small scales.
It was hot, even in the dead of night. Claude lay on the floor trying to sleep, his warts oozing. He snuffled uneasily, as if having a bad dream. Leopold and Wade lay together on a sacking-covered pallet. They were so weak. Hester was convinced their cell was built over a nuclear waste facility. Something was slowly wasting them. Klin and Klang, the Siamese twins were unco-ordinated and listless.
“Is he comin’ Hester?”
Wade’s voice could hardly be heard.
“He ain’t comin’. He sold us out in Vegas. He don’t care no more. He just wants his little girl.”
Leopold’s bitterness seemed to have given him a bit of fight.
Hester got angry too.
“He’s comin’. He’ll not leave us no more. He knows we’re his family now, not that murderin’ bitch. He’ll be back.”
“You’re foolin’ yourself, Hester,” coughed Leopold, another clump of fur falling from his head. “We don’t exist for him.”
Hester turned back to the window, and looked forlornly out into the dark.
“Don’t let us down, Doc,” she whispered.
******************
The young woman carried the earthenware bowl of broth to her bed-ridden mother. The old woman’s hair was grey, not a trace of its former flame-red glory.
You’re a good wee girl,” she croaked. Sam spooned the orange liquid into her mother’s mouth. When the bowl was empty, she wiped her mother’s lips.
An ancient wrinkled hand emerged from the bedclothes, and clutched her wrist in a cold grip.
“Im no’ long for this particular world, Lassie. I can foresee trouble. You’re of an age now to know that your sister and her father are about to reappear. There will be violence. Your sister always was a wilful girl. You must go to her. Get her away from her father. She can be redeemed. He cannot. Seek out the Doctor. Your trust fund will provide for you. And I have some books of instruction for you to read. I’ll help all I can, Lassie.”
The old woman tapped her temple.
“It’s all in here, girl.”
****************************************
The helicopter soared across the desert sand. Tanith clutched the Director’s hand tightly and hoped she wouldn’t be sick. He was shouting furiously into the radio.
“What do you mean you can’t find him? Look! He’s in a Hummer packed with weapons. Get more choppers aloft! I don’t care about the budget! Find him!”
He tore off the headphones and glared out of the window.
********************************************
Darren Copely-Syle looked at the three piles of clothes, and then turned shakily to the two figures sitting up on their slabs.
“Master?” he gargled.
“You have done well, novice,” rumbled the obese man. “You will be rewarded.”
He gestured at the cupboard. There was the sound of breaking glass, and an array of small, stunted, hideous, damp creatures emerged from the wooden container, bearing black clothes.
Copely-Syle’s eyes nearly started from his head.
“My homunculi!” he ejaculated. “They’re…”
“Alive,” smiled the man, reaching for the first creatures offering, a pair of Satanic underpants.
More things emerged, bearing satin and leather.
Copely-Syle’s shining eyes turned to the female figure, who had adopted a coy cheesecake pose. The unfrocked priest watched in amazement as long, lustrous black locks sprouted from her bald head to flow down over her shoulders, and shroud her magnificent bustline. Thin white threads twisted through the hair, one on either side of her head. Her demurely crossed legs precluded Copley-Syle running a match downstairs.
The man indicated the vanished Haitian’s headgear, and said to a particularly revolting homunculus, “I say, dear boy, how about some goat’s head soup?”
********************************************************
PFC Butte wondered for the umpteenth time what would happen if he lit up a cigarette. Down here in the underground tunnels. Right next to America’s premier stockpile of obsolete nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons.
As per usual he decided against it, and wondered what Betsy was doing. Whiling away her time at the Godforsaken gas station, with mostly just those two old fogeys for company.
“Evening.”
“Hi.”
Wha?????
Butte struggled to unsling his rifle as the eccentric walked past.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
The white-haired, red-eyed man tipped his black top hat with the blood-stained chicken feather stuck in the band, and stepped through the doorway to the weapon store.
Butte blinked. Through the door. Which wasn’t open. Eighteen inches of steel. His rifle drooped. He stepped forward, tilting back his helmet to scratch his crew cut.
Butte felt something move inside his head and everything went black.
?************************************************************
The Director thumped Commandant Kier’s desk, almost upsetting the pint glass of vodka, ice and lemon.
“I tell you he’s coming here! You’d better be prepared!”
“So?” Kier muttered at the Director whilst simultaneously undressing at Tanith with his heavily-lidded eyes. Tanith shuddered and mentally dressed herself. How could their organisation employ such…Eurotrash?
“So, if he gets in here and releases his buddies, your ass is grass, my dear Commandant.”
Kier sipped the clear liquid, enjoying a mental battle with Tanith over her brassiere.
“Do not worry, Herr Direktor. The Special Oddities are quite safe in their concrete bunker and should be very, very contaminated by now. Even if he should get in, none of them will get out - unless we let them...”
“Why would you do that?” queried the Director, suspiciously.
“Have you never heard of the Most Dangerous Game, Herr Direktor? An Oddity hunt? With them glowing away in the desert blackness? Wunderbar.”
He drained the pint, glassy eyes crawling over and beneath Tanith’s dark business suit. She shuddered, and moved behind the Director.
“We have every conceivable means of extermination here, Herr Direktor. I know you are a man of God, but surely you would rejoice at the chance to remove a few of the Godless? Of Satan’s Rejects?”
“Kier,” said the Director, quietly and menacingly, “I think you’re beginning to lose touch with what’s real, all alone in your personal fiefdom out here. All we want is to capture this man and incarcerate him with his little elves. Then, when I’m sure that you have accomplished that , I can walk away and you can shoot them escaping or something.”
The Commandant pouted.
“Oh, you’re no fun any more, Smithy. Time was, you’d have been leading the pack.”
“Those days are over, Kier, and you know it. Are your perimeters safe? Can we leave one little loophole for Doctor Dipshit to get in?”
“Of course my perimeters are safe!” screamed the Commandant in a vodka frenzy, as all the windows of his office blew in and the earth shook.
*********************************************
Darren Copely-Syle nodded, and the two misshapen homunculi struggled to tilt the carafe of sloshing blood-red liquid. Having filled his glass, they trooped around the table.
Anton Krolok held out his mug.
“What news, my dear Canon?”
“Dementer is in Nevada.”
Krolock slammed down his flagon on a creature’s foot. It hopped in agony until a steak knife pierced its black little heart. Lorelei grinned and bit off the head.
****************************
Samantha studied the books, listened to her mother and practiced. Within hours she could levitate, within days take short trips upon the Astral. She was nervous. She was the good one, her half-sister the bad. She really didn’t want confrontation. Her mother told her it was inevitable.
***************************************************
“It’s happening!” cheered Hester, watching the night sky light up with orange fireballs. “He’s hittin’ the whole damn’ site. Better get ready!”
A rejuvenated Claude, lifted Dick up to one mighty shoulder, then the poorly Wade was draped gently upon the other. Klin and Klang tied Leopold to the monster’s back with ripped bed sheets.
Hester watched in delight as Kier’s uniforms ran around like headless chickens. The Oddities were overcoming them, strangling them with chains, seizing their weapons, the torturers were being tortured in a hellish blood red glow.
The cell floor erupted as a whirring silver screw pulsated through it. It withdrew and a top hat poked through the floor.
“Going underground!” hollered the Doc. “C’mon, you sad sacks. Let’s git while the gittin’s good.”
The Oddities clustered around the escape tunnel, and began the leap into darkness.
***********
“Hey, Pops? We gonna face down the Doc and his guys? With guns? Huh?”
“Lorelei, my dear darling daughter, I sometimes wonder if you aren’t actually related to that quack. You know that a gun obsession is an obsession with the male reproductive organ? I thought you’d exorcised that particular beast in Las Vegas.”
Lorelei shuddered with pleasure.
“What a gas! Can we?”
“No, child. This time it’s magic. It’s time you started thinking beyond your guns.”
Krolok stood up.
“Come, my dear. Time to depart.”
Copeley-Syle looked up, startled. He raised a tremulous hand.
“Hello? Can I come too? I did…”
Krolok contemptuously clicked his fingers. The homunculi fell upon the canon, tearing, biting, ripping.
The quivering bloody mass collapsed to the floor. The screams stopped as the tongue and vocal chords were torn away, the disgusting creatures feeding noisily.
“Not the Astral?” moaned Lorelei.
“The Astral,” confirmed Krolok.
***************************************
Doctor Dementer hummed The Count Bishops’ I Take What I Want as the little electric buggy eased it’s way around the death superstore. He pocketed various test tubes and petri dishes in the Chemical Warfare section.
The Oddities were perplexed. As they had descended through the Doc’s hastily excavated tunnel into the underground storage silos, they noticed the faint yellow glow surrounding them. Hester pulled at her beard anxiously and clumps came off in her hand.
When the Doc returned from his shopping expedition, they voiced their fears. With waves of his hand, he pronounced them cured. Leopold launched into a diatribe about traitors, turncoats, and how long would it take him to desert them again for his offspring. The Doc’s good humour evaporated.
“She’s Krolok’s girl. And she’s coming for us. With her daddy. We’ve got to be prepared.”
“Eat shit,” muttered Leopold.
Wade, head still bandaged from the terrible mutilations of Las Vegas, lay wheezing in the trailer of the buggy. He waved feebly at Dementer. The Doc drew close and listened.
“Doc, gimme my glow back. I can’t take no more. Lay me on one of those,” he indicated a small nuclear warhead, “and I’ll take care of Kier and his boys. Maybe even Smithy. Leave you free to deal with Krolock. And her. I’ll see you in the next world.”
The Doc patted his shoulder.
“Whatever you say, Wade. Noble sacrifice.”
***********************************************
The helicopter buzzed them as they fled across the Mojave in a half-track. The Director radioed Kier, astride a magnificent white Arab charger, as he led the remnants of his battered, tatty army across the sand, swigging from a bottle of Stolichnaya.
“What’s that glow?” queried the Director. Tanith squinted through her binoculars.
“It’s the little Alligator Boy!”
“Hah! He’s one of the Specials. Kier! Get your ass over here.”
Tanith strained to make out Wade’s peculiarly phallic companion. She realised.
“Director?”
“Come on, Kier. Move yourself! The others are getting away.”
“Director?”
“Hush now, Tanith. This is men’s work.”
“SMITHY! You patronising sexist bastard! Get us out of here. He’s lying on part of a tactical nuclear missile.”
The Director grabbed the binoculars, half-strangling his assistant.
“Shit! You’re right! Go, Garcia! Go!”
The pilot rammed the stick forward.
Kier’s steed flew towards the faint glow, then reared neighing above the prostrate Oddity.
“Hah! ‘Gator Boy! Meet your death!” shrieked Kier, leaping from the saddle.
“Meet yours, Asshole. Fuck you,” said Wade, smiling. “And the horse you rode in on.”
He thumbed a red button. A silly farting noise came from under him.
“Shit,” said Wade.
“Die!” bellowed Kier, thrusting his sabre forward. He and his horse were instantly vapourised.
The helicopter jounced in the air. Tanith and the Director prayed. Garcia swore as he fought the controls.
The occupants of the half-track looked back in anger at the mushroom cloud.
“I’ll miss him,” said Hester, her voice breaking.
“He died so that we might live,” said the Doc.
“You lying shit,” groaned Leopold.
*****
Samantha appeared before her mother in a simple, white, ankle-length cotton shift. She leaned over and pecked the old woman on the cheek.
“Have you got your bag, hen?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Godspeed.”
Samantha picked up the bag and held her arms aloft. Smiling at her mother, she was enveloped in sparkling white light, and gracefully rose, passing through the bedroom ceiling.
Morag closed her eyes, lay back and exhaled her last exhalation.
Sam saw the castle recede. Soon she was flying through the Astral at tremendous speeds, still managing to focus on the worlds that lay below. Starting simply, with fluffy white clouds, puppies and kittens, she soon began to enjoy the trip. New born babies, sunlight, wine lakes. Surrounded by chuckling faeries performing stunning aerobatics she looked down as the light from her rained over a Punch and Judy show, a sad clown cleaning his glasses, a chef emerging from a huge overcoat clutching sauteed Sugaraspa, a newspaper editor tearing off his clothes and running naked through woods, hugging moss-covered trees and marvelling at his developing nether regions as fur grew upon his legs. As she glided above Alternative Thailand, a huge drowsy-eyed Caucasian man looked up smiling, his index finger touching his headband in salute. The cobra he should have been concentrating upon saw its chance, and struck at its rival between his thighs.
“Aieeeee!”
Sam’s elation faded as she flew out over a dark desert.
*************************************
Krolok and Lorelei finished sucking on Copely-Syle’s bones. He took her hand.
“Come,child.”
They extended their arms and were encased in shimmering dark light. They flew over war, famine, pestilence, death, overdue library books, football hooliganism. graffiti, vandalism, terrorism. Krolok sang What A Wonderful World, and laughed. Lorelei felt an unexpected tension, and gritted her teeth as they reached the desert.
*************************************************
The Doc brought the halftrack to a halt beside the rippling pool.
“It’s an oasis,” gasped Hester.
“It’s where he’ll abandon us,” moped Leopold.
“Hush,” responded the bearded lady. “What’s that?”
Two figures stood beside the pool.
“It’s them,” groaned Hester.
There was a splash and a shriek. A beautiful blonde girl emerged from the water, her white, now see-through garments clinging to her body.
“This is more like it,” enthused Leopold.
The girl placed her white plastic bag inscribed with five mystic blue bars and five runic red letters upon the sand. She reached inside with both hands and withdrew two large cucumbers.
“No!” Krolok blenched.
“What’s up, Pop? It’s just a coupla tallywhacker shaped vegetables.”
Samantha held one green length upright between her breasts, and held the other crossways, about a third of the way down the first. She closed her eyes and sang a high-pitched note of purest faery-song.
Krolok screamed. He seemed paralysed. Each cucumber released a small ring, which floated across to Krolok and covered his eyes. He vomited diced carrots.
The Doc smiled and, reaching beneath the halftrack’s dashboard, retrieved a bag that matched Samantha’s.
“Doc, what do those runic red letters stand for?” asked Hester.
“Tetragrammaton, Eschaton, Satanae, Conflux, Occultum,” replied Dementer.
He jumped from the vehicle, and produced a huge sweetcorn from his bag. The small yellow particles detached themselves, and floated through the air to attach themselves to Krolok’s exposed skin. His screaming intensified, and Lorelei released his hand, staggering backwards.
Samantha, still singing, produced an apple, that floated into Krolok’s mouth, subduing the screams. A tomato appeared from her bag, and landed upon the black sorceror’s nose.
Dementer’s bag gave up a massive aubergine. It floated slowly behind Krolok, turned, appeared to aim between his buttocks, then sped forward at an amazing speed.
“MMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!”
“Pop!”
Lorelei wept as her father crumbled from inside. Soon he was just loose skin, drifting across the desert.
“No!” Lorelei turned to her adversaries.
Samantha stepped forward proferring a cucumber. An internal battle seemed to rage within Lorelei. A hand moved forward reluctantly and seized the vegetable. Sam offered the other cucmber. Again, despite struggling, Lorelei grasped the green protuberance. The girls screamed. And merged. Two shrivelled gherkins fell to the desert floor.
Lorelei looked down at herself in awe. Her black leather garb was white. She blinked and looked at the Oddities and Doc.
“I feel good,” she said in surprise. Then added “Like I knew that I would.”
The Doc stepped forward, hand reaching for her.
“Here he goes,” grumbled Leopold, reaching for a .357 Magnum. “Doing his Darth Vader act.”
Lorelei raised her arms and levitated. The shimmering white light cascaded around her.
“See youse!” she called joyously, “I’m off to Faery Land!” She disappeared..
Doctor Dementer stumbled forward. Leopold pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him in the centre of his back, bursting through the frilled white shirt. He took one pace forward and fell to his knees. Leopold’s second shot bloodied the white hair, and removed his forehead. The jolt knocked off the top hat, which rolled on the sand. A desert breeze lifted it, and sailed it out over the pool. It came to rest floating upon the surface.
It was as if all of the test-tubes and Petri dishes the Doc had lifted from below the earth had shattered. Horrific boils grew and burst upon his skin. His clothes rotted then his skin, muscle, bones, internal organs, all turning to a putrescent mush which sank into the desert sand with dizzying rapidity.
Hester snatched the Magnum from Leopold’s paw, and placed the still warm barrel against his temple. He closed his eyes and said “Do it.”
She thumbed the hammer down, clicked on the safety catch and placed the pistol on the floor of the halftrack. Seizing Leopold’s sackcloth jacket, she flung him onto the sand, then sat in the driver’s seat and started up the vehicle.
“Kill me!” screamed Leopold. “Just kill me! Don’t leave me here!”
The halftrack roared away in a cloud of dust.
*********************************************
The Director reached under his seat and pulled out an ancient Thompson sub-machine gun. He fitted the drum magazine and leant towards the helicopter pilot.
“Garcia, try and get just in front of them, so I can lead ‘em a little.”
He turned to Tanith.
“Heh, heh. Just like Gangbusters.”
As he leaned out of the open door, trying to aim at the speeding halftrack of Oddities, Tanith removed her shoe, placed her bare foot on his Ecclesiatical rump, and shoved. The Director disappeared into the darkness. Tanith slid into the co-pilot’s seat and smiled at the gaping Garcia. She placed the headphones on her head.
“Hello? Brother Francis? Tanith. Hi. Can you patch me through to Deputy Director Carpenter? Thanks. Hi? J. Edgar? Tanith. I regret to report Director Smith as MIA over the Mojave. However, CodeName Physician is terminated. As are Commandant Kier and Camp Grenada. Oddity problem gone to ground. Guess you’re the big cheese now.”
She switched off the radio and removed the headphones. Sitting back with a sigh, she looked at the pilot.
“Let’s go home, Raoul.”
********************************
The Director let go of the machine gun and clutched empty air. He hit the ground head first, his body and limbs protruding from the sand like some malformed writhing Joshua tree. The halftrack hit him at 60 miles an hour, leaving his head buried in the sand. The torso and extremities were shredded by the rear caterpillar tracks, a hand caught between the links surreally waving farewell to the oasis.
*******************************
As moisture seeped into the material, the top hat slowly keeled over, filled with water and sank, one or two bubbles rising to the surface.
Friday, 6 February 2015
Lorelei And The Wholly Weird Day
All credit to Franklin and Sam for these characters, and apologies if due for any liberties taken. This started life as a silly conversation with Sam, so it's for her
LORELEI AND THE WHOLLY WEIRD DAY
By Paul Newman
TAWNY sunlight sliced through the blinds, transforming the cheap motel room into a Cubist tiger skin and throwing the lazily shifting pall of stale cigarette smoke into precise strata of fire and shadow.
Shifting restless in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, Lorelei felt its heat on her skin and dragged herself the final few inches towards consciousness. A greasy tickling of perspiration snaked into the hollow of her throat and pooled there as she luxuriated in the last lint-flecked dregs of sleep, willing away the soft snoring of her companions. She heard a mattress creak to her right as a sleeper shifted; from somewhere close by curled the drowsy insistence of a slide guitar, its tremulous, serpentine notes shivering with the promise of a melody only to slip into elusive fading echoes.
The muted whir of cicadas hung on air that already felt stifling. Outside, a flimsy wooden screen door was slammed half-heartedly into its frame by the breeze. Time to rise and shine on, if they were to catch the day and do anything useful with it. Lorelei opened her eyes and looked down to the foot of the bed.
“What the…” she croaked through an arid Marlboro mouth.
She wasn’t blind but still couldn’t see. At least not past the monumental cleavage and improbably cantilevered breasts looking her right in the eye, dominating her line of sight and heaving into a sizeable proportion of her peripheral vision. Just how hammered had she got last night? She shook her head with an effort, a white-streaked curtain of sable hair sticking mussed to her shoulders and across her face as she levered her elbows beneath her shoulders and forced herself into a sitting position. The breasts rose with her, maintaining their perfect frontal assault on the world and proudly telling Newton just where he could shove his apple. The guitar shimmered on quietly like a mournful redneck’s lullaby.
Looking around the surreal, sticky haze of the room, she took in the bed beside her own and the drowsing Gordian Knot of pale limbs, smooth fur, tousled blonde hair and hooves that might unravel into Valerie and Goat Boy. Across from her, The Chef was slumped upright in a tatty Naugahyde armchair, chin sunk on his chest and emitting low rumbling snores; funny, she’d never noticed before just how much he looked like Robert De Niro, at least when he wasn’t displaying the wicked nest of shark teeth that passed for his mouth.
There was a side table beneath the window, pock-marked worse than any burger-flipping teenager’s face with the scars of a hundred cigarette burns, and squatting atop it was a Bakelite radio, spilling out the raw, muted guitar loops. She could hear the scrape of the player’s calloused fingertips as they shifted up the strings, something about the music so familiar it tantalised, hovered clear in her memory, its identity the shifting reflections on the oily skin of a soap bubble that popped every time she grasped at it. Her gaze followed the cord trailing from the back of the antique set to where it ended on the floor in a small two-pin plug sat in a nest of dust bunnies. The only other object on the table was a plastic display holder for tourist brochures touting the arid, masochistic thrills of a pleasure jaunt to Death Valley.
Death Valley? Death Valley-in-fucking-California Death Valley? Oh, crap. This is not good. And this is definitely not Scotland. Which it most definitely should be.
Lorelei glanced from the leaflets back to the radio, up to the window and down to her unfamiliar and most likely back-breaking pneumaticism, barely encased in a sleeve of tight black leather which merged seamlessly into sprayed-on black jeans and chunky motorcycle boots. She coughed once and announced to the room in voice that fluttered hot against the lightbulb of panic: “People, wake up. Wake up, damn it! We’ve got a problem, a big problem.”
Two big problems, actually, she muttered to herself. The Chef was awake instantly, rising from the chair with a fluid grace belying his size and fetching up with him the battered, leather-finished presentation case in which he kept his beloved knives.
“Lore’, what’s up? What’s the…?”
He stopped and stared at her, jaw vaguely working around an invisible wad of gum, eyes transfixed.
“Darlin’, I’ve got a sneaking feeling these are least of our troubles.”
A silvery squeal of surprise interrupted her and she looked sharply across to the next bed. Valerie was gazing down at own amplified endowments in disbelief as they strained dangerously at the gauzy, semi-transparent material she was almost wearing, even as her fingers explored the ludicrously accentuated tips of the ears rising pointedly through the flaxen cascade of her hair. Her ears. Small rainbow-flecked wings twitched at her shoulder-blades.
“Who dares?”
The music of her voice was retuned to vicious high-C glass shards.
“Who dares use their art to turn me into this… into this…”, words failed her for a moment , “ this fucking porn elf?”
Still brushing the dust of sleep from his eyes, Goat Boy rolled back from her and blinked stupefied as his vision came into focus. Or tried to. He leaned a little further away to improve his aim.
“Oh, my…”
A lascivious grin blossomed on his lips as his right hand meandered south along a well-travelled route, down through the fine hairs of his chest and stomach to between his legs. He froze and his grin fell to the floor in pieces. Clawing at himself in frantic disbelief, he toppled from the bed to the horrific chocolate and orange whorls of an industrial-grade carpet, tottering to his hooves and letting loose a bleat of pure anguish. Where he’d expected to find his oldest and firmest companion was now only the smooth, sexless sheen of a pair of black Lycra shorts. His desperate fingers scrabbled without success to find purchase at the waist, then at where his legs emerged from the ridiculous garment. He gave a sob of barely contained panic as he let his hands fall, clasping them over his crotch to conceal his shame.
“I hate cyclists.”
Lorelei looked steadily at her companions, down at herself, as four pairs of eyes locked in shocked incredulity. Lewd of the Rings. A eunuch Mr Tumnus. Robert De Niro. And the Bride of FrankenHeffner.
Somebody was going to pay for this, and not in small change.
“Who?” demanded Valerie, rising from the bed with murder gleaming white-hot in her eyes.
“Where?” choked Goat Boy, fingers seeking substance in a vacancy.
“Why?” thought Lorelei.
Something was wrong with time; the air felt oppressively thick, thoughts crawled around her mind with the alacrity of vacationing slugs in a treacle Jacuzzi. The Chef cocked his head a moment, detected the low crackle of tyres rolling on gravel and was at the door in a heartbeat, neck craning around the window frame as he scanned the outside world.
“This’ll have to wait. Lore’, we’ve got company.”
“Company?”
“Cops.”
“Cops? How many?”
He turned from the window and looked at her nervously. “All of ‘em.”
Lorelei and Valerie moved swiftly to his side, ducking low to peer out between the lower blinds and squinting into the glare of the sun rising in the south. From behind them came the crack of hoof on wood, succeeded immediately by a sharp hiss and a stream of uncreative if heartfelt swearing from Goat Boy, but they were too transfixed by the view to turn around.
An arc of vehicles swept across their entire field of vision, cruisers with their reds and blues revolving, doors thrown wide to provide cover for scores of men in khaki uniforms, mirrored shades and ‘70s-style horseshoe ‘taches . Every one of them had a weapon in his hands and all were trained unwaveringly on the window.
More muffled cursing and grunts from Goat Boy, accompanied by a low scuffing sound as of something heavy being dragged across cheap carpet.
“Hey…” he began.
“Not now, son, not now.”
The Chef might have sounded casual if not for the tremor in his voice.
“Lore’, got any ideas?”
“You mean apart from observing that the sun’s in the wrong place today? Not a one.”
“Where the hell is this? Are we still in the Astral?”
Lorelei closed her eyes and sniffed deeply.
“No, we’re not. But I’m not picking up the stink of the Real, either. This is someplace far weirder and more dangerous by far. I think this is California.”
“Aw, crap.”
“Crap is right.”
“Still no ideas?”
“Yeah, one ...” She apparated a lit cigarette and drew hungrily on it. “Smoke if you got ‘em.”
“Hey, seriously ...” Goat Boy tried again.
Valerie kept her eyes on the black-unformed ATF goons scuttling about and taking up defensive postures behind the phalanx of cops, hut-hut-hutting to and fro in small units and giving each other leg-ups onto the assorted outbuildings.
“What is it, my beloved creature?”
“I really think you need to take a look at this.”
The three turned from the window to find Goat Boy crouched low. Before him was a cheap pine coffin with brass fittings, and with one hand he held open the hinged lid which concealed its contents from them. He looked up at them and for a moment the pain of his loss was gone from his face and he was lit up like Old Scratch on All Hallows.
“I was just wondering ...” He threw open the lid fully, “... who all these guns belong to?”
The casket was a bristling arsenal of high-powered, gleaming death, oiled and ready to rock ‘n’ roll; a jumble of AK-47s, magnums, an Uzi or 10, the blunt nose of a sawn-off shotgun, a couple of pump-actions, bandoliers of ammunition shining in their dull brass clips. And, front and centre, cradled lovingly in the lethal arms of its kin, a fuck-off M60 that looked just about right for carjacking a tank.
Lorelei apparated a bottle of Jack, took a hard pull on it and handed it across to The Chef.
“Okay, not what I was expecting, but I’ll drink to that.”
The Chef flipped the bottle over to Goat Boy, who deftly caught it in one hand, gulped down a quarter of the contents and tossed it back before delving into the coffin.
A bullhorn quacked, clicked sharply and squawked again.
“You inside the cabin. Open the door slowly and throw out your weapons. Exit one at time. Hands laced behind your heads.Do it now and nobody dies.”
The four friends looked at one another, gave a collective shrug and dived into the coffin. The Chef lost his knives somewhere within his improbably accommodating overcoat and took both pump-actions, holding them by the slides and jacking shells with a single savage flick of his wrists. Valerie snagged a pair of Uzis, slung one over each shoulder and bent to hook a couple more. Lorelei was strapping a holster tight around her waist, tying it off just above her knee and slipping a gleaming .44 Magnum snugly home before reaching for an AK-47.
“God damn,” muttered The Chef, “doesn’t this tin-pot station play anything but Ry Cooder?”
Goat Boy just stood there looking glassy-eyed and lost, somewhere between a kid set loose in Hamleys at Christmas and a dog being shown a card trick. Valerie moved to his side, her palm and fingertips caressing the Action Man simplicity of his crotch.
“Who did this to us will pay, darling creature, but none more so than the one who in taking from you took from us both. Until that time …”
She bent and with no effort at all lugged up the M60.
“… this should help you deal with any separation anxiety. You know, size is important.”
Her lover hefted his weapon, approved of its weight and authority. Adjusting the strap over his left shoulder and holding the monstrous gun close on his hip, he looked at his companions and grinned.
“Check-out time.”
The four stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the window and the khaki army beyond. The first lachrymose chords of the theme from Paris, Texas shimmered from the radio and Lorelei scowled in annoyance, drew the hand cannon from her hip, dropped into a professional shooter’s spread-legged stance and fired. The roar was deafening as scraps of Bakelite, wood and transistor showered down around them.
She looked around a little guiltily.
“Sorry, but that was really starting to piss me off. Besides, nothing quite like starting the working day with a quick shot of Ry.”
The bullhorn was quacking against outside, joined by a commotion of shouts and orders.
“This is getting old,” she decided. “Time to go.”
The first eruption of gunfire turned the front of the motel into a colander, the four of them spewing out a Biblical curse of lead onto the heads of the cowering cops behind their car doors or, caught short in the open, simply curled up foetally in the dust. To Lorelei’s right, The Chef worked with the steady application of a gravedigger. At her left, Valerie emitted a shrill ululation of battle frenzy as the Uzis burped and stuttered bright fire in her hands. Beside her, Goat Boy was too busy studying his faery queen’s breasts jiggling magnificently to the rhythm of her gunfire to be looking where he was shooting, but it hardly mattered; the M60 laid down a criss-crossing trail of carnage the like of which might impress Kalashnikov himself, punching gouts of dirt from the ground and stitching ragged lines of fist-sized holes in the wall of vehicles and the men crouching behind them. The noise was incredible. Over to their right, a gas tank caught with a dull crump and sent up a roiling, greasy fireball. The exploding vehicle detonated its neighbours, the force lifting them from the ground, and on and on in a devastating chain reaction.
Their weapons showed no signs of running out of ammunition but by unspoken assent they reined in their deadly fire and stood panting in the acrid cordite.
It was a total rout.
Through the shattered wall and mashed blinds, the desert before their cabin was a landscape of twisted, burning wreckage and bleeding bodies. The soundtrack was all screams and cries for help.
“Screw me sideways, Lore’,” breathed The Chef in awe, smoke rising from his cuffs to merge with that wafting from the hot barrels of both guns.
She nodded, then flicked a glance over her shoulder.
“Better see if we’ve got a rear exit we can use. It won’t be long before what’s left of those bozos pulls together.
“I’m on it.”
His teeth sparkled like a fistful of steak knives and he was off to the rear of the room, stretching on tip-toe to peek through the single strip window high up in the wall.
Outside, they were beginning to hut-hut-hut again, the sound of the survivors getting organised drowned by a heavy clattering as four Bradley tanks rumbled into view behind the carnage, each sheltering long lines of very cautious and very heavily armed ATF troops. Even from this distance, Lorelei, Valerie and Goat Boy could read the malice glittering in their eyes, the grim set of their facial hair. The trio shared a look and readied their weapons for the onslaught.
“Excuse me?” said The Chef from behind them. “Did anybody order a werewolf in a hot pink Cadillac convertible playing death metal?”
They wheeled about in time to see him dive away from the wall, ricochet off the bed and land in an ungainly heap at their feet. For an instant there was the approaching roar of an engine and the rear wall disintegrated as a classic car slammed through it and slewed to a halt in a tangle of cheap furniture and dust.
“Trevor!” Goat Boy bounded across the wreckage. “Oh, man, talk about good timing.”
“Long time no see, you son of a bovid.”
The driver’s bloodshot lilac eyes twinkled from under the curtain of creamy white hair which covered every inch of his body. He was naked but for a pair of cut-off denim shorts, one furry paw on the wheel and the other resting casually on the door as he took a long, slow hit off a joint only slightly less impressive than John Holmes’ appendage.
Lorelei stepped up beside Goat Boy, nodded in greeting to the new arrival.
“You know him?”
“Know him? Know him? Shit, we were practically brothers from other mothers once upon a time. This is Trevor The Amazing Dog Boy .. the Trevor The Amazing Dog Boy. We were, what, five years together on the road with Professor Lynch’s Cavalcade Of Mutants And Inhuman Curiosities, back when the northern club circuit was still a going concern.”
“So what brings you here?”
Lorelei was still jittery from the shooting, antennae crackling on high alert. She had to shout to be heard above the frenzied metal pouring from the car’s speakers.
“I’m a little curious about that myself, Miss.”
The dope made him slur a little but his impeccable BBC English survived well enough.
“One minute I’m rattling down the M11 in my old rusting shit-box death-trap to catch Hawkwind in Brixton tonight, there’s a weird flash as I go over a pothole or something and, voila, I’m here, in this retro wet dream on wheels, it’s daytime and I’m barrelling into some shitty motel. This shitty motel here, as a matter of fact. Where is here, by the way?”
“California. Maybe.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Quite. And from the sound of that small army outside, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.”
“You need a ride?”
Lorelei smiled at him for the first time, apparated a smoke and reached over to trade it for his joint.
“Trevor, I thought you’d never ask.”
Lugging their small arsenal with them, the four piled in to the Caddy, Lorelei up front and the others in the back seat.
“Can you do anything about that bloody noise?”
Trevor fiddled with the stereo a moment, frowned and punched it in. Slayer’s No Remorse continued to erupt from the speakers like a blender full of nails.
“Sorry, sweetheart, looks like we’re stuck with it.”
“Never mind. Least it’s good for one thing ”
“Yes?”
“Getaway music.”
Trevor grinned werewolfishly.
“Right you are.”
In a howl of roaring mechanics and bellowing metal, the Caddy fishtailed for purchase and smashed through the shattered remains of the front wall, heading straight for the line of burning cruisers before Trevor wrestled the wheel into submission, spun about and headed for the single highway running to the sun.
A stutter of bullets began, some spanging into the car and most simply kicking up dirt fore and aft.
“Those idiots are lousy shots ....” Goat Boy swivelled around, hoisted the M60 onto the rear of the seat and started to fire back, “… but we’re not.” He laughed aloud, then looked puzzled.”Oddly.”
As the hot pink Cadillac screamed down the highway in a blur of bullets and basslines, several cruisers and a couple of Humvees peeled out of the motel forecourt in pursuit, their wailing sirens adding marginally to the toxic noise pollution. Valerie joined Goat Boy in firing back and in a minute there was only burning wreckage in the rear-view mirror.
A few minutes further on, The Chef spotted a dirt track branching off to the west.
“Lore’…?”
“I see it. Trevor, hang a right and kill the speed so they won’t have any dust to follow.”
His pelt rippling in the wind, teeth bared with the thrill of the chase, Trevor spun the wheel around with one hand and the next moment they were jolting and bouncing along track. A mile, two miles later, and the terrain began to crowd in on the car, boulders joining up until they were creeping through a ravine of sheer rock walls and deepening shadows.
Goat Boy bleated a little from down in his chest.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Valerie moved tighter to him, her head on his shoulder as her hand stayed protectively between his legs. The tip of one elfin ear tickled his cheek but he was too smart to say anything about it.
“He’s right,” said The Chef. “In a day of some fucked-up weird shit, this does not bode well. Has anybody else noticed the sun’s already going down?”
The Caddy coughed and lurched. Trevor peered at the antique dials on the dashboard.
“Speaking about not boding well, I estimate we’re going to run out of petrol about…”
A final rattle, a shiver of metal and the car died.
“… now.”
Even the squalling from the radio faded into silence until there was nothing but the random pinging of the cooling engine and a soft whirr of crickets in the scrub.
“So I guess we have to walk our way out of here.”
Lorelei opened the door and swung her legs out, staggering a little as she stood from the unfamiliar additional weight upstairs.
“I swear, when I find who’s responsible for this, I’m going to feed them their…”
“Lore’! Shh!”
The Chef was already out of the car, crouching to the ground with the palm of one hand spread flat in the dirt.
“We’ve got company.”
She spun and looked back down the way they’d come. No headlights. No nothing.
“Where? How many?”
“Where? Baby girl, I’m not even sure ‘what?’.”
Trevor vaulted out of the driver’s seat and landed gracefully on all fours. He sniffed the wind.
“Search me. Something old, smells like. Ancient. Evil.”
“Great,” sighed Goat Boy. “So now your mum’s after us?”
Trevor growled at him. “No, worse than that. Much worse.”
The dog boy took point, followed by Lorelei, Valerie and Goat Boy with The Chef bringing up the rear, and they trudged into the gloom of the canyon.
After a few hundred yards, the towering rock walls to either side of them began to fall away and they emerged into a wide valley. As far as the eye could see, it was densely planted with maize, the waxy green leaves rustling secretively as they caught and turned bloody rays from the setting sun. The far reaches of the valley were already in shadow and a thin mist wreathed the corn.
“I’m not liking this one little bit, Lore’.”
The Chef’s face creased in a creepy, mirthless grin, teeth and eyes shining bright.
“Me neither, but I can’t see any way around it. Single file, as we were, but first…”
The air in her palm shimmered into a bottle.
“… a little something to lubricate balls of steel, yes?”
The bottle did the rounds, miraculously surviving the damage inflicted by Trevor, until it ended back with Lorelei. She clasped it around the neck and raised it in toast to her comrades; in the brief moment she held the bottle steady before her eyes she felt a curious tremor in the ground. A perfect circle of ripples raced over the surface of the last inch of whisky. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, opened them again and stared into the bottle. There it was again, racing in and then back on itself in circles, and this time the motion in the ground was unmistakable. Trevor whined and Lorelei had the strongest urge to reach out and ruffle the pelt behind his ears. Whump! A third time, and now the tremor was strong enough that everyone felt it.
“Earthquake?”
Goat Boy hefted the M60 and backed protectively to Valerie.
“I don’t think so, lover.”
Trevor was sniffing the air at all points of the compass and when he was facing back the way they’d come, his stance locked rigid. He raised his head, wet black nose hungrily drawing in the evening air. And then he was off, bolting through the cornfield. They barely caught his shout as he went, but the message was self-evident.
“Run with me if you want to live! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnn!”
And they were hard at his heels, haring blindly through the corn when the first bowel-melting bellow made the stalks around them tremble; a second followed, somewhere above, beneath and everywhere in between the range of human hearing. As the ground began to shake from some colossal impact, Valerie risked a glance over her shoulder. Her eyes widened and she turned back, doubling her speed and driving a startled Goat Boy before her.
Impressively big, impossibly savage and improbably there, the Tyrannosaurus Rex burst from the canyon and thundered towards its prey as they fled through the corn. Teeth like ivory Ghurkha knives, ropes of viscous saliva whipping from its jaws, it carried a reptilian stench of rotting swamp matter and carrion combined; its howl was ear-splitting and, as it trampled into the corn, it lowered its great head in preparation for the kill. Lorelei risked a glance over her shoulder and stopped dead. In the pathway flattened by their passage, The Chef stood alone, facing the creature impassively as it tore towards him. The shotguns were at his feet.
“Chef! No!”
He didn’t turn to her, but she sensed as much as saw his shoulders stiffen for an instant. Then he shucked his coat and straightened to his full height, a wicked blade in each hand.
The prehistoric horror was almost on him, mouth gaping with death and pestilence. In the last instant, The Chef launched himself upwards and directly at the behemoth. Lorelei heard him cry “Bon appetite, fucker!” And then he was gone.
“Nooooooooooooo!”
The T-Rex threw back its head and worked its gullet. Another fog-horn blaring of primal power and it lurched forward, head scanning for movement. It clocked her stumbling backwards and started in her direction, its howl almost gleeful. One gigantic pace, another and the third brought it towering over her. Jaws gaping wickedly, it loomed down at her… and then stopped abruptly. It made as if to roar once more, but only a thick coughing came out. A fine spray of blood misted onto Lorelei’s face. The creature stumbled to one side, spluttering and growling as it tried to bite into its own stomach, pointless little upper arms flailing uselessly. It went to roar again, but this time emitted an appalling shriek. Thrashing its head around, the dinosaur lunged clumsily at Lorelei, missed by a yard and thumped into the dirt. She backed away from its whipping tail, snapping jaws, leaving it to flatten itself a clearing in the maize. Its breathing came harsh and laboured now, and with each exhalation it blew out a river of blood and shredded tissue.
Lorelei felt a hand on her shoulder, realised the others had made their way back. Stunned, they kept at a safe distance and watched as the beast shivered uncontrollably in a final spasm, released a thin groan and died.
Goat Boy squeezed Lorelei’s shoulder a little tighter.
“It got The Chef, huh? Damn, I’m sorry about that I’m going to miss his canapes.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”
“Wha….?”
Lorelei nodded towards the T-Rex’s hips, where there was still a slight motion between its legs. A single shark fin of silver broke through the surface of the skin, tracing a bloody swathe towards the tail as more of it emerged. The blade vanished from sight, reappearing with its twin in tow, and the pair danced a graceful waltz until the flesh of the creature was reduced to ribbons and soup. As if taking a bow, the blades leapt up to salute, each gripped in a bloody fist. Keeping the dull top edges of the knives towards him, The Chef used them as pitons to heave himself from the belly of the beast. Slithering down the last few yards, he gained his feet and weaved slightly as he sloughed great gouts of gore and clots of pulverised organ.
“How do like your steaks?”
Words were not enough and his friends crowded around in a tight embrace of relief and gratitude, for their lives, for his. He assured them he was fine, no, really, and went to retrieve his box while the companions flicked away what they could of the dinosaur’s innards he’d left adhered to them.
Trevor sniffed at the cooling body, looked to the far end of the valley.
“Much as I don’t want to be the one to break this up, particularly as it’d be a real pleasure to claim a T-bone and a set of luggage from this…,” he kicked idly at the T-Rex’s snout, “… I can’t help but think it’d be a good idea to get moving. How many more of these things might there be out here?”
Weary but smart, they nodded ascent and moved on. Shortly, the corn thinned and they were tramping through soft ochre sand still warm with the sun. Lorelei had heard of sunsets that seemed to go on forever, had even sat through a few of them herself in a previous life, but this was the first she’d encountered that really looked as if it might. She was about to propose a break, regardless of the danger, when it reared its ugly head again.
Or, rather, heads.
There were about a dozen of them, smaller kin to the monster through which The Chef had just tunnelled and about a hundred yards out, circling them warily. The party noticed them at the same time and pulled into a tight knot, facing out and weapons readied
Communicating with loud nasal honks, the mutant velociraptors slowly drew their trap tighter. They were about five feet tall, maws of needle teeth and vicious-looking toe hooks. Fifty yards. Thirty. Twenty. The pack became more agitated the closer it got, adding low snarls to the strange honks and keening whines.
The fine line of tension was stretched to breaking point when Goat Boy inadvertently snipped it.
“Why’s that one wearing a watch?”
The creatures paused, milling about in confusion. Goat Boy stood now, the muzzle of his gun dropping towards the sand.
“You! No, not you…you!”
He pointed a finger at the culprit. The creature seemed to cringe as its companions drew back from it with an air of embarrassment. Trevor brushed the hair out of his eyes, sniffed deeply and howled with laughter.
“Eddie Lizard! I heard you were dead.”
The velociraptor hung its head sheepishly, tried to angle its body to conceal the cheap digital watch it wore on its left wrist.
“Oi! Get over here, now.”
There was a bite to Trevor’s bark that brooked no argument. He looked around at the others.
“And you lot can just fuck off. Sharpish!”
Not quite knowing where to look, the velociraptors kicked up the sand, seemed to remember pressing engagements and slunk away. Satisfied, Trevor rounded on the cringing creature before him.
“Okay you, what’s your story? And make it a good one. With a happy ending.”
Lorelei shot an inquiring look at Trevor, who shrugged and nodded in Eddie’s direction.
“I ran into him a few times, years ago when I was doing the summer season in Yarmouth; he was one of the meet-and-greeters at some themed burger joint …what the hell was it?...ah, Arizona Smith’s Restaurant Of Doom.”
“Classy.”
“You’re not wrong, but I’ll bet it was the only place in the country that served seven different kinds of meat cooked on a sword, right at your table.”
“A sword? But wh- ... oh, forget it.” Lorelei turned back to Eddie. “More importantly, what are you doing here? You’ve got a minute to audition for your future or my friends here’ll be firing up the barbeque.”
Eddie looked as abashed as a carnivorous lizard could, and when he spoke it was with a poorly concealed West Country burr.
“He’s right, I did a few seasons at the seaside but when Spielberg came along I thought my bed was made for good. Upped sticks and took off for LA.”
He showed a lot of teeth in what passed for a smile.
“I was ‘Second Raptor’, but the bastard had me killed off.After that, well, y'know Hollywood; it’s who you know. I tried out for everything but couldn’t even get on Barney as a bloody sidekick …’too much negative energy’ according to some pony-tailed tosser of a producer. I managed to scrape together an agent, tried to break into stand-up for a while but got fed up taking beer and glass showers behind the chicken wire every night, with supper shows on Saturdays. It got so bad, bills mounting up, the drinking and all that… I found myself in porn, wound up as a fluffer on Jurassic Pork II. A bloody fluffer!
Please, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t want to do this, but I was desperate ... and the money was just too good to walk away from.”
He cringed and looked up at Lorelei hopefully, one claw washing the other in a particularly unctuous manner. Her expression was grim as a Bank Holiday forecast and she was nodding steadily to herself.
“The next time I see you, you’re shoes. Go!”
“Oh, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, Miss, I ...”
“Shoes!”
The squirming ‘raptor took to his spiked heels.
“What is it, Lore’…?”
“Thump me, Chef, and do it damn hard. What an idiot I’ve been not to see this.”
“See what?”
“Well, look at us,” she gestured at Valerie. “I should have guessed when we woke up with Frazetta tits and fetish wardrobes. And Goat Boy, suddenly he’s rated PG? And you, Chef, how long have you looked like Robert De Niro?”
“Well, since about the time he did Goodfellas; a bit, from the side, and sometimes when I smile, if the light’s right. But yeah, I see your point.”
“It’s time we brought this farce to a close.”
She dropped her guns in the sand, turned to address the shadows obscuring the end of the valley.
“You, whoever you are, wherever you are… show yourself!”
A single tumbleweed rolled across the dirt with a dry crackle. The air seemed to be holding its breath.
“I said now!” she shouted, louder, her voice razor-edged and packing knuckledusters. “Or do you want to meet some of the friends and acquaintances who owe me favours? Big ones.”
The air before them shimmered, smudged and solidified into a pale, cadaverous man. He wore a faintly pretentious beard waxed to a fine point, expensive designer jeans, a black body-warmer and a purple beret, cocked at what was likely meant to be a cavalier angle indicating ‘artiste’. His washed-out eyes darted nervously and he looked ripe to either bolt or drop dead with a coronary. Lorelei’s face suggested she’d be happy to administer one.
“Wilhelm Scream? I might have known….”
Goat Boy voiced everybody’s incomprehension.
“Who he?”
“Second-rate mage turned third-rate movie maker, underground purveyor of carnal cliches, bespoke blockbusters and trailer trash for the Magickal community.”
Scream stiffened to his full height and attempted to gaze down imperiously.
“I am not third-rate,” he emphasised indignantly in a sneering Valley whine, tinged with a just hint of fake French ‘Je suis un artiste!’
Lorelei ignored him.
“Sheb Wooley, graduated Brown University with a 1st in illusions but couldn’t do a damn thing with it because they always came out so corny; was stripped of his degree a year later when he got pissed in the wrong Salem bar and bragged that he’d cheated in the final; crawled into a bottle as perpetually arseholed as country singer Ben Colder and then sold his soul, and his real name, to the Devil in ‘51 for eternal fame and a killer toe-job from Lucretia Borgia. How am I doing so far?”
She drew a breath and laughed in his face.
“Only he neglected to read the fine print and got stiffed on the deal. The eternal fame came, but not quite as he’d imagined. Since then, he’s traded on his slender Hollywood connections to… which reminds me, where is he?”
“Who?”
“You really don’t want to fuck with me right now, Scream.”
He winced, looked as if he’d lost a foot in height and unsteadily made a few passes in the air, muttering briefly. There was a shimmering next to him, a soft pop, and a small crimson creature appeared hovering in the air on stubby wings. In place of its face was huge camera lens.
“That figures… ‘Arry Flecks, the over-familiar familiar. Lose him, and while you’re at it …” she gestured to her heaving bosom and at her colleagues, “…fix this.”
The fluttering cameraman buzzed huffily as Scream made more gestures, his lips moving in a blur of incantation. Then it was gone. Lorelei felt as if she’d just shed a backpack, arched her spine with pleasure.
“Oh, you fucking beauty!”
Goat Boy was looking down at himself in round-eyed pleasure. Beside him, Valerie was Valerie again, but just as baleful. The Chef still looked a bit like Robert De Niro, but no more than usual.
“One thing, Scream,” Lorelei snared his eyes with hers, bore into him. “Why us? Why this?”
“But Lorelei, dahling, you’re sensational box office. The entire Astral and half the Real is alight with tales of you. The people and the not-people just can’t get enough. And if not me, then who? What, I should wait until some talentless schmuck in bed with the big boys has the same idea?”
“Do you have any idea what kind of a day we’ve just had?”
“No pain, no gain sweetheart. Besides, you’re a natural; trust me, with my help, the sky’s the limit. I can make you a star! Think of it, we ju-“
He made a strangulated sound as Valerie materialised at his side, one slim hand locked around his throat with all the tenderness of a witch-hunter’s strapado. Slowly, almost erotically, she loosened her grip and trailed her hand down, unbuttoning his expensive fly and taking the matter in hand. Her other hand appeared around his waist, one of The Chef’s finest knives glinting prettily in the amber light. She lifted him almost gently to sit him right on the cutting edge.
“Lore’, what you want to do with this prick?”
Chef’s teeth gleamed wicked and hungry.
“Well, it’s been one hell of a day. I’m starving… what do you say to a cook-out?”
“Baby, I’ve got just thing.”
He smiled warmly at her, rummaged in an inside pocket and extracted a roll of greaseproof paper, opening it to reveal a neat stack of flour tortillas.
“Your call.”
Lorelei looked at him, stared contemptuously one last time at Scream and finally locked eyes with Valerie.
She nodded once, smiling.
“Cut!”
It really was a most unique scream.
“Okay everybody, that’s a wrap.”
LORELEI AND THE WHOLLY WEIRD DAY
By Paul Newman
TAWNY sunlight sliced through the blinds, transforming the cheap motel room into a Cubist tiger skin and throwing the lazily shifting pall of stale cigarette smoke into precise strata of fire and shadow.
Shifting restless in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, Lorelei felt its heat on her skin and dragged herself the final few inches towards consciousness. A greasy tickling of perspiration snaked into the hollow of her throat and pooled there as she luxuriated in the last lint-flecked dregs of sleep, willing away the soft snoring of her companions. She heard a mattress creak to her right as a sleeper shifted; from somewhere close by curled the drowsy insistence of a slide guitar, its tremulous, serpentine notes shivering with the promise of a melody only to slip into elusive fading echoes.
The muted whir of cicadas hung on air that already felt stifling. Outside, a flimsy wooden screen door was slammed half-heartedly into its frame by the breeze. Time to rise and shine on, if they were to catch the day and do anything useful with it. Lorelei opened her eyes and looked down to the foot of the bed.
“What the…” she croaked through an arid Marlboro mouth.
She wasn’t blind but still couldn’t see. At least not past the monumental cleavage and improbably cantilevered breasts looking her right in the eye, dominating her line of sight and heaving into a sizeable proportion of her peripheral vision. Just how hammered had she got last night? She shook her head with an effort, a white-streaked curtain of sable hair sticking mussed to her shoulders and across her face as she levered her elbows beneath her shoulders and forced herself into a sitting position. The breasts rose with her, maintaining their perfect frontal assault on the world and proudly telling Newton just where he could shove his apple. The guitar shimmered on quietly like a mournful redneck’s lullaby.
Looking around the surreal, sticky haze of the room, she took in the bed beside her own and the drowsing Gordian Knot of pale limbs, smooth fur, tousled blonde hair and hooves that might unravel into Valerie and Goat Boy. Across from her, The Chef was slumped upright in a tatty Naugahyde armchair, chin sunk on his chest and emitting low rumbling snores; funny, she’d never noticed before just how much he looked like Robert De Niro, at least when he wasn’t displaying the wicked nest of shark teeth that passed for his mouth.
There was a side table beneath the window, pock-marked worse than any burger-flipping teenager’s face with the scars of a hundred cigarette burns, and squatting atop it was a Bakelite radio, spilling out the raw, muted guitar loops. She could hear the scrape of the player’s calloused fingertips as they shifted up the strings, something about the music so familiar it tantalised, hovered clear in her memory, its identity the shifting reflections on the oily skin of a soap bubble that popped every time she grasped at it. Her gaze followed the cord trailing from the back of the antique set to where it ended on the floor in a small two-pin plug sat in a nest of dust bunnies. The only other object on the table was a plastic display holder for tourist brochures touting the arid, masochistic thrills of a pleasure jaunt to Death Valley.
Death Valley? Death Valley-in-fucking-California Death Valley? Oh, crap. This is not good. And this is definitely not Scotland. Which it most definitely should be.
Lorelei glanced from the leaflets back to the radio, up to the window and down to her unfamiliar and most likely back-breaking pneumaticism, barely encased in a sleeve of tight black leather which merged seamlessly into sprayed-on black jeans and chunky motorcycle boots. She coughed once and announced to the room in voice that fluttered hot against the lightbulb of panic: “People, wake up. Wake up, damn it! We’ve got a problem, a big problem.”
Two big problems, actually, she muttered to herself. The Chef was awake instantly, rising from the chair with a fluid grace belying his size and fetching up with him the battered, leather-finished presentation case in which he kept his beloved knives.
“Lore’, what’s up? What’s the…?”
He stopped and stared at her, jaw vaguely working around an invisible wad of gum, eyes transfixed.
“Darlin’, I’ve got a sneaking feeling these are least of our troubles.”
A silvery squeal of surprise interrupted her and she looked sharply across to the next bed. Valerie was gazing down at own amplified endowments in disbelief as they strained dangerously at the gauzy, semi-transparent material she was almost wearing, even as her fingers explored the ludicrously accentuated tips of the ears rising pointedly through the flaxen cascade of her hair. Her ears. Small rainbow-flecked wings twitched at her shoulder-blades.
“Who dares?”
The music of her voice was retuned to vicious high-C glass shards.
“Who dares use their art to turn me into this… into this…”, words failed her for a moment , “ this fucking porn elf?”
Still brushing the dust of sleep from his eyes, Goat Boy rolled back from her and blinked stupefied as his vision came into focus. Or tried to. He leaned a little further away to improve his aim.
“Oh, my…”
A lascivious grin blossomed on his lips as his right hand meandered south along a well-travelled route, down through the fine hairs of his chest and stomach to between his legs. He froze and his grin fell to the floor in pieces. Clawing at himself in frantic disbelief, he toppled from the bed to the horrific chocolate and orange whorls of an industrial-grade carpet, tottering to his hooves and letting loose a bleat of pure anguish. Where he’d expected to find his oldest and firmest companion was now only the smooth, sexless sheen of a pair of black Lycra shorts. His desperate fingers scrabbled without success to find purchase at the waist, then at where his legs emerged from the ridiculous garment. He gave a sob of barely contained panic as he let his hands fall, clasping them over his crotch to conceal his shame.
“I hate cyclists.”
Lorelei looked steadily at her companions, down at herself, as four pairs of eyes locked in shocked incredulity. Lewd of the Rings. A eunuch Mr Tumnus. Robert De Niro. And the Bride of FrankenHeffner.
Somebody was going to pay for this, and not in small change.
“Who?” demanded Valerie, rising from the bed with murder gleaming white-hot in her eyes.
“Where?” choked Goat Boy, fingers seeking substance in a vacancy.
“Why?” thought Lorelei.
Something was wrong with time; the air felt oppressively thick, thoughts crawled around her mind with the alacrity of vacationing slugs in a treacle Jacuzzi. The Chef cocked his head a moment, detected the low crackle of tyres rolling on gravel and was at the door in a heartbeat, neck craning around the window frame as he scanned the outside world.
“This’ll have to wait. Lore’, we’ve got company.”
“Company?”
“Cops.”
“Cops? How many?”
He turned from the window and looked at her nervously. “All of ‘em.”
Lorelei and Valerie moved swiftly to his side, ducking low to peer out between the lower blinds and squinting into the glare of the sun rising in the south. From behind them came the crack of hoof on wood, succeeded immediately by a sharp hiss and a stream of uncreative if heartfelt swearing from Goat Boy, but they were too transfixed by the view to turn around.
An arc of vehicles swept across their entire field of vision, cruisers with their reds and blues revolving, doors thrown wide to provide cover for scores of men in khaki uniforms, mirrored shades and ‘70s-style horseshoe ‘taches . Every one of them had a weapon in his hands and all were trained unwaveringly on the window.
More muffled cursing and grunts from Goat Boy, accompanied by a low scuffing sound as of something heavy being dragged across cheap carpet.
“Hey…” he began.
“Not now, son, not now.”
The Chef might have sounded casual if not for the tremor in his voice.
“Lore’, got any ideas?”
“You mean apart from observing that the sun’s in the wrong place today? Not a one.”
“Where the hell is this? Are we still in the Astral?”
Lorelei closed her eyes and sniffed deeply.
“No, we’re not. But I’m not picking up the stink of the Real, either. This is someplace far weirder and more dangerous by far. I think this is California.”
“Aw, crap.”
“Crap is right.”
“Still no ideas?”
“Yeah, one ...” She apparated a lit cigarette and drew hungrily on it. “Smoke if you got ‘em.”
“Hey, seriously ...” Goat Boy tried again.
Valerie kept her eyes on the black-unformed ATF goons scuttling about and taking up defensive postures behind the phalanx of cops, hut-hut-hutting to and fro in small units and giving each other leg-ups onto the assorted outbuildings.
“What is it, my beloved creature?”
“I really think you need to take a look at this.”
The three turned from the window to find Goat Boy crouched low. Before him was a cheap pine coffin with brass fittings, and with one hand he held open the hinged lid which concealed its contents from them. He looked up at them and for a moment the pain of his loss was gone from his face and he was lit up like Old Scratch on All Hallows.
“I was just wondering ...” He threw open the lid fully, “... who all these guns belong to?”
The casket was a bristling arsenal of high-powered, gleaming death, oiled and ready to rock ‘n’ roll; a jumble of AK-47s, magnums, an Uzi or 10, the blunt nose of a sawn-off shotgun, a couple of pump-actions, bandoliers of ammunition shining in their dull brass clips. And, front and centre, cradled lovingly in the lethal arms of its kin, a fuck-off M60 that looked just about right for carjacking a tank.
Lorelei apparated a bottle of Jack, took a hard pull on it and handed it across to The Chef.
“Okay, not what I was expecting, but I’ll drink to that.”
The Chef flipped the bottle over to Goat Boy, who deftly caught it in one hand, gulped down a quarter of the contents and tossed it back before delving into the coffin.
A bullhorn quacked, clicked sharply and squawked again.
“You inside the cabin. Open the door slowly and throw out your weapons. Exit one at time. Hands laced behind your heads.Do it now and nobody dies.”
The four friends looked at one another, gave a collective shrug and dived into the coffin. The Chef lost his knives somewhere within his improbably accommodating overcoat and took both pump-actions, holding them by the slides and jacking shells with a single savage flick of his wrists. Valerie snagged a pair of Uzis, slung one over each shoulder and bent to hook a couple more. Lorelei was strapping a holster tight around her waist, tying it off just above her knee and slipping a gleaming .44 Magnum snugly home before reaching for an AK-47.
“God damn,” muttered The Chef, “doesn’t this tin-pot station play anything but Ry Cooder?”
Goat Boy just stood there looking glassy-eyed and lost, somewhere between a kid set loose in Hamleys at Christmas and a dog being shown a card trick. Valerie moved to his side, her palm and fingertips caressing the Action Man simplicity of his crotch.
“Who did this to us will pay, darling creature, but none more so than the one who in taking from you took from us both. Until that time …”
She bent and with no effort at all lugged up the M60.
“… this should help you deal with any separation anxiety. You know, size is important.”
Her lover hefted his weapon, approved of its weight and authority. Adjusting the strap over his left shoulder and holding the monstrous gun close on his hip, he looked at his companions and grinned.
“Check-out time.”
The four stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the window and the khaki army beyond. The first lachrymose chords of the theme from Paris, Texas shimmered from the radio and Lorelei scowled in annoyance, drew the hand cannon from her hip, dropped into a professional shooter’s spread-legged stance and fired. The roar was deafening as scraps of Bakelite, wood and transistor showered down around them.
She looked around a little guiltily.
“Sorry, but that was really starting to piss me off. Besides, nothing quite like starting the working day with a quick shot of Ry.”
The bullhorn was quacking against outside, joined by a commotion of shouts and orders.
“This is getting old,” she decided. “Time to go.”
The first eruption of gunfire turned the front of the motel into a colander, the four of them spewing out a Biblical curse of lead onto the heads of the cowering cops behind their car doors or, caught short in the open, simply curled up foetally in the dust. To Lorelei’s right, The Chef worked with the steady application of a gravedigger. At her left, Valerie emitted a shrill ululation of battle frenzy as the Uzis burped and stuttered bright fire in her hands. Beside her, Goat Boy was too busy studying his faery queen’s breasts jiggling magnificently to the rhythm of her gunfire to be looking where he was shooting, but it hardly mattered; the M60 laid down a criss-crossing trail of carnage the like of which might impress Kalashnikov himself, punching gouts of dirt from the ground and stitching ragged lines of fist-sized holes in the wall of vehicles and the men crouching behind them. The noise was incredible. Over to their right, a gas tank caught with a dull crump and sent up a roiling, greasy fireball. The exploding vehicle detonated its neighbours, the force lifting them from the ground, and on and on in a devastating chain reaction.
Their weapons showed no signs of running out of ammunition but by unspoken assent they reined in their deadly fire and stood panting in the acrid cordite.
It was a total rout.
Through the shattered wall and mashed blinds, the desert before their cabin was a landscape of twisted, burning wreckage and bleeding bodies. The soundtrack was all screams and cries for help.
“Screw me sideways, Lore’,” breathed The Chef in awe, smoke rising from his cuffs to merge with that wafting from the hot barrels of both guns.
She nodded, then flicked a glance over her shoulder.
“Better see if we’ve got a rear exit we can use. It won’t be long before what’s left of those bozos pulls together.
“I’m on it.”
His teeth sparkled like a fistful of steak knives and he was off to the rear of the room, stretching on tip-toe to peek through the single strip window high up in the wall.
Outside, they were beginning to hut-hut-hut again, the sound of the survivors getting organised drowned by a heavy clattering as four Bradley tanks rumbled into view behind the carnage, each sheltering long lines of very cautious and very heavily armed ATF troops. Even from this distance, Lorelei, Valerie and Goat Boy could read the malice glittering in their eyes, the grim set of their facial hair. The trio shared a look and readied their weapons for the onslaught.
“Excuse me?” said The Chef from behind them. “Did anybody order a werewolf in a hot pink Cadillac convertible playing death metal?”
They wheeled about in time to see him dive away from the wall, ricochet off the bed and land in an ungainly heap at their feet. For an instant there was the approaching roar of an engine and the rear wall disintegrated as a classic car slammed through it and slewed to a halt in a tangle of cheap furniture and dust.
“Trevor!” Goat Boy bounded across the wreckage. “Oh, man, talk about good timing.”
“Long time no see, you son of a bovid.”
The driver’s bloodshot lilac eyes twinkled from under the curtain of creamy white hair which covered every inch of his body. He was naked but for a pair of cut-off denim shorts, one furry paw on the wheel and the other resting casually on the door as he took a long, slow hit off a joint only slightly less impressive than John Holmes’ appendage.
Lorelei stepped up beside Goat Boy, nodded in greeting to the new arrival.
“You know him?”
“Know him? Know him? Shit, we were practically brothers from other mothers once upon a time. This is Trevor The Amazing Dog Boy .. the Trevor The Amazing Dog Boy. We were, what, five years together on the road with Professor Lynch’s Cavalcade Of Mutants And Inhuman Curiosities, back when the northern club circuit was still a going concern.”
“So what brings you here?”
Lorelei was still jittery from the shooting, antennae crackling on high alert. She had to shout to be heard above the frenzied metal pouring from the car’s speakers.
“I’m a little curious about that myself, Miss.”
The dope made him slur a little but his impeccable BBC English survived well enough.
“One minute I’m rattling down the M11 in my old rusting shit-box death-trap to catch Hawkwind in Brixton tonight, there’s a weird flash as I go over a pothole or something and, voila, I’m here, in this retro wet dream on wheels, it’s daytime and I’m barrelling into some shitty motel. This shitty motel here, as a matter of fact. Where is here, by the way?”
“California. Maybe.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Quite. And from the sound of that small army outside, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.”
“You need a ride?”
Lorelei smiled at him for the first time, apparated a smoke and reached over to trade it for his joint.
“Trevor, I thought you’d never ask.”
Lugging their small arsenal with them, the four piled in to the Caddy, Lorelei up front and the others in the back seat.
“Can you do anything about that bloody noise?”
Trevor fiddled with the stereo a moment, frowned and punched it in. Slayer’s No Remorse continued to erupt from the speakers like a blender full of nails.
“Sorry, sweetheart, looks like we’re stuck with it.”
“Never mind. Least it’s good for one thing ”
“Yes?”
“Getaway music.”
Trevor grinned werewolfishly.
“Right you are.”
In a howl of roaring mechanics and bellowing metal, the Caddy fishtailed for purchase and smashed through the shattered remains of the front wall, heading straight for the line of burning cruisers before Trevor wrestled the wheel into submission, spun about and headed for the single highway running to the sun.
A stutter of bullets began, some spanging into the car and most simply kicking up dirt fore and aft.
“Those idiots are lousy shots ....” Goat Boy swivelled around, hoisted the M60 onto the rear of the seat and started to fire back, “… but we’re not.” He laughed aloud, then looked puzzled.”Oddly.”
As the hot pink Cadillac screamed down the highway in a blur of bullets and basslines, several cruisers and a couple of Humvees peeled out of the motel forecourt in pursuit, their wailing sirens adding marginally to the toxic noise pollution. Valerie joined Goat Boy in firing back and in a minute there was only burning wreckage in the rear-view mirror.
A few minutes further on, The Chef spotted a dirt track branching off to the west.
“Lore’…?”
“I see it. Trevor, hang a right and kill the speed so they won’t have any dust to follow.”
His pelt rippling in the wind, teeth bared with the thrill of the chase, Trevor spun the wheel around with one hand and the next moment they were jolting and bouncing along track. A mile, two miles later, and the terrain began to crowd in on the car, boulders joining up until they were creeping through a ravine of sheer rock walls and deepening shadows.
Goat Boy bleated a little from down in his chest.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Valerie moved tighter to him, her head on his shoulder as her hand stayed protectively between his legs. The tip of one elfin ear tickled his cheek but he was too smart to say anything about it.
“He’s right,” said The Chef. “In a day of some fucked-up weird shit, this does not bode well. Has anybody else noticed the sun’s already going down?”
The Caddy coughed and lurched. Trevor peered at the antique dials on the dashboard.
“Speaking about not boding well, I estimate we’re going to run out of petrol about…”
A final rattle, a shiver of metal and the car died.
“… now.”
Even the squalling from the radio faded into silence until there was nothing but the random pinging of the cooling engine and a soft whirr of crickets in the scrub.
“So I guess we have to walk our way out of here.”
Lorelei opened the door and swung her legs out, staggering a little as she stood from the unfamiliar additional weight upstairs.
“I swear, when I find who’s responsible for this, I’m going to feed them their…”
“Lore’! Shh!”
The Chef was already out of the car, crouching to the ground with the palm of one hand spread flat in the dirt.
“We’ve got company.”
She spun and looked back down the way they’d come. No headlights. No nothing.
“Where? How many?”
“Where? Baby girl, I’m not even sure ‘what?’.”
Trevor vaulted out of the driver’s seat and landed gracefully on all fours. He sniffed the wind.
“Search me. Something old, smells like. Ancient. Evil.”
“Great,” sighed Goat Boy. “So now your mum’s after us?”
Trevor growled at him. “No, worse than that. Much worse.”
The dog boy took point, followed by Lorelei, Valerie and Goat Boy with The Chef bringing up the rear, and they trudged into the gloom of the canyon.
After a few hundred yards, the towering rock walls to either side of them began to fall away and they emerged into a wide valley. As far as the eye could see, it was densely planted with maize, the waxy green leaves rustling secretively as they caught and turned bloody rays from the setting sun. The far reaches of the valley were already in shadow and a thin mist wreathed the corn.
“I’m not liking this one little bit, Lore’.”
The Chef’s face creased in a creepy, mirthless grin, teeth and eyes shining bright.
“Me neither, but I can’t see any way around it. Single file, as we were, but first…”
The air in her palm shimmered into a bottle.
“… a little something to lubricate balls of steel, yes?”
The bottle did the rounds, miraculously surviving the damage inflicted by Trevor, until it ended back with Lorelei. She clasped it around the neck and raised it in toast to her comrades; in the brief moment she held the bottle steady before her eyes she felt a curious tremor in the ground. A perfect circle of ripples raced over the surface of the last inch of whisky. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, opened them again and stared into the bottle. There it was again, racing in and then back on itself in circles, and this time the motion in the ground was unmistakable. Trevor whined and Lorelei had the strongest urge to reach out and ruffle the pelt behind his ears. Whump! A third time, and now the tremor was strong enough that everyone felt it.
“Earthquake?”
Goat Boy hefted the M60 and backed protectively to Valerie.
“I don’t think so, lover.”
Trevor was sniffing the air at all points of the compass and when he was facing back the way they’d come, his stance locked rigid. He raised his head, wet black nose hungrily drawing in the evening air. And then he was off, bolting through the cornfield. They barely caught his shout as he went, but the message was self-evident.
“Run with me if you want to live! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnn!”
And they were hard at his heels, haring blindly through the corn when the first bowel-melting bellow made the stalks around them tremble; a second followed, somewhere above, beneath and everywhere in between the range of human hearing. As the ground began to shake from some colossal impact, Valerie risked a glance over her shoulder. Her eyes widened and she turned back, doubling her speed and driving a startled Goat Boy before her.
Impressively big, impossibly savage and improbably there, the Tyrannosaurus Rex burst from the canyon and thundered towards its prey as they fled through the corn. Teeth like ivory Ghurkha knives, ropes of viscous saliva whipping from its jaws, it carried a reptilian stench of rotting swamp matter and carrion combined; its howl was ear-splitting and, as it trampled into the corn, it lowered its great head in preparation for the kill. Lorelei risked a glance over her shoulder and stopped dead. In the pathway flattened by their passage, The Chef stood alone, facing the creature impassively as it tore towards him. The shotguns were at his feet.
“Chef! No!”
He didn’t turn to her, but she sensed as much as saw his shoulders stiffen for an instant. Then he shucked his coat and straightened to his full height, a wicked blade in each hand.
The prehistoric horror was almost on him, mouth gaping with death and pestilence. In the last instant, The Chef launched himself upwards and directly at the behemoth. Lorelei heard him cry “Bon appetite, fucker!” And then he was gone.
“Nooooooooooooo!”
The T-Rex threw back its head and worked its gullet. Another fog-horn blaring of primal power and it lurched forward, head scanning for movement. It clocked her stumbling backwards and started in her direction, its howl almost gleeful. One gigantic pace, another and the third brought it towering over her. Jaws gaping wickedly, it loomed down at her… and then stopped abruptly. It made as if to roar once more, but only a thick coughing came out. A fine spray of blood misted onto Lorelei’s face. The creature stumbled to one side, spluttering and growling as it tried to bite into its own stomach, pointless little upper arms flailing uselessly. It went to roar again, but this time emitted an appalling shriek. Thrashing its head around, the dinosaur lunged clumsily at Lorelei, missed by a yard and thumped into the dirt. She backed away from its whipping tail, snapping jaws, leaving it to flatten itself a clearing in the maize. Its breathing came harsh and laboured now, and with each exhalation it blew out a river of blood and shredded tissue.
Lorelei felt a hand on her shoulder, realised the others had made their way back. Stunned, they kept at a safe distance and watched as the beast shivered uncontrollably in a final spasm, released a thin groan and died.
Goat Boy squeezed Lorelei’s shoulder a little tighter.
“It got The Chef, huh? Damn, I’m sorry about that I’m going to miss his canapes.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”
“Wha….?”
Lorelei nodded towards the T-Rex’s hips, where there was still a slight motion between its legs. A single shark fin of silver broke through the surface of the skin, tracing a bloody swathe towards the tail as more of it emerged. The blade vanished from sight, reappearing with its twin in tow, and the pair danced a graceful waltz until the flesh of the creature was reduced to ribbons and soup. As if taking a bow, the blades leapt up to salute, each gripped in a bloody fist. Keeping the dull top edges of the knives towards him, The Chef used them as pitons to heave himself from the belly of the beast. Slithering down the last few yards, he gained his feet and weaved slightly as he sloughed great gouts of gore and clots of pulverised organ.
“How do like your steaks?”
Words were not enough and his friends crowded around in a tight embrace of relief and gratitude, for their lives, for his. He assured them he was fine, no, really, and went to retrieve his box while the companions flicked away what they could of the dinosaur’s innards he’d left adhered to them.
Trevor sniffed at the cooling body, looked to the far end of the valley.
“Much as I don’t want to be the one to break this up, particularly as it’d be a real pleasure to claim a T-bone and a set of luggage from this…,” he kicked idly at the T-Rex’s snout, “… I can’t help but think it’d be a good idea to get moving. How many more of these things might there be out here?”
Weary but smart, they nodded ascent and moved on. Shortly, the corn thinned and they were tramping through soft ochre sand still warm with the sun. Lorelei had heard of sunsets that seemed to go on forever, had even sat through a few of them herself in a previous life, but this was the first she’d encountered that really looked as if it might. She was about to propose a break, regardless of the danger, when it reared its ugly head again.
Or, rather, heads.
There were about a dozen of them, smaller kin to the monster through which The Chef had just tunnelled and about a hundred yards out, circling them warily. The party noticed them at the same time and pulled into a tight knot, facing out and weapons readied
Communicating with loud nasal honks, the mutant velociraptors slowly drew their trap tighter. They were about five feet tall, maws of needle teeth and vicious-looking toe hooks. Fifty yards. Thirty. Twenty. The pack became more agitated the closer it got, adding low snarls to the strange honks and keening whines.
The fine line of tension was stretched to breaking point when Goat Boy inadvertently snipped it.
“Why’s that one wearing a watch?”
The creatures paused, milling about in confusion. Goat Boy stood now, the muzzle of his gun dropping towards the sand.
“You! No, not you…you!”
He pointed a finger at the culprit. The creature seemed to cringe as its companions drew back from it with an air of embarrassment. Trevor brushed the hair out of his eyes, sniffed deeply and howled with laughter.
“Eddie Lizard! I heard you were dead.”
The velociraptor hung its head sheepishly, tried to angle its body to conceal the cheap digital watch it wore on its left wrist.
“Oi! Get over here, now.”
There was a bite to Trevor’s bark that brooked no argument. He looked around at the others.
“And you lot can just fuck off. Sharpish!”
Not quite knowing where to look, the velociraptors kicked up the sand, seemed to remember pressing engagements and slunk away. Satisfied, Trevor rounded on the cringing creature before him.
“Okay you, what’s your story? And make it a good one. With a happy ending.”
Lorelei shot an inquiring look at Trevor, who shrugged and nodded in Eddie’s direction.
“I ran into him a few times, years ago when I was doing the summer season in Yarmouth; he was one of the meet-and-greeters at some themed burger joint …what the hell was it?...ah, Arizona Smith’s Restaurant Of Doom.”
“Classy.”
“You’re not wrong, but I’ll bet it was the only place in the country that served seven different kinds of meat cooked on a sword, right at your table.”
“A sword? But wh- ... oh, forget it.” Lorelei turned back to Eddie. “More importantly, what are you doing here? You’ve got a minute to audition for your future or my friends here’ll be firing up the barbeque.”
Eddie looked as abashed as a carnivorous lizard could, and when he spoke it was with a poorly concealed West Country burr.
“He’s right, I did a few seasons at the seaside but when Spielberg came along I thought my bed was made for good. Upped sticks and took off for LA.”
He showed a lot of teeth in what passed for a smile.
“I was ‘Second Raptor’, but the bastard had me killed off.After that, well, y'know Hollywood; it’s who you know. I tried out for everything but couldn’t even get on Barney as a bloody sidekick …’too much negative energy’ according to some pony-tailed tosser of a producer. I managed to scrape together an agent, tried to break into stand-up for a while but got fed up taking beer and glass showers behind the chicken wire every night, with supper shows on Saturdays. It got so bad, bills mounting up, the drinking and all that… I found myself in porn, wound up as a fluffer on Jurassic Pork II. A bloody fluffer!
Please, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t want to do this, but I was desperate ... and the money was just too good to walk away from.”
He cringed and looked up at Lorelei hopefully, one claw washing the other in a particularly unctuous manner. Her expression was grim as a Bank Holiday forecast and she was nodding steadily to herself.
“The next time I see you, you’re shoes. Go!”
“Oh, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, Miss, I ...”
“Shoes!”
The squirming ‘raptor took to his spiked heels.
“What is it, Lore’…?”
“Thump me, Chef, and do it damn hard. What an idiot I’ve been not to see this.”
“See what?”
“Well, look at us,” she gestured at Valerie. “I should have guessed when we woke up with Frazetta tits and fetish wardrobes. And Goat Boy, suddenly he’s rated PG? And you, Chef, how long have you looked like Robert De Niro?”
“Well, since about the time he did Goodfellas; a bit, from the side, and sometimes when I smile, if the light’s right. But yeah, I see your point.”
“It’s time we brought this farce to a close.”
She dropped her guns in the sand, turned to address the shadows obscuring the end of the valley.
“You, whoever you are, wherever you are… show yourself!”
A single tumbleweed rolled across the dirt with a dry crackle. The air seemed to be holding its breath.
“I said now!” she shouted, louder, her voice razor-edged and packing knuckledusters. “Or do you want to meet some of the friends and acquaintances who owe me favours? Big ones.”
The air before them shimmered, smudged and solidified into a pale, cadaverous man. He wore a faintly pretentious beard waxed to a fine point, expensive designer jeans, a black body-warmer and a purple beret, cocked at what was likely meant to be a cavalier angle indicating ‘artiste’. His washed-out eyes darted nervously and he looked ripe to either bolt or drop dead with a coronary. Lorelei’s face suggested she’d be happy to administer one.
“Wilhelm Scream? I might have known….”
Goat Boy voiced everybody’s incomprehension.
“Who he?”
“Second-rate mage turned third-rate movie maker, underground purveyor of carnal cliches, bespoke blockbusters and trailer trash for the Magickal community.”
Scream stiffened to his full height and attempted to gaze down imperiously.
“I am not third-rate,” he emphasised indignantly in a sneering Valley whine, tinged with a just hint of fake French ‘Je suis un artiste!’
Lorelei ignored him.
“Sheb Wooley, graduated Brown University with a 1st in illusions but couldn’t do a damn thing with it because they always came out so corny; was stripped of his degree a year later when he got pissed in the wrong Salem bar and bragged that he’d cheated in the final; crawled into a bottle as perpetually arseholed as country singer Ben Colder and then sold his soul, and his real name, to the Devil in ‘51 for eternal fame and a killer toe-job from Lucretia Borgia. How am I doing so far?”
She drew a breath and laughed in his face.
“Only he neglected to read the fine print and got stiffed on the deal. The eternal fame came, but not quite as he’d imagined. Since then, he’s traded on his slender Hollywood connections to… which reminds me, where is he?”
“Who?”
“You really don’t want to fuck with me right now, Scream.”
He winced, looked as if he’d lost a foot in height and unsteadily made a few passes in the air, muttering briefly. There was a shimmering next to him, a soft pop, and a small crimson creature appeared hovering in the air on stubby wings. In place of its face was huge camera lens.
“That figures… ‘Arry Flecks, the over-familiar familiar. Lose him, and while you’re at it …” she gestured to her heaving bosom and at her colleagues, “…fix this.”
The fluttering cameraman buzzed huffily as Scream made more gestures, his lips moving in a blur of incantation. Then it was gone. Lorelei felt as if she’d just shed a backpack, arched her spine with pleasure.
“Oh, you fucking beauty!”
Goat Boy was looking down at himself in round-eyed pleasure. Beside him, Valerie was Valerie again, but just as baleful. The Chef still looked a bit like Robert De Niro, but no more than usual.
“One thing, Scream,” Lorelei snared his eyes with hers, bore into him. “Why us? Why this?”
“But Lorelei, dahling, you’re sensational box office. The entire Astral and half the Real is alight with tales of you. The people and the not-people just can’t get enough. And if not me, then who? What, I should wait until some talentless schmuck in bed with the big boys has the same idea?”
“Do you have any idea what kind of a day we’ve just had?”
“No pain, no gain sweetheart. Besides, you’re a natural; trust me, with my help, the sky’s the limit. I can make you a star! Think of it, we ju-“
He made a strangulated sound as Valerie materialised at his side, one slim hand locked around his throat with all the tenderness of a witch-hunter’s strapado. Slowly, almost erotically, she loosened her grip and trailed her hand down, unbuttoning his expensive fly and taking the matter in hand. Her other hand appeared around his waist, one of The Chef’s finest knives glinting prettily in the amber light. She lifted him almost gently to sit him right on the cutting edge.
“Lore’, what you want to do with this prick?”
Chef’s teeth gleamed wicked and hungry.
“Well, it’s been one hell of a day. I’m starving… what do you say to a cook-out?”
“Baby, I’ve got just thing.”
He smiled warmly at her, rummaged in an inside pocket and extracted a roll of greaseproof paper, opening it to reveal a neat stack of flour tortillas.
“Your call.”
Lorelei looked at him, stared contemptuously one last time at Scream and finally locked eyes with Valerie.
She nodded once, smiling.
“Cut!”
It really was a most unique scream.
“Okay everybody, that’s a wrap.”
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