SHOWDOWN – Franklin Marsh
The three elderly men hurried across Main Street, doing their best to avoid the piles of horse manure. The short, stocky figure was first up the stairs to the Marshal’s office, the tall, bald man stumbling and being caught by the ex-actor with the dyed hair.
The shorter man waited impatiently on the wooden sidewalk, then they all burst into the Marshal’s office together.
“The Clintons are coming!” bawled the short man. “What are you gonna do about it, Marshal?”
The grey-haired custodian of the law seated behind the desk wiped up the last of the egg from his plate with a crust of bread, then pushed the soggy mess into his mouth. He sat back in his chair and observed his visitors.
“I said what are you gonna do about it, Marshal?” persisted the short man. “ The whole damn lot of ‘em are comin’, we heard. Not just Big Bill, but that wife of hiss’n. And O’Bama.”
“Fritz Mondale,” croaked the former actor.
The tall bald man tried to say something like Dukakis, but it came out garbled and indecipherable.
“Goddamn it, George! They’re un-American!”
“Easy, fellers.”
The three oldsters turned. To see a tall, lean figure framed in the doorway that led to the two cells, currently empty, in back.
“We’ll take care of it.”
The short man spluttered “You’d better. They say Locke’s with ‘em. The one the Indians call Krow.”.
The tall man thrust his groin forward, twin pearl-handled revolvers jiggling in their holsters.
“Read my hips,” he said, menacingly. “We’ll take care of it.”
The short man harrumphed, then added “And while you’re about it, do somethin’ about that weird sawbones hangin’ round Morag’s place.” He spun on his heel and headed for the door.
His two companions looked at one another, shrugged, tipped their hats to the newcomer and followed their leader.
“McCain’s got a bee in his bonnet,” said the seated Marshal, having swallowed the last of his supper.
“He’s after your job, Son,” drawled the taller lawman. A slight drumming noise invaded the following silence.
The two peace officers glanced at one another, then made for the door.
*****************
McCain glanced to his right as the trio made their way back across the dusty street toward the saloon.
“Shit.” The expletive was appropriate as his highly polished boot entered a heap of droppings. He slipped, but kept his balance.
The three oldies watched the dust cloud approaching town.
“It’s them, “ gasped McCain.
“There’s stacks of ‘em”, said the former actor, in a tone of awe.
The balding gentleman hot-footed it for the saloon batswings, tripping on the steps to the sidewalk, and crashing through the door. The other two were close behind.
?************************
The diner was quiet. Morag watched the Doctor playing patience. He was using an ornately-decorated, very unusual deck of cards, laying them out in a cruciform pattern.
There was the patter of small feet on the stairwell that led to the upper floor.
“Mom! Mom!” A little blonde whirlwind flew into the dining area.
“Riders comin’! Lots of ‘em! I seen Mr McCain and his friends come outta the Marshal’s office and..”
“Hush now, Sam. You should be in bed. Git up them stairs before I tan your hide.”
“Aw, Mom??”
“Come on now, child.”
The red-haired woman rose wearily from her chair and ushered the little girl back to the doorway.
Samantha huffed and puffed and began to stamp her way back upstairs. As Morag returned to her seat, the low drumming sound penetrated the diner.
The Cook had left the kitchen and was gazing anxiously out of the window.
“Lot o’ dust, Mizz Morag.”
Morag followed his gaze.
“Lot of trouble”, she mused.
The Doctor turned over the penultimate card. Depicted upon it was a brick tower, being struck by lightning. He smiled to himself. He knew what the last card would be.
“Morag,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“You know he’ll be with them? And her?”
Morag ignored him.
“Sam know she’s got a half-sister?”
Morag turned, her eyes blazing at the Doctor. She opened her mouth to speak.
“There’s George and his pappy,” said the Cook, sarcastically, watching the two Marshals stroll out into the Main Street from the Law Office. “Don’t know what they think they’re gonna do.”
“Lord, no more killin?”, sighed Morag, turning back to the window..
The Doctor saw the little blonde head peeking through the door, looking at him.
“Morag,” he said. “Your daughter’s still here.”
Morag whirled, in time to see the diminutive figure race up the stairwell.
The Cook walked back toward the kitchen.
“Nice flapjacks, feller,” said the Doc.
“We call ‘em pancakes round here, Mister,” supplied the Cook, as he entered his domain.
Morag watched the dust settle as the posse of riders reined in their mounts. The two Marshals stood stoically in front of them. She turned as the Cook re-entered the dining area, buckling on a gunbelt, a pump-action shotgun tucked under his arm.
“Oh, no, Autie. NO!” She placed a hand on his arm.
The Doctor turned over the final card. Death grinned up at him. He grinned back, sticking the card into the band of his top hat that sat on the clean white tablecloth. He stood up, donning the hat and walked over to where Morag and Autie stood at the window.
**************
“Howdy, George. George, “ smirked Big Bill Clinton around his cigar, nodding at the pair of Marshalls.
“Howdy, Bill. Ma’am.” The elder Marshal touched the brim of his Stetson as he nodded at the wild-eyed blonde woman next to the rancher.
“What brings you to town?”
“Our business”, snapped the woman.
“See your spiritual advisor ain’t with you,” observed the younger lawman. “Where’s Jimmy Peanuts?”
“On a mission,” supplied Bill, still grinning expansively. “He’ll be here before long. How ‘bout your spiritual advisor, boys? How’s that ol’ crook, Nick Dixon?”
“I am not a crook!”
A bizarre figure stumbled from the ever-open door of the small adobe church squatting next to the saloon, the heavy jowls blue with stubble, a virtually empty whiskey bottle in one hand.
“And I’ll thank you to call me Reverend Nixon, Slick Willie.” The last two words were spat out contemptuously.
Clinton laughed emptily, his wife’s hand strayed toward a Colt automatic at her waist..
The Reverend Nixon staggered back into the cool darkness of his church.
There was a crashing sound from the saloon, as if someone had fallen over, then the roar of a gunshot.
“Gerry, you dumb asshole!” wailed McCain.
Clinton’s cigar had disappeared. His face suffused with rage. His henchmen had all drawn their sidearms. The unexpected report had caught the Marshals by surprise, their hands empty.
Hillary Clinton drew a bead on the younger Marshal. She closed one eye and grinned.
“Welcome to Hell, Dubya.”
“Don’t call me…”
The Marshal’s reply was drowned out in the fusillade. Both Peace Officers were torn to shreds and hurled back along Main Street like bloody rags. The trigger happy cow punchers whooped and hollered, their horses bucking and skittering.
“Tear the place down!” screamed Mrs Clinton.
Morag, the Doctor and the Cook stepped back from the window as the Clinton posse began to ride up and down the Main Street firing randomly at buildings.. Little Samantha ran crying to her mother, who swept her up in her arms.
The Cook pumped the action of his shotgun and turned to the Doctor.
“Come on, man. We gotta do something!”
“They’ll come for us,” replied the Doc. “Have a little patience, boy.”
“I ain’t no boy!”
The door of the diner opened, and a man and a girl walked in.
The man wore an ankle-length duster over a black suit. He removed his hat, revealing a bald pate, and grinned at the room’s occupants.
“Morag, Doc, son. Howdy.”
The girl was also dressed in black. A short toreador jacket over a white blouse, and culottes, which allowed her to ride a horse like a man. She removed her wide-brimmed Spanish hat, and shook out her long black hair. Samantha gasped and pointed at the white streak.
“Ah, Samantha,” said the man. “You’ve grown.”
“Who are they, Mom?” queried the little girl.
“Never mind,” growled Morag. “What do you want, Locke?”
It was the girl who spoke.
“I wanted to see my sister.” She smiled, dazzlingly.
“I got a sister?”
“A half-sister,” said the Doc.
Locke barked out a short harsh laugh.
“Come on, Doc. You don’t still believe?” He slapped his thigh and threw his head back, roaring with laughter.
The Doc glanced at Morag. She was helpless under the gaze of the girl with the two-tone hair, who was reaching out for Samantha.
“How about some food, son?” Locke had turned his attention to the Cook.
“Mister, all Hell’s breakin’ loose out there, and you want somethin’ to eat?”
“Sure thing, son. Man gets mighty hungry out there on the trail. Don’t none of you worry ‘bout them Clinton owlhoots. They won’t bother us none.”
The man sat down at a nearby table, hoisting his coat clear of his revolver.
“MORAG!”
The Doc’s shout jerked the red-haired owner of the diner out of her trance.
“Stay away!” she shrieked at the girl in black, clutching Samantha more tightly to her bosom, and backing away.
“You OK, Morag?” asked the Cook.
Locke drew his revolver and shot Autie in the back. Morag and Samantha screamed as the young man flew face forward onto the sawdust covered floor.
The Doc’s arm was a blur. A Navy Colt .44 grew from his fist, spitting yellow flame. Locke grunted and dropped his pistol as a slug from the Doc’s gun shattered his right elbow. The left elbow followed, then both knees. Locke lay helplessly on the ground like an upended beetle, the sawdust around him turning red.
The Doc felt two small metal circles press against his neck.
The girl pushed the derringer deeper into the Doc’s flesh, and cocked the hammer.
“Tell her, Morag,” said the Doc, evenly.
“Lorelei.”
The girl drew breath in sharply.
“Don’t shoot him. He’s…he..he might be your father.”
“Bullshit!” spat Lorelei, venomously. “He just shot my pa!”
“It ain’t that clear cut, daughter,” said Morag, softly, cradling the sobbing Samantha.
Lorelei stared at her in amazement.
“Ma?”
The Doc felt the pressure ease on his neck, as Lorelei moved away, the tiny firearm wavering between himself and Morag.
She glanced down at the recumbent form of Locke. He seemed unconscious.
The Doc holstered his pistol.
“I was with…him”, Morag nodded at Locke, “but I was also seein’ the Doc. When you was conceived I.didn’t know. It could be either.”
“No!” snapped Lorelei. “You must know! It can’t be?”
The Doc stepped forward and punched her sharply on the chin.
“Spare the rod, “ he sighed as she slumped to the floor.
He looked helplessly at Morag.
“You mean you really don’t?”
The gunshot was thunderous in the enclosed space. Morag groaned in agony and fell to the floor, releasing her little girl as she fell.
“The family that slays together, stays together,” croaked Locke, attempting unsteadily to aim Autie’s pistol at the Doc, who pumped his two remaining bullets into the sneering face.
He carried Morag upstairs to her bed, Samantha following him, kicking his legs all the way.
He laid her down and passed his hand over the wound. Samantha couldn’t believe what she saw.
“Stay with her, Sam. She’ll be fine in the morning.”
The Doc trotted down the stairs and glanced into the dining room. Only Autie’s corpse remained.
He walked out of the diner. Although darkness had fallen many buildings were ablaze, giving the town an unearthly quality. A crowd was gathered in front of the saloon where lynchings were about to take place.
The Doc moved on to the livery stable and retrieved his mount.
Three days out from the town, just as night began to fall, he spotted a friendly looking campfire. A small wagon with two horses was nearby. As he walked up, a burly woman wiped her beard and spooned beans onto a tin plate which she handed to him.
“Did you find her, Doc?” said a hirsute, leonine figure clad in sacking.
“I lost her, Leopold,” said the Doc sadly, tucking into his beans.
Wednesday, 28 January 2015
Lorelei And The Unseemly Court
Lorelei And The Unseemly Court – Samantha Crosby
Intro from the lady hersel’
Franklin Marsh created a set of characters for his stories and I stole one, Lorelei, and used her for my own stuff. Lorelei and her band of weird mates roam the world getting into scrapes with odd beings. This is the follow up to "Mr Punch" and "Angels". In which we meet Lorelei's dad. Apparently........
Lorelei and the Unseemly Court
Valerie was being awkward.
Goat Boy was exhausted. He was currently lying dead to the world on a sofa in the kitchen, unwakeable by or for anyone or anything. It had transpired that Faeries did not sleep. Ever. Regardless of which half was goat and which was man, it made no difference. He had no more in him. Quite literally.
And Valerie was not happy.
“Stupid animal. I want another pet!”
Valerie was following Lorelei around the small crofter’s cottage on the shores of a Loch that the little band were currently hiding out in. They had made it to Scotland.
Lorelei ran a hand through her dark hair. The streak of white was getting broader.
“Valerie, please. He needs to sleep. We all need to sleep. We aren’t like you.”
Valerie shrugged. Even in her ire she was a sight to see. Lorelei had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.
“No, you are not. You are pathetic. Wake him!”
Lorelei sighed. On route to Scotland they had run into various bands of spirit renegades, daemons, zombie horses, angry alien crossbred bovines and even a Vampire or two. All had fled at the sight of Valerie. But she was so damn wearing,
Lorelei would happily have engaged in hand to hand combat with the devil himself rather than face another evening listening to Valerie bang on about the uselessness of her pet, the coldness of this horrible country, the barren nature of the British countryside. Valerie did not like anything, unless it was her home land, alcoholic, or was capable of pleasuring her for weeks on end in one constant orgy of attention. And Lorelei had run out of the latter.
The Chef had gamely offered to stand in when Goat Boy finally caved in and collapsed. Valerie had looked him up and down, declared he smelled of garlic, and flounced out of the room.
She had now taken to looking sideways at Lorelei and licking her lips. Lorelei was increasingly worried.
“Valerie, listen to me. You chose to come along. And really, I am very grateful…”
Lorelei paused to remove Valerie’s hand from her thigh. She wasn’t that grateful. Yet.
“But you don’t have to stay with us. You can go home now. You got us here safe. And I thank you. But I have to do something here, and I can’t leave till it’s done.”
Valerie cocked her golden head on one side and appraised Lorelei levelly.
“Dead relatives, I think.”
Lorelei sucked in her breath.
“My father. I need to find him. I have a question or two to ask him.”
Valerie closed her eyes.
“I am old. Very old. I can see in your heart. You think I am foolish and only interested in the flesh. Certainly the flesh has a broad appeal. But I am many more things. I can see right into you. See your heart. I miss my father too . I miss my land. I will leave my pet and go home and then I will miss him too.”
Lorelei looked at Valerie. Such sadness in her face, all at once.
She rubbed a hand over her face.
Suddenly this was all very odd, Valerie behaving like a normal being, the sadness of their reality.
Valerie smiled, a sunburst avalanche of gold, and placed her hand back on Lorelei’s thigh. Lorelei let it stay there.
“Va…?”
“Huzza!”
Valerie glowered as The Chef bounded into the room. He was wreathed in strings of onions, and his pockets were dripping mushrooms.
“Shops! Wild food! New pans!”
He was incoherent in his culinary frenzy. It had been a while since he had found himself in a proper kitchen all his own, and he planned an orgy of cuisine so fantastical it would defy appetite and belief.
“Please.Shut the fuck up,” said Lorelei crossly. “We were talking.”?
The Chef lowered a frying pan and narrowed his eyes.
“Ah. Then I will leave you ladies to it.”
He walked back towards the door and stopped. Then turned. Sometimes Lorelei wondered what fear it was he could instil in his enemies. Then she remembered.
His eyes were filled with black, his mouth curved into a sneer filled with razor sharp shark teeth, four times wider than normal, five teeth deep. Smoke curled delicately from the cuffs of his tattered coat.
“But stay the fuck out of my kitchen in future.”
******
Goat Boy roused himself by late evening. The Other One was nowhere to be seen. He had been gone since just before dawn. Lorelei had heard him leave, had got up to watch his broad profile stalk away across the moors with intent. She wished she had gone with him.
The Chef had laid a sumptuous table. Valerie, who usually ate butterflies and small insects, was talking with her mouth full of the most wonderful mushroom and rabbit casserole in the world, barely taking the time to make her advances on Goat Boy. Who was eating with two spoons, alternately inserting one over filled cutlery item and then the other into his currently man shaped top half.
Lorelei also ate with gusto, despite the feeling of impending doom that washed over her.
It had been a long day and brought with it a lot to think about. That Goat Boy was some eternal being was unbelievable. She decided to ignore it. That The Other One was still gone was disturbing. That Valerie was proving to be a friend was even more disturbing.
When they finally could eat no more, Lorelei laid down her spoon and leaned back in her chair.
“That was delicious. Thank you.”
The Chef tipped his hat to her.
“My pleasure ma’am. It’s nice to have a proper arena again.”
He gazed around the small kitchen, bathed in late evening summer light, and smiled at the site of all the used pans and utensils. By the side of his plate lay his special knives. Idly he caressed the sharp blade of one, cutting his finger and smiling with a hint of shark as a few drops of indigo blood dripped from the blade onto the delicate muslin table cloth.
Valerie nodded her head slightly and then stood up and yanked Goat Boy to his feet.
“Bedroom. Now.”
Lorelei watched as the odd couple skittered away down the corridor, hand in hoof. The Chef caught her expression.
“He’ll be back soon, I should think.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Yes you were. Listen honey…” and The Chef tipped his chair backwards and looked at her expectantly. She apparated two cigars and a half bottle of bourbon, and handed one of the former and a glass of the latter to him.
“It’s a pickle and no mistake, this whole thing. But we’ll find your pa and find out what the hell is goin’ on.”
“ I slep…”
The Chef put a finger to his lips.
“I know you did. When you was an agent, you were a different girl, darlin’ …”
“I wasn’t. I was a bitch. I betrayed everyone. That’s why I’m running round the world trying to stay alive. A lot of people want me dead.”
“And you was dead once too. And now you ain’t.”
Lorelei sighed. And coughed. The cigar was strong.
A long time ago she had been a Special Agent, working out of America’s underworld, and doing pretty much anything to get her man. And man, she had got him. Doctor Dementer. The man she now thought to be her father, and a man with whom she had most definitely had relations , prior to the idea of his paternal connection becoming a possibility. She’d also been dead, once upon a time. But now she wasn’t.
“I don’t know, I am tired of all this wandering about, looking over my shoulder. Even the Astral isn’t safe anymore.”
She had to raise her voice to be heard over the ascending cries of passion and depravity coming from Goat Boy’s room. The Chef caught her eye and blushed. Valerie had the foulest mouth known to man…or goat…or anything.
“Lorelei sweetheart, we’ve been running, all of us, for years. Running from bad things we did that make bad people come after us. We’ll all keep each other safe.”
Lorelei sighed.
“And now I am chasing after the one bad people I should be running from.”
The Chef looked at her.
“That’s girls, honey. That’s just girls.”
**********
Lorelei lay in the shabby but comfortable small bed and watched the night sky through the window. Goat Boy and Valerie had been exiled to a barn a mile or so away. She could still faintly hear them.
She could also hear something else, something like a million wind chimes being dropped on a marble floor several miles above her head. Over and over again. It wasn’t getting any louder, it was just there all the time. And sometimes she would catch a glint of silvery dust shimmering in a tiny tornado in a dark corner of the room.
She was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad thing. Hard to tell these days.
And she wanted The Other One badly.
Then she heard it, a clump and a groan, as if something or someone had fallen over heavily in the kitchen. She sighed. She was a brave girl and it never got you anywhere, bravery. It made you get up in the night and go downstairs without a weapon in the dark and confront whatever unworldly creature was waiting for you. All this occurred to her as she opened the door to the kitchen and turned on the light.
At first she thought a man was slumped on the floor, dressed in a battered duster coat, face down, the curls of a ragged beard flowing from the downturned head. Then she caught sight of his hand. Beautifully manicured red nails, delicate skin, a tasteful ring or two.
Lorelei caught her breath.
“Hello Hester.”
********
When she had got Hester, a bearded lady and one time member of Doctor Dementer’s circus of freaks, to her feet and positioned somewhat slackly in a chair, she had poured bourbon after bourbon into the bearded lady’s mouth until Hester coughed and moaned and finally opened her eyes.
“Hi girly,” she said. “Thunk you was dead. I did shoot you myself.”
She laughed and it became a cough and then a rattle and her eyes crossed slightly. Lorelei was aware of the blood running from somewhere under the ragged coat. Hester was dying.
“I came back. It’s not rocket science.”
“You been runnin’ ever since. The Doc, he’s after you.”
“I know,” sighed Lorelei, rubbing her face. “And I am not running from him any more. If he wants me dead, then he can damn well tell me why. In person. “
Hester looked up through clouding eyes.
“He don’t want you dead! He wants to find you and make everything ok.”
“Mr Punch? Mr fucking Punch? I KNOW that was his doing!”
Hester coughed.
“Punch got out of control. The Doc, something bad was after you and he wanted you hidden for a while. Hoped you’d get stuck in there and not get out. Not till he had done what he needed to , to keep you safe.”
Lorelei’s head was a whirl.
“I don’t understand?.You…oh Hester, what the fuck is going on?”
Hester moaned again and clutched her side.
“I ain’t got long. I came here to tell you to sit tight. The Doc’ll come get you. Then it will all be ok. And I’m sorry I killed you back then. Them days was hard and I was hurtin’. And you an Agent and all, you was the enemy.”
Lorelei nodded. She didn’t like to dwell on her old life if she could help it. It was too painful.
“Hester?”
“Laurie, I’m dyin’. There’s a bad thing in this world, and its after you. Your Daddy, he ain’t done much for you in your life. For a long while, he dint even know you was his girl . Now he does and he…will..come. A girl needs her daddy in her life, no matter what. He’s the most important thing in the world.”
Hester coughed once, harshly, and closed her eyes. Lorelei looked away. When she looked back Hester was dead.
********
For a long time Lorelei sat in the kitchen, drinking magical bourbon and killing herself with apparated smokes. She would send the others away. Goat Boy could vanish into Faery, The Chef and The Other one could just saddle on up and get out of town. She would stay. It made sense. She sighed and wondered what the hell she was going to do with Hester’s body.
A thump and a groan from the door made her look up.
The Other One staggered into the kitchen clutching the knife embedded in his chest. A black silk top hat followed close behind, shedding tarot cards behind the man under the hat.
“Get a damn towel, girl, now!”
Lorelei jumped to her feet and grabbed a tea towel from the top of the cooker.
Doctor Dementer was lowering The Other One onto the floor.
“Don’t touch the knife. Leave it! Just wait a while. Here, give me that cloth.”
Lorelei passed the towel over and for one brief second Dementer squeezed her fingers. Their dark eyes met.
“Jesus this hurts..” groaned The Other One. Lorelei stroked his face gently.
“It’ll be ok. Just don’t move.”
Dementer was holding the cloth to wound around the knife. He looked up.
“Hester make it?”
Lorelei shook her head.
“Damn. Ok, I’ll do this myself. Get The Chef.”
Lorelei ran down the corridor and hammered on the door of The Chef’s room. There was no sound from within. She kicked the door down and dragged the sleeping and drunken man from his bed. He was still wearing his Stetson.
“Get up! Now!”
The Chef looked groggily at her.
“Wassup honey?”
“The Other One. He’s hurt. Quick!”
The Chef was standing and sober in seconds. Together they dashed back to the kitchen.
“Shit, Dementer!”
The Chef took a step back.
“Ain’t I. Give me a knife and get down here.”
Dementer’s voice suggested that messing about and wasting time were a fast track to hell. The Chef handed him one of his own knives and knelt beside The Other One’s body.
“It’s a Dark Knife. Tell me there aren’t Demons out there?”
Dementer nodded.
“They’s after my girl here. I been running ahead of them for weeks, but they caught up with me last night. When Hester shot her, way back when, and she died, I used Demon blood to bring her back to life. And they don’t like that, no sir.”
The Chef nodded and then looked up.
“Lorrie honey, go in the other room. Please?”
“No. I want to stay with him.”
“Lorelei, go.”
Dementer’s voice was flat but harsh.
Lorelei leant across and reached out a hand to grasp The Other One’s shoulder. His breathing was laboured and his face white.
“No. I stay.”
Dementer looked at her steadily.
“My girl.”
And they began to save The Other One’s life.
**********
As dawn broke, Lorelei wished she had left the room. When they finally removed The Dark Knife, The Other One’s body spasmed and leapt around the room, a macabre and insane clown in a rictus parody of circus moves. Finally he shuddered to the floor, his bow tie spinning in erratic circles till finally it was still. There was blood everywhere. But he was alive.
Lorelei knelt beside him and held him as tight to her as she could. He was murmuring something she could not quite hear, so she bent her ear to his lips. And when she heard what he was saying, tears began to fall onto her pale cheeks, but she was smiling. The Chef raised an eyebrow and glanced at Dementer. Who was also smiling.
“He told her his name, didn’t he?”
Dementer nodded and knelt beside The Other One.
“Welcome to the family, lad. You’ll make a fine son-in-law.”
********
Dementer was still on his knees when the door crashed open and Valerie glowed her way inside. She was dragging Goat Boy behind her by one hoof and one foot. Deranged with her passions, his psyche had gone into overdrive, and his halves were now split down the meridian. One man eye and one goat eye remained resolutely closed.
Valerie dropped the extremities and scowled.
“Asleep! Again! This…”
She caught sight of Dementer and stopped.
“Who are you?”
“Doctor Dementer, at your service,” he said, rising to his feet and swooping into a seamless bow.
Valerie looked him up and down and licked her lips.
“Bedroom.Now.”
And with a wink and a click of his heels, Dementer skipped down the corridor behind her.
The bedroom door slammed happily.
*******
The Chef helped Lorelei to get The Other One onto a sofa, but he was looking better all the time. Not once did his eyes leave Lorelei, wherever she went, whatever she did.
“Congratualations an’ all. Maybe I can make the cake for the wedding?”
The Chef was already seeing confectionary pornography in his mind. Butter. Cream. Marzipan. A little Faery essence for luck maybe..
“Be honoured, sir,” said The Other One in a cracked but up beat voice.
“Ditto,” said Lorelei.”And what I …”
There was a slamming of doors in the corridor. Lorelei raised an eyebrow.
“Here she goes again…”
Dementer walked cockily into the room.
“Valerie’s sleeping.”
His grin was as wide as the world.
“Faeries don’t sleep,” said the Chef, glowing with manly admiration.
“They do now,” replied Dementer. “Which reminds me, let’s go sort out those Demons that are right outside the door.”
The Other One stiffened and tried to get to his feet. Lorelei placed her hand firmly on his shoulder and shook her head. The Chef grabbed his knives.
Dementer raised a hand.
“Sit down gents. This ain’t gonna be hard. Not no more.”
Dementer walked over to Lorelei and put a finger to her cheek.
“My girl here, an’ her man. They done a good thing back there on the Astral. See, Demons is afraid of nothing. You can’t kill ‘em. But you can make ‘em go away with things that sap their dark. With things that just kinda disregard them. Nothin’ a Demon hates more than bein’ disregarded.”
The Chef , who was really warming to Dementer, tossed him a cigar. Dementer caught it between his lips.
“And we got that very thing?” asked The Chef.
Dementer nodded.
“See, what’s the opposite of ‘em? What’s bright and mad and takes no notice of anythin’ but themselves? What can’t really die? What’s older’n even Demons? “
“What talks shit and wears men down with a look and is so fuckin’ relentless?” added GoatBoy, who was currently all man and very confused.
Lorelei held her breath.
“Exaccerly,” said Dementer. “Faeries.”
And he clicked his fingers three times, and whistled an odd and old tune that hurt the ears, and then the room was filled with windchimes dropping on marble and a whole troupe of naked Faeries, male and female, floating in mid air, fluttering by the ceiling, making sparks by the cooker, playing with The Chef’s long hair, had entered the room.
Dementer’s wide as the world grin bridged universes.
“Go at ‘em. Let the carnival begin.”
**************
Later, much later, the fields were scattered with Demon limbs and tattered black winged remnants. The Faeries proved to be a vicious and tactless enemy, with no thought to the protocols of war. Rather, there was a lot of screaming and shouting and then the Demons attempted to flee. A Faery in its wrath was a thing to avoid. Lorelei had not realised they had talons and claws and teeth , and a quite frankly Kurt Russell-esque armoury of improbable physical weaponry at their disposal, should they choose to display it. And they had. Dark blood covered the dusky grass and the little band of comrades had little to do but watch through the kitchen window and gape at the carnage.
Until finally it was over.
Then began a party of such glowing drunkenness and wanton behaviour even Goat Boy looked nervous.
“Anyone for supper?” asked The Chef.
***********
Valerie finally emerged from her room after dinner and walked straight through the kitchen without a word. She didn’t even slam the door on her way outside. Dementer looked nervous as she passed and The Other One smiled to himself. It was pretty obvious Dementer had only laid a hand on her in a physician’s capacity.
“She ok?” asked The Chef of Lorelei.
Lorelei shrugged. A sleeping Valerie that did not slam doors or demand men follow her to a bedroom was unusual in the extreme.
Dementer was pouring another drink for everyone. There was something calming in the candlelight, the clinking of glass, the warmth of the oven. And the company of friends, Lorelei thought.
They chatted of nothing, The Other One holding her hand, across the table her father smiling and promising long talks and explanations. And end to the uncertainties in her life. Goat Boy was enjoying the rest. The Chef was dozing, dreaming of asparagus and Satie.
For some time, a slight hissing had been coming from just outside the window behind Lorelei’s head. Like cicadas, but softer. Out of the corner of her eye she would catch a brief spasm of light, tiny and fleeting but there all the same. Withdrawing her hand from The Other One’s, she drew back her chair and stood to peer through the curtains.
At first she couldn’t quite reconcile what she was seeing. But when she realised what it was she laughed softly.
“Charlie, put out the candles,” she whispered in The Other One’s ear. As he did so, she placed a finger to her lips.
“Ssshh. And look.” Drawing the curtains wide, she stepped to the side of the window so everyone could see what she had seen.
The night was black as tar. But there were a lot of bright somethings framed against it.
Dementer chuckled. The Chef hiccupped. Goat Boy went very, very pale.
Outside, in the dark, numerous tiny, glowing goats with wings thronged the air…
Intro from the lady hersel’
Franklin Marsh created a set of characters for his stories and I stole one, Lorelei, and used her for my own stuff. Lorelei and her band of weird mates roam the world getting into scrapes with odd beings. This is the follow up to "Mr Punch" and "Angels". In which we meet Lorelei's dad. Apparently........
Lorelei and the Unseemly Court
Valerie was being awkward.
Goat Boy was exhausted. He was currently lying dead to the world on a sofa in the kitchen, unwakeable by or for anyone or anything. It had transpired that Faeries did not sleep. Ever. Regardless of which half was goat and which was man, it made no difference. He had no more in him. Quite literally.
And Valerie was not happy.
“Stupid animal. I want another pet!”
Valerie was following Lorelei around the small crofter’s cottage on the shores of a Loch that the little band were currently hiding out in. They had made it to Scotland.
Lorelei ran a hand through her dark hair. The streak of white was getting broader.
“Valerie, please. He needs to sleep. We all need to sleep. We aren’t like you.”
Valerie shrugged. Even in her ire she was a sight to see. Lorelei had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.
“No, you are not. You are pathetic. Wake him!”
Lorelei sighed. On route to Scotland they had run into various bands of spirit renegades, daemons, zombie horses, angry alien crossbred bovines and even a Vampire or two. All had fled at the sight of Valerie. But she was so damn wearing,
Lorelei would happily have engaged in hand to hand combat with the devil himself rather than face another evening listening to Valerie bang on about the uselessness of her pet, the coldness of this horrible country, the barren nature of the British countryside. Valerie did not like anything, unless it was her home land, alcoholic, or was capable of pleasuring her for weeks on end in one constant orgy of attention. And Lorelei had run out of the latter.
The Chef had gamely offered to stand in when Goat Boy finally caved in and collapsed. Valerie had looked him up and down, declared he smelled of garlic, and flounced out of the room.
She had now taken to looking sideways at Lorelei and licking her lips. Lorelei was increasingly worried.
“Valerie, listen to me. You chose to come along. And really, I am very grateful…”
Lorelei paused to remove Valerie’s hand from her thigh. She wasn’t that grateful. Yet.
“But you don’t have to stay with us. You can go home now. You got us here safe. And I thank you. But I have to do something here, and I can’t leave till it’s done.”
Valerie cocked her golden head on one side and appraised Lorelei levelly.
“Dead relatives, I think.”
Lorelei sucked in her breath.
“My father. I need to find him. I have a question or two to ask him.”
Valerie closed her eyes.
“I am old. Very old. I can see in your heart. You think I am foolish and only interested in the flesh. Certainly the flesh has a broad appeal. But I am many more things. I can see right into you. See your heart. I miss my father too . I miss my land. I will leave my pet and go home and then I will miss him too.”
Lorelei looked at Valerie. Such sadness in her face, all at once.
She rubbed a hand over her face.
Suddenly this was all very odd, Valerie behaving like a normal being, the sadness of their reality.
Valerie smiled, a sunburst avalanche of gold, and placed her hand back on Lorelei’s thigh. Lorelei let it stay there.
“Va…?”
“Huzza!”
Valerie glowered as The Chef bounded into the room. He was wreathed in strings of onions, and his pockets were dripping mushrooms.
“Shops! Wild food! New pans!”
He was incoherent in his culinary frenzy. It had been a while since he had found himself in a proper kitchen all his own, and he planned an orgy of cuisine so fantastical it would defy appetite and belief.
“Please.Shut the fuck up,” said Lorelei crossly. “We were talking.”?
The Chef lowered a frying pan and narrowed his eyes.
“Ah. Then I will leave you ladies to it.”
He walked back towards the door and stopped. Then turned. Sometimes Lorelei wondered what fear it was he could instil in his enemies. Then she remembered.
His eyes were filled with black, his mouth curved into a sneer filled with razor sharp shark teeth, four times wider than normal, five teeth deep. Smoke curled delicately from the cuffs of his tattered coat.
“But stay the fuck out of my kitchen in future.”
******
Goat Boy roused himself by late evening. The Other One was nowhere to be seen. He had been gone since just before dawn. Lorelei had heard him leave, had got up to watch his broad profile stalk away across the moors with intent. She wished she had gone with him.
The Chef had laid a sumptuous table. Valerie, who usually ate butterflies and small insects, was talking with her mouth full of the most wonderful mushroom and rabbit casserole in the world, barely taking the time to make her advances on Goat Boy. Who was eating with two spoons, alternately inserting one over filled cutlery item and then the other into his currently man shaped top half.
Lorelei also ate with gusto, despite the feeling of impending doom that washed over her.
It had been a long day and brought with it a lot to think about. That Goat Boy was some eternal being was unbelievable. She decided to ignore it. That The Other One was still gone was disturbing. That Valerie was proving to be a friend was even more disturbing.
When they finally could eat no more, Lorelei laid down her spoon and leaned back in her chair.
“That was delicious. Thank you.”
The Chef tipped his hat to her.
“My pleasure ma’am. It’s nice to have a proper arena again.”
He gazed around the small kitchen, bathed in late evening summer light, and smiled at the site of all the used pans and utensils. By the side of his plate lay his special knives. Idly he caressed the sharp blade of one, cutting his finger and smiling with a hint of shark as a few drops of indigo blood dripped from the blade onto the delicate muslin table cloth.
Valerie nodded her head slightly and then stood up and yanked Goat Boy to his feet.
“Bedroom. Now.”
Lorelei watched as the odd couple skittered away down the corridor, hand in hoof. The Chef caught her expression.
“He’ll be back soon, I should think.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Yes you were. Listen honey…” and The Chef tipped his chair backwards and looked at her expectantly. She apparated two cigars and a half bottle of bourbon, and handed one of the former and a glass of the latter to him.
“It’s a pickle and no mistake, this whole thing. But we’ll find your pa and find out what the hell is goin’ on.”
“ I slep…”
The Chef put a finger to his lips.
“I know you did. When you was an agent, you were a different girl, darlin’ …”
“I wasn’t. I was a bitch. I betrayed everyone. That’s why I’m running round the world trying to stay alive. A lot of people want me dead.”
“And you was dead once too. And now you ain’t.”
Lorelei sighed. And coughed. The cigar was strong.
A long time ago she had been a Special Agent, working out of America’s underworld, and doing pretty much anything to get her man. And man, she had got him. Doctor Dementer. The man she now thought to be her father, and a man with whom she had most definitely had relations , prior to the idea of his paternal connection becoming a possibility. She’d also been dead, once upon a time. But now she wasn’t.
“I don’t know, I am tired of all this wandering about, looking over my shoulder. Even the Astral isn’t safe anymore.”
She had to raise her voice to be heard over the ascending cries of passion and depravity coming from Goat Boy’s room. The Chef caught her eye and blushed. Valerie had the foulest mouth known to man…or goat…or anything.
“Lorelei sweetheart, we’ve been running, all of us, for years. Running from bad things we did that make bad people come after us. We’ll all keep each other safe.”
Lorelei sighed.
“And now I am chasing after the one bad people I should be running from.”
The Chef looked at her.
“That’s girls, honey. That’s just girls.”
**********
Lorelei lay in the shabby but comfortable small bed and watched the night sky through the window. Goat Boy and Valerie had been exiled to a barn a mile or so away. She could still faintly hear them.
She could also hear something else, something like a million wind chimes being dropped on a marble floor several miles above her head. Over and over again. It wasn’t getting any louder, it was just there all the time. And sometimes she would catch a glint of silvery dust shimmering in a tiny tornado in a dark corner of the room.
She was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad thing. Hard to tell these days.
And she wanted The Other One badly.
Then she heard it, a clump and a groan, as if something or someone had fallen over heavily in the kitchen. She sighed. She was a brave girl and it never got you anywhere, bravery. It made you get up in the night and go downstairs without a weapon in the dark and confront whatever unworldly creature was waiting for you. All this occurred to her as she opened the door to the kitchen and turned on the light.
At first she thought a man was slumped on the floor, dressed in a battered duster coat, face down, the curls of a ragged beard flowing from the downturned head. Then she caught sight of his hand. Beautifully manicured red nails, delicate skin, a tasteful ring or two.
Lorelei caught her breath.
“Hello Hester.”
********
When she had got Hester, a bearded lady and one time member of Doctor Dementer’s circus of freaks, to her feet and positioned somewhat slackly in a chair, she had poured bourbon after bourbon into the bearded lady’s mouth until Hester coughed and moaned and finally opened her eyes.
“Hi girly,” she said. “Thunk you was dead. I did shoot you myself.”
She laughed and it became a cough and then a rattle and her eyes crossed slightly. Lorelei was aware of the blood running from somewhere under the ragged coat. Hester was dying.
“I came back. It’s not rocket science.”
“You been runnin’ ever since. The Doc, he’s after you.”
“I know,” sighed Lorelei, rubbing her face. “And I am not running from him any more. If he wants me dead, then he can damn well tell me why. In person. “
Hester looked up through clouding eyes.
“He don’t want you dead! He wants to find you and make everything ok.”
“Mr Punch? Mr fucking Punch? I KNOW that was his doing!”
Hester coughed.
“Punch got out of control. The Doc, something bad was after you and he wanted you hidden for a while. Hoped you’d get stuck in there and not get out. Not till he had done what he needed to , to keep you safe.”
Lorelei’s head was a whirl.
“I don’t understand?.You…oh Hester, what the fuck is going on?”
Hester moaned again and clutched her side.
“I ain’t got long. I came here to tell you to sit tight. The Doc’ll come get you. Then it will all be ok. And I’m sorry I killed you back then. Them days was hard and I was hurtin’. And you an Agent and all, you was the enemy.”
Lorelei nodded. She didn’t like to dwell on her old life if she could help it. It was too painful.
“Hester?”
“Laurie, I’m dyin’. There’s a bad thing in this world, and its after you. Your Daddy, he ain’t done much for you in your life. For a long while, he dint even know you was his girl . Now he does and he…will..come. A girl needs her daddy in her life, no matter what. He’s the most important thing in the world.”
Hester coughed once, harshly, and closed her eyes. Lorelei looked away. When she looked back Hester was dead.
********
For a long time Lorelei sat in the kitchen, drinking magical bourbon and killing herself with apparated smokes. She would send the others away. Goat Boy could vanish into Faery, The Chef and The Other one could just saddle on up and get out of town. She would stay. It made sense. She sighed and wondered what the hell she was going to do with Hester’s body.
A thump and a groan from the door made her look up.
The Other One staggered into the kitchen clutching the knife embedded in his chest. A black silk top hat followed close behind, shedding tarot cards behind the man under the hat.
“Get a damn towel, girl, now!”
Lorelei jumped to her feet and grabbed a tea towel from the top of the cooker.
Doctor Dementer was lowering The Other One onto the floor.
“Don’t touch the knife. Leave it! Just wait a while. Here, give me that cloth.”
Lorelei passed the towel over and for one brief second Dementer squeezed her fingers. Their dark eyes met.
“Jesus this hurts..” groaned The Other One. Lorelei stroked his face gently.
“It’ll be ok. Just don’t move.”
Dementer was holding the cloth to wound around the knife. He looked up.
“Hester make it?”
Lorelei shook her head.
“Damn. Ok, I’ll do this myself. Get The Chef.”
Lorelei ran down the corridor and hammered on the door of The Chef’s room. There was no sound from within. She kicked the door down and dragged the sleeping and drunken man from his bed. He was still wearing his Stetson.
“Get up! Now!”
The Chef looked groggily at her.
“Wassup honey?”
“The Other One. He’s hurt. Quick!”
The Chef was standing and sober in seconds. Together they dashed back to the kitchen.
“Shit, Dementer!”
The Chef took a step back.
“Ain’t I. Give me a knife and get down here.”
Dementer’s voice suggested that messing about and wasting time were a fast track to hell. The Chef handed him one of his own knives and knelt beside The Other One’s body.
“It’s a Dark Knife. Tell me there aren’t Demons out there?”
Dementer nodded.
“They’s after my girl here. I been running ahead of them for weeks, but they caught up with me last night. When Hester shot her, way back when, and she died, I used Demon blood to bring her back to life. And they don’t like that, no sir.”
The Chef nodded and then looked up.
“Lorrie honey, go in the other room. Please?”
“No. I want to stay with him.”
“Lorelei, go.”
Dementer’s voice was flat but harsh.
Lorelei leant across and reached out a hand to grasp The Other One’s shoulder. His breathing was laboured and his face white.
“No. I stay.”
Dementer looked at her steadily.
“My girl.”
And they began to save The Other One’s life.
**********
As dawn broke, Lorelei wished she had left the room. When they finally removed The Dark Knife, The Other One’s body spasmed and leapt around the room, a macabre and insane clown in a rictus parody of circus moves. Finally he shuddered to the floor, his bow tie spinning in erratic circles till finally it was still. There was blood everywhere. But he was alive.
Lorelei knelt beside him and held him as tight to her as she could. He was murmuring something she could not quite hear, so she bent her ear to his lips. And when she heard what he was saying, tears began to fall onto her pale cheeks, but she was smiling. The Chef raised an eyebrow and glanced at Dementer. Who was also smiling.
“He told her his name, didn’t he?”
Dementer nodded and knelt beside The Other One.
“Welcome to the family, lad. You’ll make a fine son-in-law.”
********
Dementer was still on his knees when the door crashed open and Valerie glowed her way inside. She was dragging Goat Boy behind her by one hoof and one foot. Deranged with her passions, his psyche had gone into overdrive, and his halves were now split down the meridian. One man eye and one goat eye remained resolutely closed.
Valerie dropped the extremities and scowled.
“Asleep! Again! This…”
She caught sight of Dementer and stopped.
“Who are you?”
“Doctor Dementer, at your service,” he said, rising to his feet and swooping into a seamless bow.
Valerie looked him up and down and licked her lips.
“Bedroom.Now.”
And with a wink and a click of his heels, Dementer skipped down the corridor behind her.
The bedroom door slammed happily.
*******
The Chef helped Lorelei to get The Other One onto a sofa, but he was looking better all the time. Not once did his eyes leave Lorelei, wherever she went, whatever she did.
“Congratualations an’ all. Maybe I can make the cake for the wedding?”
The Chef was already seeing confectionary pornography in his mind. Butter. Cream. Marzipan. A little Faery essence for luck maybe..
“Be honoured, sir,” said The Other One in a cracked but up beat voice.
“Ditto,” said Lorelei.”And what I …”
There was a slamming of doors in the corridor. Lorelei raised an eyebrow.
“Here she goes again…”
Dementer walked cockily into the room.
“Valerie’s sleeping.”
His grin was as wide as the world.
“Faeries don’t sleep,” said the Chef, glowing with manly admiration.
“They do now,” replied Dementer. “Which reminds me, let’s go sort out those Demons that are right outside the door.”
The Other One stiffened and tried to get to his feet. Lorelei placed her hand firmly on his shoulder and shook her head. The Chef grabbed his knives.
Dementer raised a hand.
“Sit down gents. This ain’t gonna be hard. Not no more.”
Dementer walked over to Lorelei and put a finger to her cheek.
“My girl here, an’ her man. They done a good thing back there on the Astral. See, Demons is afraid of nothing. You can’t kill ‘em. But you can make ‘em go away with things that sap their dark. With things that just kinda disregard them. Nothin’ a Demon hates more than bein’ disregarded.”
The Chef , who was really warming to Dementer, tossed him a cigar. Dementer caught it between his lips.
“And we got that very thing?” asked The Chef.
Dementer nodded.
“See, what’s the opposite of ‘em? What’s bright and mad and takes no notice of anythin’ but themselves? What can’t really die? What’s older’n even Demons? “
“What talks shit and wears men down with a look and is so fuckin’ relentless?” added GoatBoy, who was currently all man and very confused.
Lorelei held her breath.
“Exaccerly,” said Dementer. “Faeries.”
And he clicked his fingers three times, and whistled an odd and old tune that hurt the ears, and then the room was filled with windchimes dropping on marble and a whole troupe of naked Faeries, male and female, floating in mid air, fluttering by the ceiling, making sparks by the cooker, playing with The Chef’s long hair, had entered the room.
Dementer’s wide as the world grin bridged universes.
“Go at ‘em. Let the carnival begin.”
**************
Later, much later, the fields were scattered with Demon limbs and tattered black winged remnants. The Faeries proved to be a vicious and tactless enemy, with no thought to the protocols of war. Rather, there was a lot of screaming and shouting and then the Demons attempted to flee. A Faery in its wrath was a thing to avoid. Lorelei had not realised they had talons and claws and teeth , and a quite frankly Kurt Russell-esque armoury of improbable physical weaponry at their disposal, should they choose to display it. And they had. Dark blood covered the dusky grass and the little band of comrades had little to do but watch through the kitchen window and gape at the carnage.
Until finally it was over.
Then began a party of such glowing drunkenness and wanton behaviour even Goat Boy looked nervous.
“Anyone for supper?” asked The Chef.
***********
Valerie finally emerged from her room after dinner and walked straight through the kitchen without a word. She didn’t even slam the door on her way outside. Dementer looked nervous as she passed and The Other One smiled to himself. It was pretty obvious Dementer had only laid a hand on her in a physician’s capacity.
“She ok?” asked The Chef of Lorelei.
Lorelei shrugged. A sleeping Valerie that did not slam doors or demand men follow her to a bedroom was unusual in the extreme.
Dementer was pouring another drink for everyone. There was something calming in the candlelight, the clinking of glass, the warmth of the oven. And the company of friends, Lorelei thought.
They chatted of nothing, The Other One holding her hand, across the table her father smiling and promising long talks and explanations. And end to the uncertainties in her life. Goat Boy was enjoying the rest. The Chef was dozing, dreaming of asparagus and Satie.
For some time, a slight hissing had been coming from just outside the window behind Lorelei’s head. Like cicadas, but softer. Out of the corner of her eye she would catch a brief spasm of light, tiny and fleeting but there all the same. Withdrawing her hand from The Other One’s, she drew back her chair and stood to peer through the curtains.
At first she couldn’t quite reconcile what she was seeing. But when she realised what it was she laughed softly.
“Charlie, put out the candles,” she whispered in The Other One’s ear. As he did so, she placed a finger to her lips.
“Ssshh. And look.” Drawing the curtains wide, she stepped to the side of the window so everyone could see what she had seen.
The night was black as tar. But there were a lot of bright somethings framed against it.
Dementer chuckled. The Chef hiccupped. Goat Boy went very, very pale.
Outside, in the dark, numerous tiny, glowing goats with wings thronged the air…
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Lorelei And The Angels
ANGELS – Samantha Crosby
The Chef was nodding his head and humming vaguely in time to some inner music only he could hear. Lorelei was humming along as well. She had a talent for getting inside a man’s head when he wasn’t looking.
“When are you ever going to get off this prog trip?” she asked him, inside his head, shouting over the ramblings of King Crimson.
The Chef jumped and dropped the battered wooden spoon he had been using to alternately stir the bubbling pot before him , and conduct Robert Fripp.
“What’s cookin’?” Lorelei asked, in the real world.
She examined the cauldron over the campfire. The Chef tapped the side of his nose and winked a chocolate brown eye.
“Smell, Lorelei, smell.”
And she did, hard and deep. Honey, chillies, a hint of lime, something…..else. Gold. Yes that was it. Gold. Oh dear.
“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
The Chef grinned.
“I did.”
Lorelei breathed hard. Mr Punch had been bad enough. But this?
“Where did you get…it?”
The Chef tapped his nose again. Lorelei reached out and punched him on it, hard enough to spray blood.
“Where. Did. You. Get. It.?”
The Chef uncrossed his eyes and wiped his face with a faded blue handkerchief.
“Goat Boy said he…found it.”
He wouldn’t look at her.
“Damn him.Damn you. Shit, this is bad.”
But already she was dipping a finger into the pot. She never could resist Angel stew.
After the seaside incident, Lorelei had deemed it prudent to have some brains and some muscle around her. By muscle she meant The Other One. There weren’t any brains. Goat Boy and The Chef came as part of the package regardless. One of them permanently cooking or drunk, the other dopey and sex obsessed and also usually drunk. Or stoned. Or both. But she needed them, right now and they were more than happy to watch her stride along in front of them in her tight dress and the high heels Goat Boat was always trying to hide so she was bare foot. She worried about him.
For a while they had shacked up on some Astral plane, keeping away from the real world, the Doc, everything else. Lorelei had lost count of the times she had ordered them to take no risks, draw no attention to them, until it was safe. And now that damn goat had gone and ‘found’ an Angel. That was bad enough but the Chef had gone and cooked her. Angel Stew. It made Lorelei’s mouth water just thinking about the taste on her tongue. Full, rich, luscious. Nothing like it. And also guaranteeing the eater would be pursued by hordes of avenging Angels with nothing more on their minds than separating the eater from their soul. Lorelei sucked her finger .A few drops of the stew and she was on the verge of fainting with pleasure.
“Oh, mmmm, yes, yes, mmmm”. She couldn’t help herself.
Goat Boy appeared, a slightly glazed look in his hazel Goat eyes. The bottom half of him being the man half today.
Lorelei composed herself and tried not to stare at the impressive lower portions.
“What did you do,” she demanded.
“Baaaaaaahhhh.”
“Don’t play the innocent animal with me. What did you do?”
Goat Boy shifted subtly and his halves reversed.
“Found her.”
He was nothing more than a shuffling, naughty schoolboy now.
“Where? And was she dead?”
“Sort of near that tall rock thing we passed a day or so ago. Definitely dead. Dead. Really.”
He looked at Lorelei and she knew he was telling the truth. He was stupid, indolent, carnally obsessive. But not a liar.
“That rock thing. You mean the monument to a Fallen Angel? The one that warned death to any that so much as touched it?”
Goat Boy nodded, but carried on meeting her gaze. Lorelei sighed and kicked the Chef hard on the shin with a bare foot. Her shoes had gone missing again.
“Quit laughing. Don’t think you get away with this for one moment.”
The Chef smiled lazily.
“I ain’t the one with my finger in the pot honey..” he drawled, and she hastily withdrew her hand from the cauldron and spat on the floor in front of him.
“Fuck you.”
Goat Boy looked up expectantly. Nothing he liked better than a foul mouthed woman sans footwear...
Later, the stew still cooking, Goat Boy and the Chef smoking joints like they were going to be outlawed at any second, Lorelei sat on a rock a little way away from them and worried. This was serious. They had taken a dead Angel, probably a self-sacrificial one, and they had cooked her. Little point in not using the term ‘they’, she reflected. Since Mr Punch, they were definitely ‘they’ now.
She glanced up at the darkening Astral sky. There was nothing up there, not yet, but even dead Angels had their guardians.
“Hell honey, you look a little mad.”
The Other One sat down beside her and undid his purple and yellow spotted jacket to reveal a Twisted Sister t-shirt. Lorelei apparated two cigarettes and half a bottle of bourbon. For a while the two of them smoked and drank and watched the campfire.
“We got trouble,” said The Other One at length.
“Tell me about it. We’ve got Angel on the menu.”
He looked at her.
“That’s not the worst of it.”
The Other One stood up and whistled low through his teeth. In the distance, Agatha, his horse, came ambling into view. There was something, someone, lying across her back. As Agatha drew nearer, Lorelei peered into the thickening gloom and drew in her breath sharply.
The Other One sighed.
“Yup.”
Lorelei took in the multi-hued wings, the voluptuous form, the endless pale hair that shone from within. The lack of clothes.
“Tell me you didn’t?” she began.
The Other One held a finger to her lips.
“I didn’t see her in time. You know what they are like. She was just eating butterflies and had her eyes closed and Agatha just ran right into her. Silly thing had herself half unseen.”
“Is she dead?”
“No, just knocked out.”
“Shit.”
If you were going to ride your horse into a Faery then you had better make sure you killed her because when she woke up, her fury was going to be more than a match for you, even if you were a daughter of darkness that hung out with killer clowns, chefs from hell and Goat Boy.
The Other One lifted the Faery off Agatha and laid her by the campfire, covering her with his jacket. Although it was hard, Lorelei managed to keep her fingers out of the stew.
“What now?”
The Other One shook his head.
“Leave her, and that pot of trouble, and get gone. Now.”
“They’ll come after us.”
“I know.”
He took her hand in his, dwarfing her slender fingers in his grubby white glove.
“I’ll look after you kid. You know that.”
The Faery sat up. Lorelei and the Other One scrabbled backwards, drawing knives and having heart attacks.
“What am I doing here?” asked the Faery, her voice being waterfalls in the spring.
Neither of them could speak. The Faery stood up, the jacket fell to the floor. The Other One looked away. Lorelei froze in fear and abject admiration.
“I SAID, what am I doing here?”
Her voice was now a thunderstorm.
“I..it...I”
The Other One’s breath was torn from his throat. She was killing him. Lorelei felt her heart beat faster and faster. Her pulse was racing. The Faery was also killing her.Blood began to run from her nose, her mouth. She could no longer breathe.
“One more time,” began the Faery, and then Lorelei felt herself released, heard The Other One muttering thankyou thankyou. And the Faery was gazing open mouthed at Goat Boy, who had nodded off but was now stumbling over to the odd trio, smiling slightly and drooling dreadfully.
“Whose is THAT?” asked the Faery.
Lorelei gulped hard.
“Y-yours. All yours.”
The Faery turned to look at her. Lorelei felt herself drowning in eyes so old yet so bright that it hurt the back of your head to look into them.
“For me? Then thank you..”
Goat Boy stopped stumbling but continued drooling.
“Naked,” he managed through a barrage of dribble.
The Faery continued to regard him, her head on one side, her lips parted.
“Pleasing.”
She extended one glowing hand toward Goat Boy, and he fell, quite literally, at her feet.
*******
Lorelei and The Other One sat in the dark desert of the Astral Plane, back to back, knees bent, just sharing the silence of each other. Every so often, Lorelei apparated a couple of smokes and a slug or two of bourbon, and they tried to ignore the quite frankly animalistic noises coming from Goatboy’s tent. The Faery had dragged him off, and going from the aural outpourings, she was eating him alive. Quite literally.
“Why’d you bring her with you?” asked Lorelei at last.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t just leave her there. What if something came along and took advantage of her? This is the Astral Plane. ‘S full of weird creatures.”
“Yeah, most of them us. We really do need to leave you know. A rampant Faery is one thing, a herd of Angels is another.”
The Other one stood and helped Lorelei to her feet.
“OK , let’s go.”
Lorelei kicked the Chef awake. He had been lying beside the dying camp fire, stirring the stew in his sleep.
“Come on, we are out of here. Now.”
“Damn, Lorelei. I don’t wann…”
“NOW! Do I have to remind you who my father is?”
The Chef shook his head, and took the pot off the fire, stamping out the flames and rubbing the embers into the ground.
“You gonna get him out of his tent?” he asked sullenly, nodding his head in the direction of the ululating canvas.
Lorelei nodded and opened her mouth to speak. Then she didn’t have the time to worry about Goat Boy at all. Because the dark sky was suddenly as bright as day, and filled with Angels. At least thirty of them, fluttering down on darkened wings, eyes red with rage.
“Shit.”
The Other One moved to stand beside Lorelei. He slid an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
The Chef came and stood at her other side, doing his best to stand behind her and not appear to be doing so at the same time.
An Angel was standing in front of them.
He opened his mouth and spoke imperiously. None of them understood a single word he said.
The Angel tried again, in a different language.
Not a language any of them knew.
Finally, after several more attempts, including something that may have been ancient German, they recognised some English. Oddly, spoken in a Salford accent.
“That,” said the Angel, pointing to the now almost cold pot of stew, “Is one of us. And you have cooked her.”
The Chef shuffled his feet and coughed. It looked like he would have to be brave, but the Angel was so tall, and so dark and , well, red glaring eyes always unnerved him.
“I cooked it…her. It was me.”
That was as brave as he got.
“But I didn’t kill her!”
The Angel raised a hand.
“Shut up, mate. The point is you cooked her. “
“I.. yes. I did. It’s what I do, cook.”
“And you knew she was an Angel din’t you? “
“Well, yeah.”
“But you didn’t kill ‘er?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
The words tumbled out of Lorelei’s mouth before she could stop them.
“Goat Boy found her. But he says she was already dead. And he couldn’t kill anything. He’s too stupid.”
She glared at the Angel.
“You made me say that didn’t you? Bastard.”
The Angel waved a hand at her and turned towards the tent.
He raised a hand and his wings fluttered dreadfully.
“Kill him.”
As one, twenty nine towering Angels advanced on the still shaking tent. The first one to reach it stretched out a hand and tore the material in two, to reveal a prone Goat Boy, his bottom half very obviously the man half, with the naked Faery straddling him very strenuously.
As one, twenty nine towering Angels started skipping backwards, bumping into each other in their hurry to get away from the Faery.
She looked up.
The harsh cry of rage that came from her shook the ground. And greatly pleased Goat Boy.
“HOW DARE YOU!” she screeched., clambering off Goat Boy and drawing herself to her fairly unimpressive full height. The Angels were still backing away, and even the one that had spoken was looking very unhappy.
“You have a bloody Faery. Shit. You never said.”
“She is… she is.. his wife! Yeah, his wife!” Lorelei garbled quickly, hoping to any deity going that the Faery hadn’t heard her.
“They don’t have me. I have them.” said the Faery and Goat Boy was suddenly beside her, licking her shoulder with his goat tongue. He knew she was most troublesome when she was quiet, even though their relationship was less than hours old.
She glanced at Lorelei.
“I am not his wife.”
Lorelei sucked in her breath.
“But he is my pet. And you..?” she said as she turned her ancient eyes on the Angel that had been talking.
“You are nothing. With your false wings and your stupid ideas.You are not an old race, and you do not rule anything. And you need to leave my pet ALONE.”
She hadn’t raised her voice but the venom was deafening. The Angels shuffled backwards. Suddenly the Faery seemed fifty feet tall.
Goat Boy swapped ends and stopped the licking.
“You all leave my Valerie alone!”
“Valerie?” The Other One whispered in Lorelei’s ear, as she stifled a snort.
The Angel grimaced, and tried to look brave in front of all the other Angels that were herding themselves like scared school girls behind him.
“These people ate one of our own.”
His voice was stuttered and shaken, but his eyes were red with hatred.
“So?” boomed Valerie. “She was roadkill. Why do you not bury and honour your dead? Instead you leave them lying on cold stone, to be eaten by Astral carrion?”
She paused and ran a hand over Goat Boy’s trembling shoulder.
“MY Astral carrion.”
The Angel shook his head.
“She was an offering.”
Valerie surveyed him levelly.
“So, you kill those in your realm you do not like and you dispose of them as offerings to your higher kind? Did she choose to be an offering?”
The Angel was silent. There was a shuffling in the ranks behind him, and a smaller, paler female Angel stepped from the herd.
“She did not want him.”
She nodded her head at the Angel who had been speaking.
“So he…he…”
Black tears ran from her red eyes.
Valerie continued to stare at him.
“I see. You kill what displeases you, or you cannot have, and you dress it up as divine sacrifice?”
Lorelei knew it would happen before it did. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand into The Other Ones.
“S’ok honey, you’re ok.”
He gripped her fingers hard.
Valerie shone. She had glowed before, as Faeries do, but now she was intense sunlight, shining hot and hard onto the Angels. They were immobile, their wings smoking and then bursting into flame. In their enforced stillness they could only open their mouths and scream to their maker as their wings ignited, their bodies burned from within, black blood running over fiery skin, until they were consumed and finished in crisp decimation. Even the one that had spoken out.
Lorelei had never felt colder in her life. She wanted her mother.
Finally it was done.
Lorelei was still.
The Other One drew her to him.
Valerie was smiling.
Goat Boy was drooling on Valerie’s shoulder.
“Barbecue anyone?” wheezed The Chef, through a rather large joint.
*********
Later, in the early Astral morning, Lorelei insisted that the now tentless Goat Boy and Valerie advance into the desert. Their cries and passions were getting irritating.
“Don’t give Agatha the bones!” she admonished The Chef, who was patiently feeding The Other One’s horse with charred Angel.
At her side, the Carny nightmare slipped an arm around her waist.
“What’s it all about, darlin’?” he asked gently.
Lorelei shook her head.
“I don’t know. My father, he wants me dead. Or needs me dead. And I don’t know why. But I have to find out. Find him. End this. I am not safe in the real world, and obviously the Astral is getting a little racy these days. “
“We’ve got her.”
“Valerie? She’s blinded by lust and she will only protect Goat Boy anyway. No, we can’t stay here anymore. She can’t kill off every Angel on the plane, and there will be more coming.”
“We go back to the real world then?”
The Other One tucked a finger under Lorelei’s chin and smoothed back a strand of white streak in her black hair.
If he kisses me, I bloody well will let him, she thought. But he didn’t.
Instead he drew away and walked a little distance from her.
“Ok guys, wagons roll. We are off.”
The Chef stamped out his joint on the sand and reached for his knives. In the pale distance Goat Boy and Valerie appeared, hand in hand. Both looked dazed, Valerie more so. Her feet were somewhat bruised. In a good way.
“I shall come,” said Valerie flatly.
Goat Boy met The Chef’s eye and sniggered.
“We have to go back to the real world, “ said Lorelei.”I have something to do, but I don’t know what. Yet. To make this all stop.”
“Where exactly we goin’, ma’am?” asked The Chef, adjusting the pies in his copious pockets.
Lorelei looked at The Other One.
“Scotland.”
The Chef was nodding his head and humming vaguely in time to some inner music only he could hear. Lorelei was humming along as well. She had a talent for getting inside a man’s head when he wasn’t looking.
“When are you ever going to get off this prog trip?” she asked him, inside his head, shouting over the ramblings of King Crimson.
The Chef jumped and dropped the battered wooden spoon he had been using to alternately stir the bubbling pot before him , and conduct Robert Fripp.
“What’s cookin’?” Lorelei asked, in the real world.
She examined the cauldron over the campfire. The Chef tapped the side of his nose and winked a chocolate brown eye.
“Smell, Lorelei, smell.”
And she did, hard and deep. Honey, chillies, a hint of lime, something…..else. Gold. Yes that was it. Gold. Oh dear.
“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
The Chef grinned.
“I did.”
Lorelei breathed hard. Mr Punch had been bad enough. But this?
“Where did you get…it?”
The Chef tapped his nose again. Lorelei reached out and punched him on it, hard enough to spray blood.
“Where. Did. You. Get. It.?”
The Chef uncrossed his eyes and wiped his face with a faded blue handkerchief.
“Goat Boy said he…found it.”
He wouldn’t look at her.
“Damn him.Damn you. Shit, this is bad.”
But already she was dipping a finger into the pot. She never could resist Angel stew.
After the seaside incident, Lorelei had deemed it prudent to have some brains and some muscle around her. By muscle she meant The Other One. There weren’t any brains. Goat Boy and The Chef came as part of the package regardless. One of them permanently cooking or drunk, the other dopey and sex obsessed and also usually drunk. Or stoned. Or both. But she needed them, right now and they were more than happy to watch her stride along in front of them in her tight dress and the high heels Goat Boat was always trying to hide so she was bare foot. She worried about him.
For a while they had shacked up on some Astral plane, keeping away from the real world, the Doc, everything else. Lorelei had lost count of the times she had ordered them to take no risks, draw no attention to them, until it was safe. And now that damn goat had gone and ‘found’ an Angel. That was bad enough but the Chef had gone and cooked her. Angel Stew. It made Lorelei’s mouth water just thinking about the taste on her tongue. Full, rich, luscious. Nothing like it. And also guaranteeing the eater would be pursued by hordes of avenging Angels with nothing more on their minds than separating the eater from their soul. Lorelei sucked her finger .A few drops of the stew and she was on the verge of fainting with pleasure.
“Oh, mmmm, yes, yes, mmmm”. She couldn’t help herself.
Goat Boy appeared, a slightly glazed look in his hazel Goat eyes. The bottom half of him being the man half today.
Lorelei composed herself and tried not to stare at the impressive lower portions.
“What did you do,” she demanded.
“Baaaaaaahhhh.”
“Don’t play the innocent animal with me. What did you do?”
Goat Boy shifted subtly and his halves reversed.
“Found her.”
He was nothing more than a shuffling, naughty schoolboy now.
“Where? And was she dead?”
“Sort of near that tall rock thing we passed a day or so ago. Definitely dead. Dead. Really.”
He looked at Lorelei and she knew he was telling the truth. He was stupid, indolent, carnally obsessive. But not a liar.
“That rock thing. You mean the monument to a Fallen Angel? The one that warned death to any that so much as touched it?”
Goat Boy nodded, but carried on meeting her gaze. Lorelei sighed and kicked the Chef hard on the shin with a bare foot. Her shoes had gone missing again.
“Quit laughing. Don’t think you get away with this for one moment.”
The Chef smiled lazily.
“I ain’t the one with my finger in the pot honey..” he drawled, and she hastily withdrew her hand from the cauldron and spat on the floor in front of him.
“Fuck you.”
Goat Boy looked up expectantly. Nothing he liked better than a foul mouthed woman sans footwear...
Later, the stew still cooking, Goat Boy and the Chef smoking joints like they were going to be outlawed at any second, Lorelei sat on a rock a little way away from them and worried. This was serious. They had taken a dead Angel, probably a self-sacrificial one, and they had cooked her. Little point in not using the term ‘they’, she reflected. Since Mr Punch, they were definitely ‘they’ now.
She glanced up at the darkening Astral sky. There was nothing up there, not yet, but even dead Angels had their guardians.
“Hell honey, you look a little mad.”
The Other One sat down beside her and undid his purple and yellow spotted jacket to reveal a Twisted Sister t-shirt. Lorelei apparated two cigarettes and half a bottle of bourbon. For a while the two of them smoked and drank and watched the campfire.
“We got trouble,” said The Other One at length.
“Tell me about it. We’ve got Angel on the menu.”
He looked at her.
“That’s not the worst of it.”
The Other One stood up and whistled low through his teeth. In the distance, Agatha, his horse, came ambling into view. There was something, someone, lying across her back. As Agatha drew nearer, Lorelei peered into the thickening gloom and drew in her breath sharply.
The Other One sighed.
“Yup.”
Lorelei took in the multi-hued wings, the voluptuous form, the endless pale hair that shone from within. The lack of clothes.
“Tell me you didn’t?” she began.
The Other One held a finger to her lips.
“I didn’t see her in time. You know what they are like. She was just eating butterflies and had her eyes closed and Agatha just ran right into her. Silly thing had herself half unseen.”
“Is she dead?”
“No, just knocked out.”
“Shit.”
If you were going to ride your horse into a Faery then you had better make sure you killed her because when she woke up, her fury was going to be more than a match for you, even if you were a daughter of darkness that hung out with killer clowns, chefs from hell and Goat Boy.
The Other One lifted the Faery off Agatha and laid her by the campfire, covering her with his jacket. Although it was hard, Lorelei managed to keep her fingers out of the stew.
“What now?”
The Other One shook his head.
“Leave her, and that pot of trouble, and get gone. Now.”
“They’ll come after us.”
“I know.”
He took her hand in his, dwarfing her slender fingers in his grubby white glove.
“I’ll look after you kid. You know that.”
The Faery sat up. Lorelei and the Other One scrabbled backwards, drawing knives and having heart attacks.
“What am I doing here?” asked the Faery, her voice being waterfalls in the spring.
Neither of them could speak. The Faery stood up, the jacket fell to the floor. The Other One looked away. Lorelei froze in fear and abject admiration.
“I SAID, what am I doing here?”
Her voice was now a thunderstorm.
“I..it...I”
The Other One’s breath was torn from his throat. She was killing him. Lorelei felt her heart beat faster and faster. Her pulse was racing. The Faery was also killing her.Blood began to run from her nose, her mouth. She could no longer breathe.
“One more time,” began the Faery, and then Lorelei felt herself released, heard The Other One muttering thankyou thankyou. And the Faery was gazing open mouthed at Goat Boy, who had nodded off but was now stumbling over to the odd trio, smiling slightly and drooling dreadfully.
“Whose is THAT?” asked the Faery.
Lorelei gulped hard.
“Y-yours. All yours.”
The Faery turned to look at her. Lorelei felt herself drowning in eyes so old yet so bright that it hurt the back of your head to look into them.
“For me? Then thank you..”
Goat Boy stopped stumbling but continued drooling.
“Naked,” he managed through a barrage of dribble.
The Faery continued to regard him, her head on one side, her lips parted.
“Pleasing.”
She extended one glowing hand toward Goat Boy, and he fell, quite literally, at her feet.
*******
Lorelei and The Other One sat in the dark desert of the Astral Plane, back to back, knees bent, just sharing the silence of each other. Every so often, Lorelei apparated a couple of smokes and a slug or two of bourbon, and they tried to ignore the quite frankly animalistic noises coming from Goatboy’s tent. The Faery had dragged him off, and going from the aural outpourings, she was eating him alive. Quite literally.
“Why’d you bring her with you?” asked Lorelei at last.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t just leave her there. What if something came along and took advantage of her? This is the Astral Plane. ‘S full of weird creatures.”
“Yeah, most of them us. We really do need to leave you know. A rampant Faery is one thing, a herd of Angels is another.”
The Other one stood and helped Lorelei to her feet.
“OK , let’s go.”
Lorelei kicked the Chef awake. He had been lying beside the dying camp fire, stirring the stew in his sleep.
“Come on, we are out of here. Now.”
“Damn, Lorelei. I don’t wann…”
“NOW! Do I have to remind you who my father is?”
The Chef shook his head, and took the pot off the fire, stamping out the flames and rubbing the embers into the ground.
“You gonna get him out of his tent?” he asked sullenly, nodding his head in the direction of the ululating canvas.
Lorelei nodded and opened her mouth to speak. Then she didn’t have the time to worry about Goat Boy at all. Because the dark sky was suddenly as bright as day, and filled with Angels. At least thirty of them, fluttering down on darkened wings, eyes red with rage.
“Shit.”
The Other One moved to stand beside Lorelei. He slid an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
The Chef came and stood at her other side, doing his best to stand behind her and not appear to be doing so at the same time.
An Angel was standing in front of them.
He opened his mouth and spoke imperiously. None of them understood a single word he said.
The Angel tried again, in a different language.
Not a language any of them knew.
Finally, after several more attempts, including something that may have been ancient German, they recognised some English. Oddly, spoken in a Salford accent.
“That,” said the Angel, pointing to the now almost cold pot of stew, “Is one of us. And you have cooked her.”
The Chef shuffled his feet and coughed. It looked like he would have to be brave, but the Angel was so tall, and so dark and , well, red glaring eyes always unnerved him.
“I cooked it…her. It was me.”
That was as brave as he got.
“But I didn’t kill her!”
The Angel raised a hand.
“Shut up, mate. The point is you cooked her. “
“I.. yes. I did. It’s what I do, cook.”
“And you knew she was an Angel din’t you? “
“Well, yeah.”
“But you didn’t kill ‘er?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
The words tumbled out of Lorelei’s mouth before she could stop them.
“Goat Boy found her. But he says she was already dead. And he couldn’t kill anything. He’s too stupid.”
She glared at the Angel.
“You made me say that didn’t you? Bastard.”
The Angel waved a hand at her and turned towards the tent.
He raised a hand and his wings fluttered dreadfully.
“Kill him.”
As one, twenty nine towering Angels advanced on the still shaking tent. The first one to reach it stretched out a hand and tore the material in two, to reveal a prone Goat Boy, his bottom half very obviously the man half, with the naked Faery straddling him very strenuously.
As one, twenty nine towering Angels started skipping backwards, bumping into each other in their hurry to get away from the Faery.
She looked up.
The harsh cry of rage that came from her shook the ground. And greatly pleased Goat Boy.
“HOW DARE YOU!” she screeched., clambering off Goat Boy and drawing herself to her fairly unimpressive full height. The Angels were still backing away, and even the one that had spoken was looking very unhappy.
“You have a bloody Faery. Shit. You never said.”
“She is… she is.. his wife! Yeah, his wife!” Lorelei garbled quickly, hoping to any deity going that the Faery hadn’t heard her.
“They don’t have me. I have them.” said the Faery and Goat Boy was suddenly beside her, licking her shoulder with his goat tongue. He knew she was most troublesome when she was quiet, even though their relationship was less than hours old.
She glanced at Lorelei.
“I am not his wife.”
Lorelei sucked in her breath.
“But he is my pet. And you..?” she said as she turned her ancient eyes on the Angel that had been talking.
“You are nothing. With your false wings and your stupid ideas.You are not an old race, and you do not rule anything. And you need to leave my pet ALONE.”
She hadn’t raised her voice but the venom was deafening. The Angels shuffled backwards. Suddenly the Faery seemed fifty feet tall.
Goat Boy swapped ends and stopped the licking.
“You all leave my Valerie alone!”
“Valerie?” The Other One whispered in Lorelei’s ear, as she stifled a snort.
The Angel grimaced, and tried to look brave in front of all the other Angels that were herding themselves like scared school girls behind him.
“These people ate one of our own.”
His voice was stuttered and shaken, but his eyes were red with hatred.
“So?” boomed Valerie. “She was roadkill. Why do you not bury and honour your dead? Instead you leave them lying on cold stone, to be eaten by Astral carrion?”
She paused and ran a hand over Goat Boy’s trembling shoulder.
“MY Astral carrion.”
The Angel shook his head.
“She was an offering.”
Valerie surveyed him levelly.
“So, you kill those in your realm you do not like and you dispose of them as offerings to your higher kind? Did she choose to be an offering?”
The Angel was silent. There was a shuffling in the ranks behind him, and a smaller, paler female Angel stepped from the herd.
“She did not want him.”
She nodded her head at the Angel who had been speaking.
“So he…he…”
Black tears ran from her red eyes.
Valerie continued to stare at him.
“I see. You kill what displeases you, or you cannot have, and you dress it up as divine sacrifice?”
Lorelei knew it would happen before it did. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand into The Other Ones.
“S’ok honey, you’re ok.”
He gripped her fingers hard.
Valerie shone. She had glowed before, as Faeries do, but now she was intense sunlight, shining hot and hard onto the Angels. They were immobile, their wings smoking and then bursting into flame. In their enforced stillness they could only open their mouths and scream to their maker as their wings ignited, their bodies burned from within, black blood running over fiery skin, until they were consumed and finished in crisp decimation. Even the one that had spoken out.
Lorelei had never felt colder in her life. She wanted her mother.
Finally it was done.
Lorelei was still.
The Other One drew her to him.
Valerie was smiling.
Goat Boy was drooling on Valerie’s shoulder.
“Barbecue anyone?” wheezed The Chef, through a rather large joint.
*********
Later, in the early Astral morning, Lorelei insisted that the now tentless Goat Boy and Valerie advance into the desert. Their cries and passions were getting irritating.
“Don’t give Agatha the bones!” she admonished The Chef, who was patiently feeding The Other One’s horse with charred Angel.
At her side, the Carny nightmare slipped an arm around her waist.
“What’s it all about, darlin’?” he asked gently.
Lorelei shook her head.
“I don’t know. My father, he wants me dead. Or needs me dead. And I don’t know why. But I have to find out. Find him. End this. I am not safe in the real world, and obviously the Astral is getting a little racy these days. “
“We’ve got her.”
“Valerie? She’s blinded by lust and she will only protect Goat Boy anyway. No, we can’t stay here anymore. She can’t kill off every Angel on the plane, and there will be more coming.”
“We go back to the real world then?”
The Other One tucked a finger under Lorelei’s chin and smoothed back a strand of white streak in her black hair.
If he kisses me, I bloody well will let him, she thought. But he didn’t.
Instead he drew away and walked a little distance from her.
“Ok guys, wagons roll. We are off.”
The Chef stamped out his joint on the sand and reached for his knives. In the pale distance Goat Boy and Valerie appeared, hand in hand. Both looked dazed, Valerie more so. Her feet were somewhat bruised. In a good way.
“I shall come,” said Valerie flatly.
Goat Boy met The Chef’s eye and sniggered.
“We have to go back to the real world, “ said Lorelei.”I have something to do, but I don’t know what. Yet. To make this all stop.”
“Where exactly we goin’, ma’am?” asked The Chef, adjusting the pies in his copious pockets.
Lorelei looked at The Other One.
“Scotland.”
Monday, 26 January 2015
Castle Calreagh
Castle Calreagh – Franklin Marsh
Dedicated to Sam - caring, sharing and no mean storyteller.
The crowd in the public gallery gasped and there were shouts of protest as the usher stepped forward bearing the cushion. The judge leaned forward, grasped the square of black cloth, and placed it solemnly upon his head. He clasped his hands together and looked at the prisoner in the dock.
The red eyes stared balefully back at him. The flowing white locks had been shorn, giving the head an even more skull-like appearance. The man’s stance oozed a relaxed defiance, and, despite the rough prison clothes, he retained a seedy grandeur.
“Devereux Delacroix Dementer,” intoned the judge, “you have been found guilty of the most heinous crimes by a jury of twelve good men and true…”
Dementer faced the jury. Twenty male eyes averted themselves. Of the four remaining, two stared avidly, drool slipping from Marian Hardcastle’s smiling lips. The other two were covered by lids. Betty Smithers had fainted. There was a muffled thump as she slid from her seat. Another usher signalled frantically for help.
The journalists couldn’t believe their luck. One went so far as to claim that the tongue that licked the accused’s lips was forked.
“…and so I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
Dementer nodded at the judge and was led away, as the public gallery erupted. Women attacked men calling that hanging was too good for him. The police vainly attempted to restore order.
*****************
Dementer’s request for a last meal was grudgingly requested. He dined heartily on swan. There was consternation when the priest assigned to visit him dropped dead of a heart attack outside his cell door.
*********************
January 1st, 1967. 5 a.m.
A small, dapper man wearing a double breasted suit marched through the labyrinthine corridors, accompanied by two prison officers. He was let into the condemned cell.
Dementer stood erect, facing the door, hands clasped behind his back. The civilian slipped the restraint onto the prisoner’s arms, and the quartet set off for the place of execution.
They entered the small room, and Dementer moved under the noose. The dapper man tightened it around his neck.
“No bag,” said Dementer.
“As you wish,” replied the executioner. “Any final words?”
Dementer smiled.
“Not just yet,” he said politely.
The executioner nodded. An officer pulled the lever. Dementer disappeared through the trapdoor. There was a loud and satisfying crack and the rope pulled taut.
Silence, apart from the creaking of the rope, reigned for a few minutes. The officer by the lever heaved a huge sigh of relief, removed his cap, and wiped his brow.
The dapper man patted his arm embarrassedly.
“Well done, lads,” he said quietly, then moved to look down through the trapdoor.
The second officer noticed his frown.
“Something wrong, Mr. P?”
“No,” said the man. “Just unusual.”
“What’s up, Sir?”
The executioner led the way down the stairs. The three men surveyed the gently swinging body. Dementer’s head was at an unnatural angle. His eyes bugged, burst veins turning them completely red apart from the pupils. His tongue protruded.
“No voiding of the bowels. No ejaculation,” mused the executioner, strolling slowly around the late prisoner.
“Hmmmm?”
The two officers coughed and shuffled their feet. The executioner came out of his trance.
“Oh…er…carry on, gentlemen.”
He left, to collect his pay.
The officers cut down the corpse, leaving the noose around the neck. They placed the body in the cheap plywood coffin, and carried it to the door. A non-descript unmarked van was waiting outside, engine running. They threw the coffin unceremoniously into the back, slammed the doors and watched it drive off.
“Good fucking riddance.”
**************
The van drove slowly around the graveyard to an untidy, overgrown plot at the back. Two donkey-jacketed artisans waited beside an open grave. One joined the prison driver in lifting the coffin out of the van, and dropping it into the muddy hole.
“It’s not the Doctor fella, is it?” asked the other gravedigger nervously.
“Nah,” said the driver. “Some other shit.”
He smoked cigarette after cigarette as he watched them fill in the grave. He remained by the van after they’d finished. They walked away slowly, constantly turning to watch him. He didn’t move.
Sure they’d gone, he stepped forward, unzipped his flies, and urinated on the freshly turned earth. Zipping up, he managed to spit a globule of phlegm onto the damp soil.
“Fucker,” he threw at the grave, and climbed into the van.
****************
Winter dark came early. A shadowy figure slipped over the graveyard wall. It loped to the new unmarked grave. A tiny shovel bit into the earth, and a frenzied digging began, the figure pausing occasionally to wipe its scaled brow.
The shovel struck wood. The shape dropped to its knees and scrabbled at the remaining earth with its odd little hands. It rapped on the wood. A white fist punched straight through the coffin lid. Another hand joined it , tearing away half of the plywood.
Doctor Dementer, long white hair restored, sat up. He turned his head. His neck cracked. He grimaced, and looked at his rescuer.
“Hi, Wade,” he said. “On your own?”
“The others is back at the fairground, Doc. The judge, the police, and all them do-gooders is there. They say they’re gonna take the animals. Compensation for the victims.”
”We’ll see about that,” said the Doc , shakily crawling out of his grave.
Wade and the Doc slipped over the graveyard wall. A British Racing Green Morris Traveller awaited them. Wade drove, whilst the Doc struggled to get changed in the back. His white shirt/black suit ensemble had been laid out for him, along with a bottle of Haig. He took a few quick slugs, then tore a piece from his prison shirt, soaked it in scotch and plugged the neck of the bottle.
The Traveller nosed its way onto the fairground. A portly bearded lady and a young man clad in a sacking jacket and trousers, his exposed flesh covered in flowing reddish hair, stood in front of the big top.
They were being harangued by a crowd of smartly-dressed well-to-do people led by the judge, his wife and a chief inspector of police.
The elephant, Nellie, shifted uneasily in front of the entrance to the tent. A number of cages on wheels containing a large male lion, two Bengal tigers and a polar bear were lined up beside the pachyderm, and some roustabouts were preparing to move them. The bearded lady and the lion-man were protesting.
Wade brought the Traveller to a halt, and the Doc stepped out, punching out a collapsible top-hat, and setting it atop his white hair at a jaunty angle.
“Welcome to the show!” he bawled.
Shocked gasps went up from the crowd. The judge couldn’t believe his eyes.
“You’re dead! You must be! A double? A twin? I-I-I?”
“You-you-you what?” crowed the Doc. He took a lighter emblazoned with World Cup Willie from his jacket and lit the soaked rag. The crowd moved back.
“Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Then let the ceremony begin!” howled Dementer, hurling his Molotov cocktail at the big top. It shattered, Flames blossomed and spread alarmingly quickly.
The Doc made some passes in the air. Nellie trumpeted in rage, stood on her hind legs, then fell forward into the screaming crowd. All of the cages sprang open, and the beasts leaped out, tearing into the confused, milling humanity.
Hester the bearded lady and Leopold the Lion-Man ran for the Traveller. The Doc stalked towards the judge and his wife who clung to one another, screaming at the carnage taking place around them. The darkness, illuminated by the raging inferno, flung shadows of ripping, rending slaughter; a Bosch or Brueghel inspired purgatory.
“It can’t be you,” moaned the judge, as Dementer placed his hands either side of the older man’s face.
“Oh but it is,” supplied the Doc, bringing his hands together and crushing the legal head to pulp.
He wiped his hands on his jacket and turned to the judge’s wife, who was moaning in terror. He removed her hat and threw it into the flames. She sank to her knees sobbing. Sparks from the blaze floated towards her blue rinse, and ignited a spray-can’s worth of lacquer. As her head sizzled, the Doc took a cigar from the breast pocket of his jacket and lit it. He watched her eyes melt and heard her brain fry like a side of bacon.
“Hell of a way to start the year,” he muttered, and walked to the car. Leopold was behind the wheel, Hester in the front passenger seat. Dementer joined Wade in the back.
“Let’s go, Leopold.”
“Where to, Doc?”
“Head North.”
“We getting off this Godforsaken little island?”
“Sure. We’ll soon be back in the New World. There’s just something I have to do first.”
The Morris Traveller moved away from the conflagration.
“What?ll happen to the animals, Doc?” asked Hester.
“They’ll be killed.”
“I thought the Brits liked animals?”
“Not killers. Or Man-eaters. They’re wild animals, Hester. Just lucky they got a chance to be really wild before they die.”
The Doc lapsed into silence as the little car sped through the night.
It took them five days to reach the highlands of Scotland.
The Traveller turned from the main road and bounced down a rutted track. At the end of it was an earthen cottage perched precariously by the sea. A paddock containing two horses was on the left. The light, misty rain and what seemed like cloud formations at ground level obscured the ocean, but the oddities could hear the crash of the surf as they disembarked.
“Whoa!”
Everyone turned at Hester’s call. A gust of wind had moved the misty billows to reveal a castle. It seemed to be sitting in the clouds, tall and majestic.
Dementer led the way into the tiny cottage, stooping to get through the door. As eyes became accustomed to the dark, a crofter or fisherman could be made out, sat by one of the tiny windows, clad in folded-down Wellingtons, shapeless baggy black trousers, a huge chunky dark-blue Arran sweater with matching hat. His face was stained a deep dark brown by constant exposure to wind and salt water, and it was set off nicely by his white stubble and light blue eyes.
“William.”
“Doctor.”
“Can my friends and I stay tonight?”
“Aye.”
The Doctor led the oddities to a curtain. He pulled it back to reveal a small room stacked with mattresses.
“Get some rest. William and I will be going to the castle tomorrow. I want you to stay here and keep a lookout. There may be danger.”
He stepped out of the room and let the curtain fall.
******
Try as he might, Wade couldn’t sleep. Leopold snored and Hester gently wheezed. The alligator boy strained his scaled ears to hear what the Doc and the old crofter were talking about, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He must have dozed off eventually, for he was awoken by the front door closing. He scrambled across the cottage to one of the tiny windows.
The Doc and William were on a shingle beach just below the house. They were dragging a small motor boat into the water.
Wade looked up and gasped. The mist and clouds had cleared. They were situated in a small bay, and in that bay was a small island. Atop the island sat the magnificent castle.
The outboard motor roared into life, propelling the boat towards the island.
**************************
As they neared a small stone jetty, shouts rang out from the island. Dementer looked up to see an obese figure in an obscure uniform struggling down the stone steps from the castle to the jetty.
“Keep away! Go away! No trespassing! Schwein!!”
A smile slowly formed on Dementer lips. William hunched over the outboard and guided the boat alongside the jetty. The Doc sprang ashore just as the island guardian waddled up the jetty.
“I said clear off. No?”
He caught sight of the Doc’s smiling face.
“Du! Verdammte Klown!”
“Hello, Gunther,” drawled the Doc, landing a perfect left hook on the uniformed man’s chin as he struggled to draw pistol from a belt holster.
Gunther went down like a felled tree. William made the boat fast to a jetty post, and pulled another length of rope from under his seat. Dementer tipped the guardian into the boat with his feet.
Crofter and Doctor nodded at one another, and Dementer set out to climb the 144 stone steps. He looked up and stopped. Silhouetted against the horizon at the top of the steps was a woman. With no protection from the wind, her bright red hair was whipped across her face, and her blue and green tartan dress curled around her body.
As Dementer set off again, she turned and walked toward the castle. Her profile made the Doctor gasp, and begin to race upward.
He reached the entrance to the castle and glanced up at the black portcullis, hanging above him like a many-bladed Sword of Damocles. Being on an island, the fortress had no need of a moat.
Dementer walked through the entrance into a courtyard. It was crowded with geese, chickens and seagulls. The Doc heard the cawing of carrion crows on the battlements, and saw a golden eagle glide overhead.
He entered the building itself. Walking down a short hall, he strolled into the dining room.
She sat at the head of the table. He made to sit opposite, but she beckoned him closer. As he advanced, he saw that she was sat a little way away from the table, clutching her massively protuberant belly. Her breathing was coming in short gasps, and she was sweating.
“How close?” he asked.
“Imminent.”
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He comes and goes. Like some others…”
Her glance was venomous, but that could have been the pain.
“I heard Gunther shouting. I thought it might be him, but…”?
She groaned aloud.
He gently picked her up from the chair and carried her towards the bedrooms. She refused to go into the Master, instead choosing a much more simple and Spartan room.
Dementer fetched hot water and towels.
“The contractions are starting,” she groaned. “Oh Dev, I hope it’s a girl…”
It was a relatively short labour. She fainted as the baby girl entered the world. Dementer bit through the cord and tied it. He cleaned mother and baby. He tapped the baby’s bottom, and she cried lustily.
“Feisty, eh? Like your mother,” said the Doctor.
As he dried the baby’s hair, he stared, fascinated. It had been blessed with a thick, dark thatch. But there was a little fair line running down one side.
He looked at the mother, to see Morag awake and staring at him. He handed over the infant.
“She’s beautiful. I shall call her Lorelei,” Morag sighed.
The Doc paused at the bedroom door.
“Anything you need?”
“I have all I need,” replied Morag, cradling the tiny baby.
“Is he likely to come back soon?”
They stared at one another.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Call if you need me,” said Dementer tersely, turning away.
He left the castle and started down the steps to the jetty. His pace increased as he realised that he could see neither William nor Gunther by the boat.
William was laid out in the bottom of the craft, his mouth a grinning rictus in death. A second grin beamed from his slashed throat, and eight pints of blood had soaked into his clothes and the wood of the boat.
Dementer hurried back to the castle and checked the bedroom. Mother and baby slept soundly. He listened but could hear no sound.
He wandered, aimlessly at first, then down a spiral flight of stairs, some instinct compelling him to go underground. He passed three dungeons in a passageway hewn into solid rock. To his surprise, one was occupied. A midget slept soundly upon a wooden pallet, whilst a man-monster, a hairless gorilla slumbered on the straw-strewn stone floor.
Dementer opened the door, and removed their chains. They did not stir. He smiled and moved on.
He’d expected it to be cool, if not cold, down in the depths, but it was warm. He could hear machinery. Opening the next door he came to, he discovered a laboratory. Test-tubes whirled in centrifuges. Petri dishes containing cultures were everywhere.
Dementer examined a couple. He couldn’t be 100% sure, but would have bet on anthrax and cholera. There was a door at the far end of the lab. He opened it, then closed it quickly. Taking his time, he opened it again and slipped through.
Gunther was in the next room, engrossed by flashing lights, twitching dials and a set of instructions for the machine he was playing with. The far end of this room was a large picture window. Through it the Doc saw a medium sized rocket, the equivalent of a World War II V2.
Dementer stepped back into the laboratory, located a hypodermic needle and filled it from a Petri dish. He re-entered the far room. Gunther saw him reflected in the window and reached for his pistol.
The Doc struck like a cobra, emptying the hypo into Gunther’s neck. The guardian collapsed to the floor, hyperventilating and frothing at the mouth. It took about five minutes.
Dementer turned off the machine Gunther had been enthralled by, and walked back to the corridor.
The midget and the monster stood, waiting for him.
“I’m Dick,” said the midget, “and this is Claude.”
“Doctor Dementer. Pleased to make your acquaintance. Come with me, gentlemen.”
As they ascended the stone staircase, a blood-curdling shriek echoed throughout the castle. Dementer ran towards it’s source. He stopped in the dining room, as a blood-spattered Morag staggered in from the other side.
“He’s taken my baby!” she screamed, lurching toward the wall. The wall that was decorated with all manner of weaponry. Morag elected to seize a battleaxe. In ordinary circumstances, the Doc was sure she couldn’t have even lifted it but her frenzy gave her unimagined strength.
Dementer tried to stop her, but she saw only baby-snatchers and struck at him, missing by inches. The axe imbedded itself in the wooden table, and Morag desperately tried to free it.
Before the Doctor could do anything, Claude’s massive hand encircled her throat and squeezed.
Dementer turned away as he heard the neck being crushed. A gobbet of bright red blood shot from her mouth. The monster’s grip relaxed and Morag’s head flopped unnaturally behind her shoulders, before the whole body crashed to the floor.
The Doc nodded at his companions and raced for the door. He reached the top of the steps leading down to the jetty in time to see a bald, powerfully built man in a powder blue suit with dark blue cravat leap into William’s boat.
Dementer raced down the steps, watching the man gently place a white bundle in the prow of the boat, and untie the mooring rope. The Doc reached the end of the jetty as the outboard roared, and the small craft powered away from the island.
He almost dived into the sea after them, but pulled up short. Dick was astride Claude’s shoulders and frantically pointing to the left. The Doc looked around feverishly. Another boat! It was leaky and unstable, but the trio climbed aboard. A few minutes elapsed as Dick and the Doc showed Claude how to row. Time well spent as the decrepit craft fair flew across the sparkling water, past the floating corpse of William, the Doc poised at the front like Washington crossing the Delaware.
He leaped from the vessel and splashed ashore. William’s earthen cottage had collapsed upon itself. The Morris Traveller was gone. The Doc began clawing at the earth, joined by Claude and Dick. They uncovered Hester, Leopold and Wade, and revived them with water from the horse trough. They’d been watching from the cottage when it collapsed around them, thinking at first that the returning boat contained the Doc, but recognising the burly bald man when it was too late.
“He had something with him,” said a concerned Hester. “Looked…well, looked like a baby.”
“My daughter.”
Silence.
The Doc bit his lip and felt tears in his eyes. Lost control. Shown weakness.
Recovering his composure, Dementer signalled to Claude, and the huge creature retrieved a battered cart from nearby. The Doc dug up bridles and traces and hitched the two horses to the cart. The oddities climbed aboard, and Dementer flicked the reins. They set off at a slow jog-trot.
Wade coughed.
“Doc. Shouldn’t we be going faster? He’s got a car and…”
“It don’t matter, Wade. We’ll find them. After all, we’ve got ‘til the end of time.”
Dedicated to Sam - caring, sharing and no mean storyteller.
The crowd in the public gallery gasped and there were shouts of protest as the usher stepped forward bearing the cushion. The judge leaned forward, grasped the square of black cloth, and placed it solemnly upon his head. He clasped his hands together and looked at the prisoner in the dock.
The red eyes stared balefully back at him. The flowing white locks had been shorn, giving the head an even more skull-like appearance. The man’s stance oozed a relaxed defiance, and, despite the rough prison clothes, he retained a seedy grandeur.
“Devereux Delacroix Dementer,” intoned the judge, “you have been found guilty of the most heinous crimes by a jury of twelve good men and true…”
Dementer faced the jury. Twenty male eyes averted themselves. Of the four remaining, two stared avidly, drool slipping from Marian Hardcastle’s smiling lips. The other two were covered by lids. Betty Smithers had fainted. There was a muffled thump as she slid from her seat. Another usher signalled frantically for help.
The journalists couldn’t believe their luck. One went so far as to claim that the tongue that licked the accused’s lips was forked.
“…and so I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
Dementer nodded at the judge and was led away, as the public gallery erupted. Women attacked men calling that hanging was too good for him. The police vainly attempted to restore order.
*****************
Dementer’s request for a last meal was grudgingly requested. He dined heartily on swan. There was consternation when the priest assigned to visit him dropped dead of a heart attack outside his cell door.
*********************
January 1st, 1967. 5 a.m.
A small, dapper man wearing a double breasted suit marched through the labyrinthine corridors, accompanied by two prison officers. He was let into the condemned cell.
Dementer stood erect, facing the door, hands clasped behind his back. The civilian slipped the restraint onto the prisoner’s arms, and the quartet set off for the place of execution.
They entered the small room, and Dementer moved under the noose. The dapper man tightened it around his neck.
“No bag,” said Dementer.
“As you wish,” replied the executioner. “Any final words?”
Dementer smiled.
“Not just yet,” he said politely.
The executioner nodded. An officer pulled the lever. Dementer disappeared through the trapdoor. There was a loud and satisfying crack and the rope pulled taut.
Silence, apart from the creaking of the rope, reigned for a few minutes. The officer by the lever heaved a huge sigh of relief, removed his cap, and wiped his brow.
The dapper man patted his arm embarrassedly.
“Well done, lads,” he said quietly, then moved to look down through the trapdoor.
The second officer noticed his frown.
“Something wrong, Mr. P?”
“No,” said the man. “Just unusual.”
“What’s up, Sir?”
The executioner led the way down the stairs. The three men surveyed the gently swinging body. Dementer’s head was at an unnatural angle. His eyes bugged, burst veins turning them completely red apart from the pupils. His tongue protruded.
“No voiding of the bowels. No ejaculation,” mused the executioner, strolling slowly around the late prisoner.
“Hmmmm?”
The two officers coughed and shuffled their feet. The executioner came out of his trance.
“Oh…er…carry on, gentlemen.”
He left, to collect his pay.
The officers cut down the corpse, leaving the noose around the neck. They placed the body in the cheap plywood coffin, and carried it to the door. A non-descript unmarked van was waiting outside, engine running. They threw the coffin unceremoniously into the back, slammed the doors and watched it drive off.
“Good fucking riddance.”
**************
The van drove slowly around the graveyard to an untidy, overgrown plot at the back. Two donkey-jacketed artisans waited beside an open grave. One joined the prison driver in lifting the coffin out of the van, and dropping it into the muddy hole.
“It’s not the Doctor fella, is it?” asked the other gravedigger nervously.
“Nah,” said the driver. “Some other shit.”
He smoked cigarette after cigarette as he watched them fill in the grave. He remained by the van after they’d finished. They walked away slowly, constantly turning to watch him. He didn’t move.
Sure they’d gone, he stepped forward, unzipped his flies, and urinated on the freshly turned earth. Zipping up, he managed to spit a globule of phlegm onto the damp soil.
“Fucker,” he threw at the grave, and climbed into the van.
****************
Winter dark came early. A shadowy figure slipped over the graveyard wall. It loped to the new unmarked grave. A tiny shovel bit into the earth, and a frenzied digging began, the figure pausing occasionally to wipe its scaled brow.
The shovel struck wood. The shape dropped to its knees and scrabbled at the remaining earth with its odd little hands. It rapped on the wood. A white fist punched straight through the coffin lid. Another hand joined it , tearing away half of the plywood.
Doctor Dementer, long white hair restored, sat up. He turned his head. His neck cracked. He grimaced, and looked at his rescuer.
“Hi, Wade,” he said. “On your own?”
“The others is back at the fairground, Doc. The judge, the police, and all them do-gooders is there. They say they’re gonna take the animals. Compensation for the victims.”
”We’ll see about that,” said the Doc , shakily crawling out of his grave.
Wade and the Doc slipped over the graveyard wall. A British Racing Green Morris Traveller awaited them. Wade drove, whilst the Doc struggled to get changed in the back. His white shirt/black suit ensemble had been laid out for him, along with a bottle of Haig. He took a few quick slugs, then tore a piece from his prison shirt, soaked it in scotch and plugged the neck of the bottle.
The Traveller nosed its way onto the fairground. A portly bearded lady and a young man clad in a sacking jacket and trousers, his exposed flesh covered in flowing reddish hair, stood in front of the big top.
They were being harangued by a crowd of smartly-dressed well-to-do people led by the judge, his wife and a chief inspector of police.
The elephant, Nellie, shifted uneasily in front of the entrance to the tent. A number of cages on wheels containing a large male lion, two Bengal tigers and a polar bear were lined up beside the pachyderm, and some roustabouts were preparing to move them. The bearded lady and the lion-man were protesting.
Wade brought the Traveller to a halt, and the Doc stepped out, punching out a collapsible top-hat, and setting it atop his white hair at a jaunty angle.
“Welcome to the show!” he bawled.
Shocked gasps went up from the crowd. The judge couldn’t believe his eyes.
“You’re dead! You must be! A double? A twin? I-I-I?”
“You-you-you what?” crowed the Doc. He took a lighter emblazoned with World Cup Willie from his jacket and lit the soaked rag. The crowd moved back.
“Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Then let the ceremony begin!” howled Dementer, hurling his Molotov cocktail at the big top. It shattered, Flames blossomed and spread alarmingly quickly.
The Doc made some passes in the air. Nellie trumpeted in rage, stood on her hind legs, then fell forward into the screaming crowd. All of the cages sprang open, and the beasts leaped out, tearing into the confused, milling humanity.
Hester the bearded lady and Leopold the Lion-Man ran for the Traveller. The Doc stalked towards the judge and his wife who clung to one another, screaming at the carnage taking place around them. The darkness, illuminated by the raging inferno, flung shadows of ripping, rending slaughter; a Bosch or Brueghel inspired purgatory.
“It can’t be you,” moaned the judge, as Dementer placed his hands either side of the older man’s face.
“Oh but it is,” supplied the Doc, bringing his hands together and crushing the legal head to pulp.
He wiped his hands on his jacket and turned to the judge’s wife, who was moaning in terror. He removed her hat and threw it into the flames. She sank to her knees sobbing. Sparks from the blaze floated towards her blue rinse, and ignited a spray-can’s worth of lacquer. As her head sizzled, the Doc took a cigar from the breast pocket of his jacket and lit it. He watched her eyes melt and heard her brain fry like a side of bacon.
“Hell of a way to start the year,” he muttered, and walked to the car. Leopold was behind the wheel, Hester in the front passenger seat. Dementer joined Wade in the back.
“Let’s go, Leopold.”
“Where to, Doc?”
“Head North.”
“We getting off this Godforsaken little island?”
“Sure. We’ll soon be back in the New World. There’s just something I have to do first.”
The Morris Traveller moved away from the conflagration.
“What?ll happen to the animals, Doc?” asked Hester.
“They’ll be killed.”
“I thought the Brits liked animals?”
“Not killers. Or Man-eaters. They’re wild animals, Hester. Just lucky they got a chance to be really wild before they die.”
The Doc lapsed into silence as the little car sped through the night.
It took them five days to reach the highlands of Scotland.
The Traveller turned from the main road and bounced down a rutted track. At the end of it was an earthen cottage perched precariously by the sea. A paddock containing two horses was on the left. The light, misty rain and what seemed like cloud formations at ground level obscured the ocean, but the oddities could hear the crash of the surf as they disembarked.
“Whoa!”
Everyone turned at Hester’s call. A gust of wind had moved the misty billows to reveal a castle. It seemed to be sitting in the clouds, tall and majestic.
Dementer led the way into the tiny cottage, stooping to get through the door. As eyes became accustomed to the dark, a crofter or fisherman could be made out, sat by one of the tiny windows, clad in folded-down Wellingtons, shapeless baggy black trousers, a huge chunky dark-blue Arran sweater with matching hat. His face was stained a deep dark brown by constant exposure to wind and salt water, and it was set off nicely by his white stubble and light blue eyes.
“William.”
“Doctor.”
“Can my friends and I stay tonight?”
“Aye.”
The Doctor led the oddities to a curtain. He pulled it back to reveal a small room stacked with mattresses.
“Get some rest. William and I will be going to the castle tomorrow. I want you to stay here and keep a lookout. There may be danger.”
He stepped out of the room and let the curtain fall.
******
Try as he might, Wade couldn’t sleep. Leopold snored and Hester gently wheezed. The alligator boy strained his scaled ears to hear what the Doc and the old crofter were talking about, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He must have dozed off eventually, for he was awoken by the front door closing. He scrambled across the cottage to one of the tiny windows.
The Doc and William were on a shingle beach just below the house. They were dragging a small motor boat into the water.
Wade looked up and gasped. The mist and clouds had cleared. They were situated in a small bay, and in that bay was a small island. Atop the island sat the magnificent castle.
The outboard motor roared into life, propelling the boat towards the island.
**************************
As they neared a small stone jetty, shouts rang out from the island. Dementer looked up to see an obese figure in an obscure uniform struggling down the stone steps from the castle to the jetty.
“Keep away! Go away! No trespassing! Schwein!!”
A smile slowly formed on Dementer lips. William hunched over the outboard and guided the boat alongside the jetty. The Doc sprang ashore just as the island guardian waddled up the jetty.
“I said clear off. No?”
He caught sight of the Doc’s smiling face.
“Du! Verdammte Klown!”
“Hello, Gunther,” drawled the Doc, landing a perfect left hook on the uniformed man’s chin as he struggled to draw pistol from a belt holster.
Gunther went down like a felled tree. William made the boat fast to a jetty post, and pulled another length of rope from under his seat. Dementer tipped the guardian into the boat with his feet.
Crofter and Doctor nodded at one another, and Dementer set out to climb the 144 stone steps. He looked up and stopped. Silhouetted against the horizon at the top of the steps was a woman. With no protection from the wind, her bright red hair was whipped across her face, and her blue and green tartan dress curled around her body.
As Dementer set off again, she turned and walked toward the castle. Her profile made the Doctor gasp, and begin to race upward.
He reached the entrance to the castle and glanced up at the black portcullis, hanging above him like a many-bladed Sword of Damocles. Being on an island, the fortress had no need of a moat.
Dementer walked through the entrance into a courtyard. It was crowded with geese, chickens and seagulls. The Doc heard the cawing of carrion crows on the battlements, and saw a golden eagle glide overhead.
He entered the building itself. Walking down a short hall, he strolled into the dining room.
She sat at the head of the table. He made to sit opposite, but she beckoned him closer. As he advanced, he saw that she was sat a little way away from the table, clutching her massively protuberant belly. Her breathing was coming in short gasps, and she was sweating.
“How close?” he asked.
“Imminent.”
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He comes and goes. Like some others…”
Her glance was venomous, but that could have been the pain.
“I heard Gunther shouting. I thought it might be him, but…”?
She groaned aloud.
He gently picked her up from the chair and carried her towards the bedrooms. She refused to go into the Master, instead choosing a much more simple and Spartan room.
Dementer fetched hot water and towels.
“The contractions are starting,” she groaned. “Oh Dev, I hope it’s a girl…”
It was a relatively short labour. She fainted as the baby girl entered the world. Dementer bit through the cord and tied it. He cleaned mother and baby. He tapped the baby’s bottom, and she cried lustily.
“Feisty, eh? Like your mother,” said the Doctor.
As he dried the baby’s hair, he stared, fascinated. It had been blessed with a thick, dark thatch. But there was a little fair line running down one side.
He looked at the mother, to see Morag awake and staring at him. He handed over the infant.
“She’s beautiful. I shall call her Lorelei,” Morag sighed.
The Doc paused at the bedroom door.
“Anything you need?”
“I have all I need,” replied Morag, cradling the tiny baby.
“Is he likely to come back soon?”
They stared at one another.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Call if you need me,” said Dementer tersely, turning away.
He left the castle and started down the steps to the jetty. His pace increased as he realised that he could see neither William nor Gunther by the boat.
William was laid out in the bottom of the craft, his mouth a grinning rictus in death. A second grin beamed from his slashed throat, and eight pints of blood had soaked into his clothes and the wood of the boat.
Dementer hurried back to the castle and checked the bedroom. Mother and baby slept soundly. He listened but could hear no sound.
He wandered, aimlessly at first, then down a spiral flight of stairs, some instinct compelling him to go underground. He passed three dungeons in a passageway hewn into solid rock. To his surprise, one was occupied. A midget slept soundly upon a wooden pallet, whilst a man-monster, a hairless gorilla slumbered on the straw-strewn stone floor.
Dementer opened the door, and removed their chains. They did not stir. He smiled and moved on.
He’d expected it to be cool, if not cold, down in the depths, but it was warm. He could hear machinery. Opening the next door he came to, he discovered a laboratory. Test-tubes whirled in centrifuges. Petri dishes containing cultures were everywhere.
Dementer examined a couple. He couldn’t be 100% sure, but would have bet on anthrax and cholera. There was a door at the far end of the lab. He opened it, then closed it quickly. Taking his time, he opened it again and slipped through.
Gunther was in the next room, engrossed by flashing lights, twitching dials and a set of instructions for the machine he was playing with. The far end of this room was a large picture window. Through it the Doc saw a medium sized rocket, the equivalent of a World War II V2.
Dementer stepped back into the laboratory, located a hypodermic needle and filled it from a Petri dish. He re-entered the far room. Gunther saw him reflected in the window and reached for his pistol.
The Doc struck like a cobra, emptying the hypo into Gunther’s neck. The guardian collapsed to the floor, hyperventilating and frothing at the mouth. It took about five minutes.
Dementer turned off the machine Gunther had been enthralled by, and walked back to the corridor.
The midget and the monster stood, waiting for him.
“I’m Dick,” said the midget, “and this is Claude.”
“Doctor Dementer. Pleased to make your acquaintance. Come with me, gentlemen.”
As they ascended the stone staircase, a blood-curdling shriek echoed throughout the castle. Dementer ran towards it’s source. He stopped in the dining room, as a blood-spattered Morag staggered in from the other side.
“He’s taken my baby!” she screamed, lurching toward the wall. The wall that was decorated with all manner of weaponry. Morag elected to seize a battleaxe. In ordinary circumstances, the Doc was sure she couldn’t have even lifted it but her frenzy gave her unimagined strength.
Dementer tried to stop her, but she saw only baby-snatchers and struck at him, missing by inches. The axe imbedded itself in the wooden table, and Morag desperately tried to free it.
Before the Doctor could do anything, Claude’s massive hand encircled her throat and squeezed.
Dementer turned away as he heard the neck being crushed. A gobbet of bright red blood shot from her mouth. The monster’s grip relaxed and Morag’s head flopped unnaturally behind her shoulders, before the whole body crashed to the floor.
The Doc nodded at his companions and raced for the door. He reached the top of the steps leading down to the jetty in time to see a bald, powerfully built man in a powder blue suit with dark blue cravat leap into William’s boat.
Dementer raced down the steps, watching the man gently place a white bundle in the prow of the boat, and untie the mooring rope. The Doc reached the end of the jetty as the outboard roared, and the small craft powered away from the island.
He almost dived into the sea after them, but pulled up short. Dick was astride Claude’s shoulders and frantically pointing to the left. The Doc looked around feverishly. Another boat! It was leaky and unstable, but the trio climbed aboard. A few minutes elapsed as Dick and the Doc showed Claude how to row. Time well spent as the decrepit craft fair flew across the sparkling water, past the floating corpse of William, the Doc poised at the front like Washington crossing the Delaware.
He leaped from the vessel and splashed ashore. William’s earthen cottage had collapsed upon itself. The Morris Traveller was gone. The Doc began clawing at the earth, joined by Claude and Dick. They uncovered Hester, Leopold and Wade, and revived them with water from the horse trough. They’d been watching from the cottage when it collapsed around them, thinking at first that the returning boat contained the Doc, but recognising the burly bald man when it was too late.
“He had something with him,” said a concerned Hester. “Looked…well, looked like a baby.”
“My daughter.”
Silence.
The Doc bit his lip and felt tears in his eyes. Lost control. Shown weakness.
Recovering his composure, Dementer signalled to Claude, and the huge creature retrieved a battered cart from nearby. The Doc dug up bridles and traces and hitched the two horses to the cart. The oddities climbed aboard, and Dementer flicked the reins. They set off at a slow jog-trot.
Wade coughed.
“Doc. Shouldn’t we be going faster? He’s got a car and…”
“It don’t matter, Wade. We’ll find them. After all, we’ve got ‘til the end of time.”
Lorelei's Revenge
Lorelei’s Revenge – Samantha Crosby
Lorelei’s head ached where the hunchback had hit her with the hammer. She ran a finger over the lump and winced. The bastard. When she got out of here and found the Doc again, his AND the hunchback’s lives would not be worth living. Not when her father found out what they had done to her. Times had been hard recently but her father wasn’t the kind of man to be messed around with. There would be a whole lot of ignored pleas for mercy when he was done with them.
She tried to stretch her legs but they didn’t go too far because she was chained to a crocodile. She knew it was a crocodile because she had heard its jaw clack, and felt its scaly skin. As far as she could tell it was sleeping. It yawned hugely every so often, and shifted its slithery bulk, but it left her alone. Her ankle was cooling where it touched the crocodile’s ankle. Did crocodiles have ankles? Whatever it was, she was tied tight to it with a thin metal chain. Incongruously a string of sausages lay across its tail.
Lorelei wished Goat Boy were there. He’d save her. But he was off somewhere with his dark cohorts, slaying angels and eating the Chef’s strange food, cooked over fires made with the bones of children and other terrible creatures. She had eaten the Chef’s food on more than one occasion and although her throat ached with the memory of its fire, the rest of her cried out for more. The Chef, Goat Boy and the Other One crossed planes travelled, both Astral and physical, by Lorelei every so often, and although they pleaded with her to join their merry band for good she always refused. Independence was all. But she more than happy to fight alongside them when called for. They were always there for her at any rate.
The crocodile shifted once more and was still. It was snoring.
“Excuse me, ” said Lorelei.
The crocodile didn’t stir.
She pushed it with her other foot. Ah. They had left her shoe on. Reaching down, she slipped the shiny, black killer stiletto heel off and readied it in her hand. Swiftly she raised it high above her head and brought it down quick and very, very hard so that the sharp heel pierced the crocodile’s sleeping eye and went down into its brain, killing it instantly. Black blood dribbled out through the hole as Lorelei withdrew her footwear of death. She remembered the first day she wore them. Goat Boy was practically a puddle of worship over them, running a tongue over them and murmuring incoherently.
“I do believe,” Lorelei muttered to the dead crocodile “that he was half right. At least, they are certainly fuck-YOU-shoes.”
But she was still chained to a dead crocodile in a dark somewhere or other and this was not good. They, whoever they were, had taken her coat and her bag, and one killer shoe wasn’t a great deal of use.
“Satan?”
Nothing.
“Satan??”
Somewhere in the dark a mouse cried and was silent. There was a low mew.
“Thank goodness! Please, detach me from this reptile!”
A sleek black cat strolled over to Lorelei, swishing its fluffy tail and smirking.
“Yes, I am chained to a dead crocodile. In my defence, I did kill it.”
Satan glanced at the chain, which disappeared in an instant.
“Yes, yes. I owe you. Thank you.”
Lorelei rubbed her freed ankle. When she looked up Satan was gone. She knew she would be seeing him again very soon though, when he had decided to call in his favour. Difficult creatures, demons going around insisting they were really cats. A bit screwed up in fact, she thought.
She got to her feet, holding the shoe of death in her left hand. With her right she made a few motions in the air and suddenly she was holding a silver zippo lighter. She didn’t have much magic herself, unlike her father, but she could conjure up the essentials, like lighters, Jack Daniels and the odd cigarette or two. Flicking it into life, she gazed around. She was in a cave, one dripping with water and bunched with seaweed. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the sea. Now that she was concentrating, she could also hear the faint cries of children, fairground music…
“The bloody seaside! Ace!”
Looking around, the cave appeared to have no entrance and no exit. She turned her attention upwards. Ah. There was a rusted iron ladder descending from a hatch in the ceiling, ending about two feet above her head. She was remembering a little more now. The hunchback and the policeman had grabbed her, as she stood eating ice cream and watching a woman in a tank pretending to be a mermaid. She had been waiting for The Chef to arrive. He had a...pie or two for her. His special pies. When he hadn’t showed, she had made to leave and suddenly a policeman had taken her arm.
“Madam?”
She had turned.
“Miss, thank you. It’s Miss.”
And the hunchback had raised his hammer, reached up and knocked her out with one swift blow.
They must have bundled her down into this cave and chained her to the crocodile. And now she had to get out. Then find them. Before she killed them she might even ask them WHY they had chained her to a crocodile.
She pushed her long black hair out of her eyes. The two streaks of white which defined each side of her parting glowed sliver in the dim light. There was sand and blood on her tight black dress. Damn.
She placed the heel of her killer shoe between her teeth. There was no way she was going out there unarmed. She looked at the hatch in the ceiling.
Lorelei was tall, even without her shoes, and she took a jump and grabbed the bottom rung of the rusty ladder. Hauling herself up she managed to get one foot, then two onto the ladder and then she was climbing up towards the hatch. She expected it to be shut when she pushed it, but it wasn’t.
I don’t expect they thought I would manage to get up here with a crocodile, she mused.
Pushing the hatch back, where it fell with a musty flump onto a sandy floor, she cautiously stuck her head and shoulders out and had a look around. It was another cave, albeit one with lanterns on the walls, and a path of sorts disappearing into the distance. She heaved herself into the new cave and dusted herself down. She couldn’t be that far from the surface because the sea was quite loud and the fairground sounds and the children’s voices were quite clear.
“That’s the way to do it!”
Lorelei whirled around, shoe in hand, but there was no one there.
Shit. Not him. Please not him. She began walking, fast, down the path and away from the voice.
Finally she came to a door, a wooden door painted red and white, bleached pale with age and sea and wind. I don’t like this at all, she decided. She wasn’t scared. She was more angry than anything. Angry that the Doc had done this. Angry that he had sold her to…to…she couldn’t think of that right now. She had to get out. Get away. She tried the handle on the door. It was locked.
“It’s behind you,” hissed a voice and she whirled around, raising the shoe over her head and then just as quickly lowering it and letting it drop from her fingers as she ran forwards to throw herself into the arms of the being that stood there.
“Goat Boy at your service Miss,” growled the half man-half goat, and fortunately today he had decided the top half was man and the bottom half goat, so he could enfold her in his arms. It was…difficult… when he was the other way around.
“You came to save me!”
She paused.
“You could have come earlier. I owe Satan a favour now. The bastard.”
“Sorry. I’ve lost the Chef. You know how half-cocked I am without his...pies. It took a while. I had to walk!”
“We have to get out of here. Now.”
“It’s just a cave. There’s nothing scary about a cave, Miss.”
“Oh lovely baby, nice baby, where's the baby, Judy?”
Goat Boy and Lorelei looked at each other. Goat Boy aimed a hefty-hooved kick at the red and white door, which flew open, and they ran through it.
“What the hell is all this?” cried Lorelei, trying to fight her way through faded red and white sheets that hung in tatters from the ceiling and wrapped themselves around their bodies, trying to hold them fast.
“Mmmmph fmmmmpp” Goat Boy replied, spitting ragged bits of material from his mouth.
Then
“I don’t know, Miss. All I know is I don’t like it. Where the hell is the Chef? He promised he’d be here and I couldn’t find him.”
Lorelei continued to shove her way through the hanging garments of Babylon. She was really worried now. It was looking very likely that the Doc HAD sold her to ‘him’ and from what she had heard, once HE owned you then you were pretty unlikely to get away. Even if you hung out with demons and half-goats, crazed Chefs and the Other One. And having a so-called black sorcerer for a father was no help either. This was OLD magic she was up against.
Finally the sheets grew tattier and thinner and then they were through. The room in which they stood was small in terms of width, but so , so high that she couldn’t see the ceiling. Up one side ran yet another rusty ladder.
Goat Boy was staring at her feet.
“No shoes?”
He crouched on all fours, ready to pounce on her. Lorelei sighed.
“We haven’t got time for this you idiot. Get up that ladder.”
Goat Boy stood, reluctantly, and with his tongue lolling outside of his mouth he leapt onto the ladder and started to climb. Lorelei followed behind, trying not to get too close to his goat shaped rump. Although she was used to the somewhat feral smell he had when he got overexcited, it still stirred something in her. Disgust usually.
She was so busy contemplating his odour that she failed to realise he had stopped and she banged her head against his rear end.
“What the..?”
“Head down, Miss! Now!”
She pressed herself harder against him, putting one hand over her head, and felt something whoosh past her at speed, glancing off her shoulder as it passed. A drawn out cry of Wahhhhhhhhhhh accompanied the falling object. Goat Boy was shaking slightly.
“Naughty, naughty, naughty baby!”
“Climb! Quick!”
Lorelei and Goat Boy scrabbled their way up the ladder as fast as they could. The baby hit the ground with a squelch, although it continued to wail and cry where it lay.
“It’s HIM, isn’t it?” asked Goat Boy breathlessly. Lorelei didn’t reply. She put a lot of store in naming names, and she was keeping this one back for when she needed it most. Which would be very soon.
Eventually the ladder gave way to another hatch. Goat Boy flipped it open and they were in a wooden room, again lit by lanterns, with a large shuttered window at the top.
They were both surprised to see the Chef lying in a corner, covered in bloody flour and clutching his Stetson.
Lorelei rushed over to him and knelt beside his prone form. Gently she brushed the long strands of grey hair from his cheek and bent to whisper his name in his ear. It never failed to rouse him. Goat Boy looked away in disgust.
“Whispering a man’s name in his own ear. You oughtta be ashamed, Miss.”
Lorelei ignored him.
“Wasssssat? Hmmm?”
“What took you so long?” asked Lorelei, as the Chef opened his chocolate brown eyes and gazed up at her.
“Head. Saucepan. Contact. Ow.”
He struggled to sit up and then, brushing flour from his Stetson, he jammed it down over his long, long hair and smiled.
“Hell, those guys were good. Didn’t see ‘em coming. Well, there was this stall selling all kindsa things I ain’t seen in years. Pixie saffron. Eel hearts. Carp tongues. Liquorice bootlaces. They come up behind and wham! With my best pan an’ all.”
“They got me too,” said Lorelei.
“And then I had to get a favour from Satan. Next, Goat Boy showed up and here we all are.”
She paused to push Goat Boy off her left foot, over which he was drooling.
“Except the Other one.”
“Well, we gotta get out. Now. I think its HIM?”
Lorelei put a finger to the Chef’s lips and nodded.
“No names. Not yet.”
Goat Boy helped the Chef to his feet, and looked expectantly at him. The Chef reached into a voluminous pocket and brought out a steaming pie.
“Asparagus and…something.”
In one moment the pie was eaten and Goat Boy grew a few feet until his head was touching the ceiling.
“NOW we are in business!” he declared, and Lorelei suddenly regretted pushing him off her foot. There wasn’t a man alive that could handle her, but a half man-half goat in full possession of his correct size…well…another matter entirely.
“What’s on the other side of that shutter?”she asked, and Goat Boy lifted the catch and opened it wide.
“Nothing. There’s no glass or anything. It’s…well it’s like a little stage. With the curtains shut. Like we are on the inside of a stage looking out.”
“Thank you, Judy, for your kisses!”
“Where the fuck are you?!!?” screamed Lorelei, and frantically looked about her, shoe in hand.
The Chef drew a steak knife from another pocket and Goat Boy growled low and rumbling, returning to his former size. They formed a tight circle, their backs together, each of them automatically returning to the positions they had fought in so well, many, many, times across the earth. And below it.
The little wooden room was silent, save for their breathing.
Then, above them, the curtains began to draw apart, and daylight pierced the room. The shouts of children, the noise of the fair grew louder and louder until it was a thunderstorm.
“Poor Judy. What-a-pity what-a-pity!”
And Lorelei knew he was in the room with them. A wooden tapping began, regular and sharp, and a shadow rippled from one corner, spiralling upwards towards the little stage.
And then HE was there, above them, looking down at them from blank blue painted eyes. His hooked nose was shabby, his red hat worn and tired. His ruff was grimy and torn. Around his neck was a leather cord, and hanging from this was little Toby Dog’s head.
“Poor Judy Judy. All mine now. All mine.”
Goat Boy and The Chef tried to move so they were shielding Lorelei, but HE waved a skeletal finger at them, and they were frozen. Lorelei dropped her shoe and moved away from them.
She tried to say HIS name but the words wouldn’t come. Her lips sucked his name right back in as soon as she attempted to form it.
HE extended his arms, and they were growing and waving and advancing down on her. A cold, pale finger reached her hair and began to stroke it, moving down to touch her cheek, drawing blood where the razor sharp nail touched. Lorelei thought, this is it. All the things I have done. All the things I could have done. And this is it. She wasn’t frightened. She was sad.
“Hello, Mr Punch. Good morning and Merry Christmas.”
The finger left her cheek and the arm pulled itself back. Lorelei held her breath. The Other One stood beside her.
“Sorry about that.. I tied one on last night. Got a headache.”
Above her Mr Punch was shaking.
“Go ‘way! Go ‘way!”
The Other One glanced up at him. Lorelei could see he had indeed tied one on last night. His greasepaint was smeared. He’d lost half his red nose. And his bow tie was circling slowly and dripping rusty water from the plastic water pistol flower at its centre.
“Don’t believe in ghosts!” screamed Mr Punch, as The Other One took the knife from The Chef’s hand and deftly threw it at Mr Punch. It severed his head with one stroke. And the head bounced down from the little stage and fell at Lorelei’s feet, grey slime oozing from his neck.
“That’s the fucking way to do it,” breathed Lorelei, taking the Other One’s large and white-gloved hand in hers and bringing it to her lips to kiss. He smiled back at her and then looked down at what was left of Mr Punch.
“Time to say good bye to the boys and girls, fucker..”
And with one crunch of his oversized shoe, Mr Punch was crushed into the floor. Whatever it was he had been was gone.
Goat Boy looked puzzled.
“You aren’t a ghost though,” he said, glancing at the Other One.
The Chef laughed.
“Course he ain’t. He’s better and older and way more powerful than all that. Carny folk always is.”
The Other One smiled and looked at Lorelei.
“Any chance of some Jack Daniels for this ol’ Clown?”
Lorelei’s head ached where the hunchback had hit her with the hammer. She ran a finger over the lump and winced. The bastard. When she got out of here and found the Doc again, his AND the hunchback’s lives would not be worth living. Not when her father found out what they had done to her. Times had been hard recently but her father wasn’t the kind of man to be messed around with. There would be a whole lot of ignored pleas for mercy when he was done with them.
She tried to stretch her legs but they didn’t go too far because she was chained to a crocodile. She knew it was a crocodile because she had heard its jaw clack, and felt its scaly skin. As far as she could tell it was sleeping. It yawned hugely every so often, and shifted its slithery bulk, but it left her alone. Her ankle was cooling where it touched the crocodile’s ankle. Did crocodiles have ankles? Whatever it was, she was tied tight to it with a thin metal chain. Incongruously a string of sausages lay across its tail.
Lorelei wished Goat Boy were there. He’d save her. But he was off somewhere with his dark cohorts, slaying angels and eating the Chef’s strange food, cooked over fires made with the bones of children and other terrible creatures. She had eaten the Chef’s food on more than one occasion and although her throat ached with the memory of its fire, the rest of her cried out for more. The Chef, Goat Boy and the Other One crossed planes travelled, both Astral and physical, by Lorelei every so often, and although they pleaded with her to join their merry band for good she always refused. Independence was all. But she more than happy to fight alongside them when called for. They were always there for her at any rate.
The crocodile shifted once more and was still. It was snoring.
“Excuse me, ” said Lorelei.
The crocodile didn’t stir.
She pushed it with her other foot. Ah. They had left her shoe on. Reaching down, she slipped the shiny, black killer stiletto heel off and readied it in her hand. Swiftly she raised it high above her head and brought it down quick and very, very hard so that the sharp heel pierced the crocodile’s sleeping eye and went down into its brain, killing it instantly. Black blood dribbled out through the hole as Lorelei withdrew her footwear of death. She remembered the first day she wore them. Goat Boy was practically a puddle of worship over them, running a tongue over them and murmuring incoherently.
“I do believe,” Lorelei muttered to the dead crocodile “that he was half right. At least, they are certainly fuck-YOU-shoes.”
But she was still chained to a dead crocodile in a dark somewhere or other and this was not good. They, whoever they were, had taken her coat and her bag, and one killer shoe wasn’t a great deal of use.
“Satan?”
Nothing.
“Satan??”
Somewhere in the dark a mouse cried and was silent. There was a low mew.
“Thank goodness! Please, detach me from this reptile!”
A sleek black cat strolled over to Lorelei, swishing its fluffy tail and smirking.
“Yes, I am chained to a dead crocodile. In my defence, I did kill it.”
Satan glanced at the chain, which disappeared in an instant.
“Yes, yes. I owe you. Thank you.”
Lorelei rubbed her freed ankle. When she looked up Satan was gone. She knew she would be seeing him again very soon though, when he had decided to call in his favour. Difficult creatures, demons going around insisting they were really cats. A bit screwed up in fact, she thought.
She got to her feet, holding the shoe of death in her left hand. With her right she made a few motions in the air and suddenly she was holding a silver zippo lighter. She didn’t have much magic herself, unlike her father, but she could conjure up the essentials, like lighters, Jack Daniels and the odd cigarette or two. Flicking it into life, she gazed around. She was in a cave, one dripping with water and bunched with seaweed. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the sea. Now that she was concentrating, she could also hear the faint cries of children, fairground music…
“The bloody seaside! Ace!”
Looking around, the cave appeared to have no entrance and no exit. She turned her attention upwards. Ah. There was a rusted iron ladder descending from a hatch in the ceiling, ending about two feet above her head. She was remembering a little more now. The hunchback and the policeman had grabbed her, as she stood eating ice cream and watching a woman in a tank pretending to be a mermaid. She had been waiting for The Chef to arrive. He had a...pie or two for her. His special pies. When he hadn’t showed, she had made to leave and suddenly a policeman had taken her arm.
“Madam?”
She had turned.
“Miss, thank you. It’s Miss.”
And the hunchback had raised his hammer, reached up and knocked her out with one swift blow.
They must have bundled her down into this cave and chained her to the crocodile. And now she had to get out. Then find them. Before she killed them she might even ask them WHY they had chained her to a crocodile.
She pushed her long black hair out of her eyes. The two streaks of white which defined each side of her parting glowed sliver in the dim light. There was sand and blood on her tight black dress. Damn.
She placed the heel of her killer shoe between her teeth. There was no way she was going out there unarmed. She looked at the hatch in the ceiling.
Lorelei was tall, even without her shoes, and she took a jump and grabbed the bottom rung of the rusty ladder. Hauling herself up she managed to get one foot, then two onto the ladder and then she was climbing up towards the hatch. She expected it to be shut when she pushed it, but it wasn’t.
I don’t expect they thought I would manage to get up here with a crocodile, she mused.
Pushing the hatch back, where it fell with a musty flump onto a sandy floor, she cautiously stuck her head and shoulders out and had a look around. It was another cave, albeit one with lanterns on the walls, and a path of sorts disappearing into the distance. She heaved herself into the new cave and dusted herself down. She couldn’t be that far from the surface because the sea was quite loud and the fairground sounds and the children’s voices were quite clear.
“That’s the way to do it!”
Lorelei whirled around, shoe in hand, but there was no one there.
Shit. Not him. Please not him. She began walking, fast, down the path and away from the voice.
Finally she came to a door, a wooden door painted red and white, bleached pale with age and sea and wind. I don’t like this at all, she decided. She wasn’t scared. She was more angry than anything. Angry that the Doc had done this. Angry that he had sold her to…to…she couldn’t think of that right now. She had to get out. Get away. She tried the handle on the door. It was locked.
“It’s behind you,” hissed a voice and she whirled around, raising the shoe over her head and then just as quickly lowering it and letting it drop from her fingers as she ran forwards to throw herself into the arms of the being that stood there.
“Goat Boy at your service Miss,” growled the half man-half goat, and fortunately today he had decided the top half was man and the bottom half goat, so he could enfold her in his arms. It was…difficult… when he was the other way around.
“You came to save me!”
She paused.
“You could have come earlier. I owe Satan a favour now. The bastard.”
“Sorry. I’ve lost the Chef. You know how half-cocked I am without his...pies. It took a while. I had to walk!”
“We have to get out of here. Now.”
“It’s just a cave. There’s nothing scary about a cave, Miss.”
“Oh lovely baby, nice baby, where's the baby, Judy?”
Goat Boy and Lorelei looked at each other. Goat Boy aimed a hefty-hooved kick at the red and white door, which flew open, and they ran through it.
“What the hell is all this?” cried Lorelei, trying to fight her way through faded red and white sheets that hung in tatters from the ceiling and wrapped themselves around their bodies, trying to hold them fast.
“Mmmmph fmmmmpp” Goat Boy replied, spitting ragged bits of material from his mouth.
Then
“I don’t know, Miss. All I know is I don’t like it. Where the hell is the Chef? He promised he’d be here and I couldn’t find him.”
Lorelei continued to shove her way through the hanging garments of Babylon. She was really worried now. It was looking very likely that the Doc HAD sold her to ‘him’ and from what she had heard, once HE owned you then you were pretty unlikely to get away. Even if you hung out with demons and half-goats, crazed Chefs and the Other One. And having a so-called black sorcerer for a father was no help either. This was OLD magic she was up against.
Finally the sheets grew tattier and thinner and then they were through. The room in which they stood was small in terms of width, but so , so high that she couldn’t see the ceiling. Up one side ran yet another rusty ladder.
Goat Boy was staring at her feet.
“No shoes?”
He crouched on all fours, ready to pounce on her. Lorelei sighed.
“We haven’t got time for this you idiot. Get up that ladder.”
Goat Boy stood, reluctantly, and with his tongue lolling outside of his mouth he leapt onto the ladder and started to climb. Lorelei followed behind, trying not to get too close to his goat shaped rump. Although she was used to the somewhat feral smell he had when he got overexcited, it still stirred something in her. Disgust usually.
She was so busy contemplating his odour that she failed to realise he had stopped and she banged her head against his rear end.
“What the..?”
“Head down, Miss! Now!”
She pressed herself harder against him, putting one hand over her head, and felt something whoosh past her at speed, glancing off her shoulder as it passed. A drawn out cry of Wahhhhhhhhhhh accompanied the falling object. Goat Boy was shaking slightly.
“Naughty, naughty, naughty baby!”
“Climb! Quick!”
Lorelei and Goat Boy scrabbled their way up the ladder as fast as they could. The baby hit the ground with a squelch, although it continued to wail and cry where it lay.
“It’s HIM, isn’t it?” asked Goat Boy breathlessly. Lorelei didn’t reply. She put a lot of store in naming names, and she was keeping this one back for when she needed it most. Which would be very soon.
Eventually the ladder gave way to another hatch. Goat Boy flipped it open and they were in a wooden room, again lit by lanterns, with a large shuttered window at the top.
They were both surprised to see the Chef lying in a corner, covered in bloody flour and clutching his Stetson.
Lorelei rushed over to him and knelt beside his prone form. Gently she brushed the long strands of grey hair from his cheek and bent to whisper his name in his ear. It never failed to rouse him. Goat Boy looked away in disgust.
“Whispering a man’s name in his own ear. You oughtta be ashamed, Miss.”
Lorelei ignored him.
“Wasssssat? Hmmm?”
“What took you so long?” asked Lorelei, as the Chef opened his chocolate brown eyes and gazed up at her.
“Head. Saucepan. Contact. Ow.”
He struggled to sit up and then, brushing flour from his Stetson, he jammed it down over his long, long hair and smiled.
“Hell, those guys were good. Didn’t see ‘em coming. Well, there was this stall selling all kindsa things I ain’t seen in years. Pixie saffron. Eel hearts. Carp tongues. Liquorice bootlaces. They come up behind and wham! With my best pan an’ all.”
“They got me too,” said Lorelei.
“And then I had to get a favour from Satan. Next, Goat Boy showed up and here we all are.”
She paused to push Goat Boy off her left foot, over which he was drooling.
“Except the Other one.”
“Well, we gotta get out. Now. I think its HIM?”
Lorelei put a finger to the Chef’s lips and nodded.
“No names. Not yet.”
Goat Boy helped the Chef to his feet, and looked expectantly at him. The Chef reached into a voluminous pocket and brought out a steaming pie.
“Asparagus and…something.”
In one moment the pie was eaten and Goat Boy grew a few feet until his head was touching the ceiling.
“NOW we are in business!” he declared, and Lorelei suddenly regretted pushing him off her foot. There wasn’t a man alive that could handle her, but a half man-half goat in full possession of his correct size…well…another matter entirely.
“What’s on the other side of that shutter?”she asked, and Goat Boy lifted the catch and opened it wide.
“Nothing. There’s no glass or anything. It’s…well it’s like a little stage. With the curtains shut. Like we are on the inside of a stage looking out.”
“Thank you, Judy, for your kisses!”
“Where the fuck are you?!!?” screamed Lorelei, and frantically looked about her, shoe in hand.
The Chef drew a steak knife from another pocket and Goat Boy growled low and rumbling, returning to his former size. They formed a tight circle, their backs together, each of them automatically returning to the positions they had fought in so well, many, many, times across the earth. And below it.
The little wooden room was silent, save for their breathing.
Then, above them, the curtains began to draw apart, and daylight pierced the room. The shouts of children, the noise of the fair grew louder and louder until it was a thunderstorm.
“Poor Judy. What-a-pity what-a-pity!”
And Lorelei knew he was in the room with them. A wooden tapping began, regular and sharp, and a shadow rippled from one corner, spiralling upwards towards the little stage.
And then HE was there, above them, looking down at them from blank blue painted eyes. His hooked nose was shabby, his red hat worn and tired. His ruff was grimy and torn. Around his neck was a leather cord, and hanging from this was little Toby Dog’s head.
“Poor Judy Judy. All mine now. All mine.”
Goat Boy and The Chef tried to move so they were shielding Lorelei, but HE waved a skeletal finger at them, and they were frozen. Lorelei dropped her shoe and moved away from them.
She tried to say HIS name but the words wouldn’t come. Her lips sucked his name right back in as soon as she attempted to form it.
HE extended his arms, and they were growing and waving and advancing down on her. A cold, pale finger reached her hair and began to stroke it, moving down to touch her cheek, drawing blood where the razor sharp nail touched. Lorelei thought, this is it. All the things I have done. All the things I could have done. And this is it. She wasn’t frightened. She was sad.
“Hello, Mr Punch. Good morning and Merry Christmas.”
The finger left her cheek and the arm pulled itself back. Lorelei held her breath. The Other One stood beside her.
“Sorry about that.. I tied one on last night. Got a headache.”
Above her Mr Punch was shaking.
“Go ‘way! Go ‘way!”
The Other One glanced up at him. Lorelei could see he had indeed tied one on last night. His greasepaint was smeared. He’d lost half his red nose. And his bow tie was circling slowly and dripping rusty water from the plastic water pistol flower at its centre.
“Don’t believe in ghosts!” screamed Mr Punch, as The Other One took the knife from The Chef’s hand and deftly threw it at Mr Punch. It severed his head with one stroke. And the head bounced down from the little stage and fell at Lorelei’s feet, grey slime oozing from his neck.
“That’s the fucking way to do it,” breathed Lorelei, taking the Other One’s large and white-gloved hand in hers and bringing it to her lips to kiss. He smiled back at her and then looked down at what was left of Mr Punch.
“Time to say good bye to the boys and girls, fucker..”
And with one crunch of his oversized shoe, Mr Punch was crushed into the floor. Whatever it was he had been was gone.
Goat Boy looked puzzled.
“You aren’t a ghost though,” he said, glancing at the Other One.
The Chef laughed.
“Course he ain’t. He’s better and older and way more powerful than all that. Carny folk always is.”
The Other One smiled and looked at Lorelei.
“Any chance of some Jack Daniels for this ol’ Clown?”
Ritual Revival
Ritual Revival – Franklin Marsh
Being a researcher for a television show is good fun when you’re young. I was twenty-one, footloose, fancy-free, and enjoyed bombing around London, visiting museums, libraries, newspaper archives, meeting interesting people, rubbing shoulders with so-called ‘celebrities’ -who are always shorter and more bad-tempered than they appear on screen. Comedians are particularly miserable bastards.
The pay was shite, but that didn’t matter at the time. I had good friends and good times. When the Beeb decided to do a ‘McGregor Investigates’ on Witchcraft, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.
Seeing my grandfather drool over the Sunday scandal rag exposes, to an adolescent fascination with suicide, murder and ‘the dark side’, it seemed I’d always been around the subject. Books of horror stories, and the inevitable horror films (even if the sfx weren’t very s) fuelled the fire.
It was in a music paper that I first saw a picture of Anton Krolok. Sandy Beech was doing an article on rock and the occult. It seemed Krolok had a big effect on drug-addled pop stars of the late sixties. Not bad for a fraudulent old fart who’d died penniless in the late forties, jeered as a liar, a traitor and a conman.
The paper printed a couple of photographs of him. I was initially struck by his resemblance to a favourite old comic character of mine, Grimly Fiendish. There was something about him. Particularly his eyes.
I moseyed down to the library and took out Ron Simmons’ biography The Huge Monster. Simmons’ had met him when he was dying. The biographer dismissed most of the stories, but had to admit, he had something. He’d been condemned in the thirties as ‘The Most Beastly Man In Britain’ – a title that had transferred to some of his musician admirers thirty years later.
I sighed. There was something much more interesting about this kind of notoriety than the current wave of child-molesters and terrorists, who all seemed so ordinary.
Colin McGregor was a well known investigative journalist, who’d worked on a broadsheet before being approached by the BBC. His journalism was respected, his articles and programmes caused ripples, and had been actually seen to provoke change.
The Witchcraft special had been cooked up as a light-hearted end of series filler. McGregor wasn’t happy about this. In a warm-up meeting, I was quite surprised by his reaction. His brusque dismissal of the subject matter seemed fuelled, not by scepticism, but…by fear. This piqued my curiosity No-one else seemed to have picked up on it. Was the bedrock of sense scared of a few old coots (most of whom were dead) who claimed to be Black Sorcerors?
The programme makers had decided to concentrate on three occultists. Krolok, the Reverend Monty Winters and current ‘King Of The Warlocks’ Alexis Sandbag. (Windbag would be more appropriate – he never shut up – talking about himself.)
McGregor seemed to cheer up when one of his old chums, novelist Gregory Pendennis , was wheeled in. Pendennis had churned out some ‘Black Sorcery’ novels, one of which (To Hell With The Devil) had been a best-seller, and filmed by Mallet Studios years back.
Pendennis was a cheery old soak, who skilfully marketed himself as an authority on the matter, although he had never participated in anything unsavoury (he said). I liked him.
He was dismissive of Krolok in the main, but admitted that the man had enormous occult knowledge, and had undoubtedly participated in Black Masses, unholy rituals, and almost certainly many, many orgies (the lucky bugger!)
The producers of the show became tremendously excited by an offer by Sandbag to attempt a ritual to conjure up Krolok actually on the programme.
McGregor stormed out. Pendennis, even in his cups on licence-payer funded brandy, advised against it.
The project was shelved , at least within McGregor’s earshot. A rumour ran round the studio that Sandbag was going to go ahead, when filming was completed and McGregor had left for the day. Part of me wanted to attend out of a desire to see how these things worked, although convinced nothing would happen. Another part of me was very afraid, and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. If this rubbish could actually frighten one of the most hard-nosed, no-nonsense reporters in Britain, it would have no problem with a self-confessed coward like myself.
Filming for the actual programme went very well. We had the luxury of nearly a week, and it was almost done by Thursday. McGregor had a few pickups to do on Friday, and would be off to Scotland by lunchtime. The crew and backroom staff would be having a wrap booze-up in The Dog & Ferret all afternoon. The rumours abounded that they would reconvene in the Studio at midnight for the Sandbag revive Krolok ritual.
I had cried off, saying I was going away for the weekend, but had found a cradle up in the lighting rigs when I assisted Albie the lighting engineer, that I was sorely tempted to secrete myself in to watch the goings on. Do a Pendennis – be there yet not participate.
I’d been reading in the cradle on Wednesday night when I overheard a conversation between Pendennis and McGregor. Our presenter was obviously worried that this bit of fun would seriously compromise his standing as a journalist. Pendennis waved his fears away.
‘Present it straight, Mac. Give it to ‘em like you mean it. Just before the summing up, take the piss a bit. It’s hogwash, you know. And then, on the sign-off, give ‘em that hint that it might be for real. Just a tiny seed of doubt. They’ll love it.’
‘Do you believe, Greg?’ McGregor sounded worried. I wanted to peek over the side of the cradle to see their faces, but daren’t move in case I was discovered.
Pendennis paused for a very long time.
‘Let’s say I don’t not believe, Mac. I can’t actually say I’ve seen anything truly…supernatural. But this stuff has been around for centuries. And these practitioners you’re concentrating on…they’re intelligent men. They believe. Even that silly ass Sandbag. He’s on to a good thing at the moment. Publicity, he’s coining it, and he’s got the pick of the young popsies that fall under his spell. I mean, who wouldn’t? But you often get the feeling that it won’t last. There’ll be a balance. You’ve scotched this séance nonsense?’
‘Yes. Damn’ young fools. I’ve told them, any fooling around and they’re out.’
‘Good man. 98% of this stuff is absolute tripe. But the other 2 % …’
The two old buffers wandered off.
So, anyone caught playing around with Witchy stuff would be sacked. Good job I wouldn’t be there officially. Forget it, I told myself. Get away for a couple of days.
But the lure of the Forbidden felt stronger than ever. And Jan was one of the people who wanted to participate in the Ritual. And the Sundays always stated that you had to be naked during these affairs. Nope, I had to attend.
‘******************************************
The rest of Thursday and Friday morning turned out to be very, very busy. Old Pop from the archives had dug up some radio broadcasts. A film can from the American avant-garde film-maker Kevin Ire turned up. And the ex-girlfriend of singer, bandleader and occultist, the late George Premium turned up to talk to McGregor.
2pm and the programme was completed, bar a couple of last minute edits. Colin McGregor was still having last minute doubts. The show was to be broadcast the following Tuesday, so a number of Sunday hacks had been sniffing around. They’d give us a great plug, but McGregor was convinced they’d be vilifying the Beeb for broadcasting filth. After the show, there was to be a round table discussion led by Joanne Bakelite and including Sandbag, the Bishop of London plus pundit Bryan Buggeridge as a damage limitation exercise.
The producers had some footage of goose-pimpled spotty herberts in the nude, dancing round a fire on a blasted heath, but there were reservations. How much flesh could be shown? There would be complaints, but the ratings would rocket. Decisions, decisions.
I was with editor Sam Markules, who was trying to fit some pictures of Krolok to a radio broadcast the Magician had made just before the Second World War. Markules was running with three pictures, trying to fade them into one another. Krolok’s voice, quavery with age but still with undeniable power, was droning on about an English magician of the 17th Century who had interested him. Krolok had been in America during the war, and commented that he’d picked up on the magician’s trail.
‘He don’t half talk some shit, don’t he?’ groaned Markules. ‘Still, they’ll tune in for the tits and bums. But I don’t think Mr McGregor will be returning for another series, if the balloon goes.up. The Blackhouse woman is on standby. We’re already trying to line up a repeat week after next. Will you be down the pub?’
‘No. No. I’ve got to get off when we’re done. Visiting the folks.’
‘You might miss a treat. I think old Windbag’s going to go ahead with his ritual.’
‘I thought McGregor forbade it?’
‘He’s gone. What he doesn’t know….’
I tried to make light of it.
‘What if he did bring old Anton back?’
Markules laughed.
‘We’d stick an extra ten minutes on the repeat, and get Anton on the next available chat show.’
I sloped off thirty minutes later.
‘****************************
Returning to the studios at nine, I managed to slip past Scranton the night watchman. I’d forgotten about him. I wondered how the returning staff would explain their presence to him. Be a laugh if he walked in on the lot of ‘em starkers.
I climbed up into the light cradle, and positioned a couple of cushions to make my self comfortable. I’d bought a child’s periscope so that I could watch the proceedings and remain hidden. I just hoped no-one would look up and spot it.
I must have dozed off, as I jerked awake to the sound of shushings and giggles below. I glanced through the periscope aperture. It was dark below. I could make out three, four, five (?) figures. All sounded drunk. One fell over which caused hysterical hushed laughter. They sat down in a circle. One spoke to the others. I assumed that it was Sandbag. God, he sounded boring from up here. The vocalist stood up and began to move around. I couldn’t make out what he was up to until he lit some candles. Black ones. He’d drawn a shaky pentagram on the studio floor. A black candle was at each point. I tried to make out the indistinct figures, but couldn’t identify anyone. They all wore hooded robes, to my disappointment.
The main speaker rejoined the others on the floor inside the pentacle. He lit an incense pyramid, and began to lead an undecipherable chant. The others joined in. They might be pissed, but they knew the words.
The plumes of smoke from the incense seemed to coagulate in the candlelight, above the ritual participants. A real atmosphere was forming down there. I felt uncomfortable, but daren’t move. I moved the periscope slightly, but still couldn’t identify any of the people below, apart from the leader of the ritual whom I was sure was Sandbag.
A red light caught my attention. Focusing the periscope, I saw that it was atop a camera. A camera that was pointing at the participants. They were being filmed? There was no cameraman, and I had not seen anyone move the camera, or turn it on.
I was definitely feeling uneasy now. The chanting was getting louder. Surely Scranton must hear them. The small ring of people had their arms out stretched toward the cloud of smoke above them. Something moved within it. I strained my eye, but could not make it out. It grew larger. The robed figures were standing now, caressing the smoke. Was it solidifying? Impossible!
The circle of ritualists guided the thickening smoke to the floor. It had assumed a human shape. There was definitely something in it. My hair was standing on end. I couldn’t believe my eye. I slowly, carefully put the periscope down within the cradle, and tried to pull my self upward to look over the side of the cradle. I made it just as the smoke cleared. The hooded figures stepped back and revealed what could only be Anton Krolok lying naked on the floor. The figures disrobed. I saw Sandbag, Jan, Liz, Sam and old Pop! Leaning forward in disbelief as they began to run their hands over Krolok’s body, one of my cushions abandoned cradle. I tried to grasp it but was too late.
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The cushion floated, achingly slowly, down between the circle of ritualists and landed on Krolok’s chest. As it did so, I came out of my trance and clambered from the cradle as fast as I could. Shouts came from below. I didn’t dare glance down. I ran across the gantries, into the next studio, and tried to slide down a thick cable, burning my palms, and falling the last 20 or so feet. A heavy, but otherwise uneventful landing, meant that I could run like hell for the exit door. I froze as it began to open toward me, but became reanimated as a puzzled Scranton looked around the edge.
‘What’s all the racket?’
‘There’s been a break-in, Officer Scranton! Thieves are in the next studio! Arrest them! I’ll get the police!’ I shouted, then dodged around him and ran like the wind.
I successfully escaped the main building and kept on running for home.
Lying sweating in my bed, I tried to make sense of what I’d been witness to. Had Britain’s King Of The Warlocks and some TV technicians managed to raise a long-dead Black Sorceror? I couldn’t take it in. A couple of Scotches made me feel ill, but successfully knocked me out.
I woke up feeling less than ready to face the day. Arriving at the Studio late I was summoned to a senior producer’s office, where I was read the riot act.
She didn’t give away too much of what had happened, except that apparently a camera had been stolen. Scranton had recognised me and grassed me up. He’d discovered ‘thieves’ in the studio, and been knocked out for his trouble. He didn’t recognise anyone else.
I realised that I was being accused of being a lookout or a decoy, for the theft! I denied everything. They didn’t press charges, but I lost my job. I didn’t see anyone I knew as I left, and didn’t particularly want to stay in contact with any of them. They hadn’t been the good friends I’d thought.
‘*************************************
Colin McGregor died of a brain haemorrhage on Monday night, so the programme was never transmitted. Some of what was considered his more worthwhile journalism was aired instead. In hindsight, I expected the tabloids to make more of a fuss, but no mention of the last in the series of ‘McGregor Investigates’ was made.
I’d moved on to a more mundane office job, when I saw Sam Markules obituary in The Guardian. A car crash.
Within the next month Alexis Sandbag succumbed to heart failure. He went as he probably would have wanted, conducting a ritual on a remote Scottish Island in the middle of a circle of standing stones. I felt sure that at least some of the programme would be used , but the reports were very terse.
Visiting my Grandfather I renewed my acquaintance with the good old lurid Sundays. It was a good weekend for them. Two ‘high-flying television back-room girls’ were revealed to be not only lesbians, but one had murdered the other, then committed suicide. I recognised Jan and Liz from the blurred photgraphs, and my paranoia began to grow.
On a whim, I telephoned the TV studios and asked for Pop. I was told that he no longer worked for the Corporation. They were unable to provide any further information. I hung up when they asked who I was.
Back home, I did some thinking. Assuming that Pop was dead, that meant everyone involved in the raising of Krolok had passed on. Was I safe? I thought so. I hadn’t participated. Perhaps Krolok (I also assumed that, not only was he back from the dead, but also was responsible for the elimination of his resurrectionists) didn’t know who I was, or didn’t care. I wasn’t important or involved enough.
I toyed with two possible ways forward. To try and have a chat with Gregory Pendennis. Or, as the longest possible shot, to try and contact Danny Leaf, rock musician extraordinaire, and owner of the second biggest collection of Krolokiana in the world. (Just behind Kevin Ire. But compared to him, Leaf seemed relatively normal)
Pendennis was unobtainable. Apparently he’d gone to his Cornish country cottage with his nephew, and it was unknown when they would return.
Surprisingly, I had much better luck with the famous guitarist. I telephoned his agent, and mentioned that I had been involved in the McGregor Investigates programme. She assured me that she would pass the message on.
Danny himself telephoned me two days later, and offered to meet me in an obscure country pub near his Surrey mansion.
I took the requisite day off, and turned up at the pub early. Leaf was there, on his own. We retired to the snug, a tiny room that could just contain the pair of us, and he asked what was on my mind. I blurted out the whole story, finishing with ‘You must think I’m mad.’
‘Oh no, ‘ he replied gently. ‘You’re nowhere near mad. If you think I don’t believe you, I do. I’ve been offered the film.’
Sitting there surrounded by cool whitewashed walls, the sunshine streaming in through a tiny window, watching the streams of bubbles in our pints, I found it difficult to think about those previous dark events.
‘You know all the other people involved in this are dead?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘But then an awful lot of people who became involved with Anton Krolok died. And not of natural causes.’
I didn’t know quite how to say what I wanted to say.
‘If you believe me….’
‘I do.’
‘Then….you accept….the possibility….that Krolok is alive. And out there somewhere.’
I gestured vaguely.
Leaf smiled.
‘Oh yes. I’ve talked to Kev about this. He told me he’d seen the film. And was convinced that it was genuine. He’s going to conduct a ritual on April 30th. To call Krolok to him.’
‘Will you be there.’
‘No. Despite my interest, I’m a bit like you. I don’t want to practice magic. I’m interested in those who do, but it’s ….too dangerous. As I said, there have been so many deaths.’
Our conversation petered out, and I thanked him for his time and left. Just before my departure, he took my address and promised to send me a bootleg DVD-r of the McGregor Investigates programme.
It arrived the next week, but I put the package to one side and left it unopened. Fortunately, work became hectic, and I struck up an acquaintance with some fellow office workers. The cinema, gigs, the theatre.
I didn’t think about anything Krolok-related until May 5th, when I caught a news bulletin about the death of Kevin Ire. Police in Beverley Hills were confounded by his apparent spontaneous combustion during ‘an occult ritual.’ It had taken a few days to identify his body.
I saw the package from Danny Leaf on the floor of the lounge. I opened it up, and took out the shiny blank disc.
Krolok’s face appeared reflected in the silver. I dropped the disc and whirled around. No-one there.
I tried to control the shaking of my hands as I picked up the disc. Had the lights in the room dimmed? I turned the television on and jumped at the harsh blare of white noise. Static filled the screen. The remote control slithered as though alive in my sweaty hand. I pushed button after button. Had the batteries gone? Finally, a picture appeared. One of those property programmes. I normally hated this sort of thing, but the asinine presenters and money-hungry would be buyers cheered me up no end. I sighed with relief and flopped onto the sofa, my heartbeat gradually beginning to slow.
I realised that I still had the disc in my other hand. Cautiously, I looked at it. No sinister reflections. Just my own pasty, nervous face. The face tried a smile. Did I really want to watch this? Get it over with. Watch it , then throw it. Send it back to Leaf.
Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and watch the DVD player swallow the disc.
I don’t quite know why, but I expected the quality of the sound and images to be poor. It was pin-sharp and perfect.
The familiar theme tune of McGregor Investigates blared out, an almost discordant fanfare. I felt tears in my eyes as the late Colin McGregor appeared behind a desk and barked
‘Witchcraft – Seventeenth Century Superstition – or a real and terrifying menace even today?’
I hoped that there was a copy of this in the BBC archives, and that it might be transmitted one day. I was enthralled. McGregor’s fears that it would come over as a load of rubbish were quite unfounded. The programme was riveting. Even the late Alexis Sandbag came over as interesting (thanks to the sterling work of the late Sam Markules, I suspected. What an editor!).
In fact, I was actually enjoying the programme until the first of the pictures of Anton Krolok appeared on the screen. As his quavering but forceful tones from the crackly radio broadcast detailed his researches into the work of one Doctor Dementer, the eyes in the photograph moved to stare at me. I felt pinned to the sofa. The head turned to follow the eyes. The moon face filled the screen as I gasped for breath.
The telephone rang. My eyes were torn from the screen, and I felt released. I practically ran across the lounge to pick up the ‘phone.
‘Yes?’
A familiar voice spoke my name.
‘Danny?’
‘Yeah, it’s me. Look, are you free this weekend?’
‘Erm…yeah…why?’
‘I’d like you to come up to Scotland. To my place up there, by Loch Ness. There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I’m sending a motorcycle courier round with some cash for travelling expenses and details of how to find my place. I’ll see you there.’
‘Great!’
‘Have you watched the programme yet?’
I felt a chill, and glanced back at the screen. To my relief, old man Pendennis was holding forth on the fact that 98% of Black Sorcery was, in fact, cobblers.
‘I’m just watching it now.’
‘Turn it off. Don’t watch anymore. And bring the disc to Scotland with you. Can you do that?’
His voice had an urgency about it.
‘No problem. See you Saturday.’
‘See you. Turn that thing off now.’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’
I put the ‘phone down and grabbed the remote.
Colin McGregor was talking to music journalist Sandy Beech as they strolled beside a large lake.
‘And the guitarist Leaf has actually purchased this property?’
‘Yeah, Col. Bolokskin. Krolok’s old place by Loch Ness.’
The black-clad, long-haired, bespectacled journo gestured at a large house nestling in the trees not far from the Loch shoreline.
McGregor, in trademark deerstalker, and Ulster, leaned on his walking stick.
‘And it was here that Krolok…’
I pressed ‘stop’.
The journey to Scotland was uneventful. I caught the train from Kings Cross and dozed, reread The Huge Monster, listened to Danny’s group performing The Songs Are All The Same on my MP3. I had to change at Edinburgh and eventually rolled up at Inverness just gone 5 pm. Over nine hours! I was sick of that album. And had binned the Simmons’ book.
The taxi from Inverness station didn’t take long, and wasn’t expensive. The driver didn’t even comment on my destination. It had gotten dark by now. As I stood outside the house, I noticed the graveyard across the road. It was freezing cold. An owl hooted. I could see the moon, as well as my breath. I suddenly wished I’d bought some sort of gift for Dan. I always thought of these things too late.
I walked down a small gravel path to the front door. As I raised my fist to knock, the door opened. Danny stood in the hall.
‘Come in.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Good journey?’
‘Fine. Bit dullsville.’
‘You didn’t fly?’
Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Had he been expecting me eight hours earlier? Did he think I was secreting my expenses?
‘I came by train. I didn’t think…’
‘Come in here.’
Danny opened a small door on his left. I followed him into a large room, with a massive bay window, overlooking the Loch. Moonlight glinted on the black water. Subdued lighting kept much of the room in a kind of semi-darkness.
I became aware of three other occupants of the room. A black leather sofa was pushed up against the wall. On it squatted an obese, bald, toad-like man. His body was encased in a long black coat, from throat to ankles. Both hands were fisted around the handle of an ebony walking-stick.
Sitting on the arm of the sofa, next to the man was a young woman, clad in a figure-hugging black dress. High-heeled black shoes adorned her feet. Long dark hair, flanked by two white streaks, curled around her shoulders.
On the other side of the man purred a large black cat, it’s green eyes fixed on me.
Danny coughed.
‘I’d like you to meet Anton Krolok, Lorelei and Satan.’
Despite a log fire blazing behind us, I’d never felt colder in my life.
‘*****************
‘Did you bring the…film?’ Krolok’s voice had none of the querulousness of the radio broadcast. He sounded powerful, in his prime.
I realised that he meant the disc.
‘Yes.’
I took it from my jacket pocket, and tried to give it to Danny. Leaf moved away, and looked out of the window.
Krolok extended his hand. I did a double take. It had only three fingers, all of which ended in talons.
The thought went through my head that I was being set up, the victim of some kind of practical joke. This was being carefully stage-managed.
I put the disc back into my jacket pocket.
The woman stood up and walked toward me. She hit me very, very hard. I stumbled backward, felt the heat from the fire and jumped forward, tripping over a set of fire irons. They and I hit the floor simultaneously.
The woman took a step forward, picked up the poker and thrust it into the fire. Her high heel then stabbed into the back of my hand and drew blood. I squealed, more in shock than pain.
‘Danny? What’s going on?’
Leaf remained stationary, gazing out at the Loch.
Krolok rose from the sofa. He pulled at the curve of his walking-stick. The handle came away, unsheathing a thin rapier-like sword.
The cat spat.
‘I’m not here to play games. You can have cold steel. You can have a red-hot poker. Mr Leaf has told me that you witnessed my….comeback. Well, my dear boy, you are the last. We are isolated here and can take our time. It’s been a while since I’ve had time on my hands. I hope you don’t break down too quickly.’
‘DANNY!!’
‘He can’t help you. He’s beholden to me. For his skill, his fame, his money, and his mystique.’
I heard the coals behind me move. The cat’s tail lashed back and forth. I felt in my jacket pocket, but the disc was no longer there.
Lorelei pulled her spiked heel from the back of my hand. I winced and thrust the damaged extremity into my other jacket pocket. The disc was there! I fumbled it out, and offered it to Krolok.
He threw his head back and laughed.
‘It’s too late for that, boy.’
‘Oh no.’
I saw Krolok and Lorelei turn towards Danny. He was still staring out of the window, but was now pointing a shaking hand at the sky.
‘Look!’
The sky was turning darker. A flock of strangely shaped objects were flying toward Bolokskin. Danny ducked beneath the window sill as glass shattered and the objects filled the room, buzzing in anger around Krolok.
I tried to make out what they were. Cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cabbages, aubergines, carrots, leeks….
Krolok was screaming and slashing at the vegetables with his swordstick. The cat, Satan, ears flat against his head, tail twice its normal size and lashing from side to side, growled and sprang at me. Claws and teeth sank into my neck and back. I howled and rolled over. The cat was dislodged and dazed. I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and hurled it into the fire. An almost human scream came from it, as it immolated.
‘Bastard!’ hissed Lorelei. She thrust the poker at my face, and I rolled to the side once more. Danny appeared through the vegetable storm, and grabbed her shoulders.
‘Come on!’ he bellowed, and shoved her through the door.
Despite Krolok’s slicing and dicing, the cut vegetables were attaching themselves to him. He was disappearing under layer after layer of rotting veg. Two perfectly circular cucumber slices settled on his eyes. He dropped the sword which pierced the parquet flooring and quivered before my nose.
He was now almost unrecognisable. His arms outstretched, he slowly began to rotate. Spinning crucifixion in salad form. The figure slowly left the floor and span toward the window. I crawled over the sticky floor toward the smashed window as the vegetised Krolok passed through. The figure slowly rotated through the air until it was above the Loch, then dropped suddenly into the water with a disappointing plop.
A short silence was shattered by the revving of an engine, and a brand new SUV careered into sight, two hunched forms in the front. It reached the main road and disappeared into the night.
I watched the Loch until I became aware of the intense cold. Hunting through the now empty house, I found a bedroom with a made bed, and slipped in. Before dropping off into a dreamless sleep I considered the fact that there was now a real monster in the Loch.
Despite the previous events, I woke early. I found the taxi firm’s card in my jacket and called them. While waiting, I strolled down to the nearest point of the Loch. A few sodden vegetables floated on the black water, like a cheap and awful stew.
I slept for most of the train journey, awakened only by the food and drink trolley. I bought a newspaper and frowned at the stop press picture of Danny Leaf, arm outstretched toward the flashbulbs, hurrying through Glasgow’s departure lounge, ‘with an unnamed woman.’ The paparazzi had slipped up. The woman was clad in a voluminous cloak, with a hood pulled over her face. You could just make out the tip of her nose.
On arrival at King’s Cross, I mooched around the station.
‘Spare some pence for a cup o’ tea, Son?’
‘No Big Issue?’
I grinned at the tramp. Then frowned. And tried to see past the balaclava, grime, salt and pepper stubble….
‘Pop?’
The ex-BBC archivist cackled with glee.
‘I thought it was you! You got away then, Son?’
‘Yes. I….How did you…?’
‘Get the drinks in, Son, and I’ll explain.’
Fifteen minutes later, we sat on a bench next to a tiny green enclosed lawn outside the railway station. I sipped some vegetable juice, Pop slurped from a can of Atomic strength lager.
‘How did you know…’ I began.
‘I saw you in my Mirror Of Illusion.’
‘Your…are you some kind of magician, Pop?’
‘I dabble.’ The old man looked away.
‘Folly of youth. I was in the Emetic Order of the Golden Yawn. Krolok attended a couple of our meetings. Funny thing, you know, Matheson McGregor was the founder of the order. Colin McGregor’s dad. I always felt Col was a bit ashamed of that. And that’s why he didn’t want to do the programme.What a programme, eh? Shame it’ll never be seen. That radio stuff. That was from my own archives, not the Beeb’s. I think there was some…kind of ….ritual stuff in what old Anton was saying. I think that may have helped bring him back. I should have been more careful.’
‘So it wasn’t Sandbag?’
‘Yeah, it was. In a way. He’s…was…just a chancer who got lucky. Fantastic memory. Could recite ritual stuff for hours. But nothing going on there.’ Pop tapped his temple.
‘I think that’s why his rituals worked. His mind was blank when he performed them. Totally receptive. What happened to Krolok?’
‘He’s in the Loch. Attacked by…’
‘Vegetables.’
‘You know?’
‘I sent them.’
‘What?’
‘It was all I had! I was holed up in New Covent Garden. I’d cloaked myself so old Anton couldn’t find me. I don’t think he was that bothered, just tidy. Wanted everyone involved out of the way so he could move about with no-one knowing. You were the only other. I watched what was going on. I conjured up a spell to send whatever was to hand to help you.’
‘Thanks. Do you think Krolok's dead now?’
‘You can’t kill something that’s already dead. He died, physically, in 1947. But he always claimed that he’d been around for centuries previously. He’s been resurrected before. That’s how his daughter came about.’
‘Lorelei?’
‘Yup. Wish I could find out who her mother was. Then we’d know a lot more.’
‘So, what do we do now?’
‘Don’t worry, Son. I don’t think he’ll bother us again. I’ve put up a couple of protection charms, but when he gets out of the Loch, he’ll have other things to worry about. Take care.’
The old tramp heaved himself up off the bench, and tottered of down the road. I heard a squeal of brakes and watched a slanging match between a taxi driver and a bicycle courier. Blessed normality!
I stuck my hands into my jacket pockets as I stood up to go home, and felt the edge of the battered, bloodstained, cracked DVD-r case.
I decided to make for the river, and walk home that way.
Being a researcher for a television show is good fun when you’re young. I was twenty-one, footloose, fancy-free, and enjoyed bombing around London, visiting museums, libraries, newspaper archives, meeting interesting people, rubbing shoulders with so-called ‘celebrities’ -who are always shorter and more bad-tempered than they appear on screen. Comedians are particularly miserable bastards.
The pay was shite, but that didn’t matter at the time. I had good friends and good times. When the Beeb decided to do a ‘McGregor Investigates’ on Witchcraft, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.
Seeing my grandfather drool over the Sunday scandal rag exposes, to an adolescent fascination with suicide, murder and ‘the dark side’, it seemed I’d always been around the subject. Books of horror stories, and the inevitable horror films (even if the sfx weren’t very s) fuelled the fire.
It was in a music paper that I first saw a picture of Anton Krolok. Sandy Beech was doing an article on rock and the occult. It seemed Krolok had a big effect on drug-addled pop stars of the late sixties. Not bad for a fraudulent old fart who’d died penniless in the late forties, jeered as a liar, a traitor and a conman.
The paper printed a couple of photographs of him. I was initially struck by his resemblance to a favourite old comic character of mine, Grimly Fiendish. There was something about him. Particularly his eyes.
I moseyed down to the library and took out Ron Simmons’ biography The Huge Monster. Simmons’ had met him when he was dying. The biographer dismissed most of the stories, but had to admit, he had something. He’d been condemned in the thirties as ‘The Most Beastly Man In Britain’ – a title that had transferred to some of his musician admirers thirty years later.
I sighed. There was something much more interesting about this kind of notoriety than the current wave of child-molesters and terrorists, who all seemed so ordinary.
Colin McGregor was a well known investigative journalist, who’d worked on a broadsheet before being approached by the BBC. His journalism was respected, his articles and programmes caused ripples, and had been actually seen to provoke change.
The Witchcraft special had been cooked up as a light-hearted end of series filler. McGregor wasn’t happy about this. In a warm-up meeting, I was quite surprised by his reaction. His brusque dismissal of the subject matter seemed fuelled, not by scepticism, but…by fear. This piqued my curiosity No-one else seemed to have picked up on it. Was the bedrock of sense scared of a few old coots (most of whom were dead) who claimed to be Black Sorcerors?
The programme makers had decided to concentrate on three occultists. Krolok, the Reverend Monty Winters and current ‘King Of The Warlocks’ Alexis Sandbag. (Windbag would be more appropriate – he never shut up – talking about himself.)
McGregor seemed to cheer up when one of his old chums, novelist Gregory Pendennis , was wheeled in. Pendennis had churned out some ‘Black Sorcery’ novels, one of which (To Hell With The Devil) had been a best-seller, and filmed by Mallet Studios years back.
Pendennis was a cheery old soak, who skilfully marketed himself as an authority on the matter, although he had never participated in anything unsavoury (he said). I liked him.
He was dismissive of Krolok in the main, but admitted that the man had enormous occult knowledge, and had undoubtedly participated in Black Masses, unholy rituals, and almost certainly many, many orgies (the lucky bugger!)
The producers of the show became tremendously excited by an offer by Sandbag to attempt a ritual to conjure up Krolok actually on the programme.
McGregor stormed out. Pendennis, even in his cups on licence-payer funded brandy, advised against it.
The project was shelved , at least within McGregor’s earshot. A rumour ran round the studio that Sandbag was going to go ahead, when filming was completed and McGregor had left for the day. Part of me wanted to attend out of a desire to see how these things worked, although convinced nothing would happen. Another part of me was very afraid, and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. If this rubbish could actually frighten one of the most hard-nosed, no-nonsense reporters in Britain, it would have no problem with a self-confessed coward like myself.
Filming for the actual programme went very well. We had the luxury of nearly a week, and it was almost done by Thursday. McGregor had a few pickups to do on Friday, and would be off to Scotland by lunchtime. The crew and backroom staff would be having a wrap booze-up in The Dog & Ferret all afternoon. The rumours abounded that they would reconvene in the Studio at midnight for the Sandbag revive Krolok ritual.
I had cried off, saying I was going away for the weekend, but had found a cradle up in the lighting rigs when I assisted Albie the lighting engineer, that I was sorely tempted to secrete myself in to watch the goings on. Do a Pendennis – be there yet not participate.
I’d been reading in the cradle on Wednesday night when I overheard a conversation between Pendennis and McGregor. Our presenter was obviously worried that this bit of fun would seriously compromise his standing as a journalist. Pendennis waved his fears away.
‘Present it straight, Mac. Give it to ‘em like you mean it. Just before the summing up, take the piss a bit. It’s hogwash, you know. And then, on the sign-off, give ‘em that hint that it might be for real. Just a tiny seed of doubt. They’ll love it.’
‘Do you believe, Greg?’ McGregor sounded worried. I wanted to peek over the side of the cradle to see their faces, but daren’t move in case I was discovered.
Pendennis paused for a very long time.
‘Let’s say I don’t not believe, Mac. I can’t actually say I’ve seen anything truly…supernatural. But this stuff has been around for centuries. And these practitioners you’re concentrating on…they’re intelligent men. They believe. Even that silly ass Sandbag. He’s on to a good thing at the moment. Publicity, he’s coining it, and he’s got the pick of the young popsies that fall under his spell. I mean, who wouldn’t? But you often get the feeling that it won’t last. There’ll be a balance. You’ve scotched this séance nonsense?’
‘Yes. Damn’ young fools. I’ve told them, any fooling around and they’re out.’
‘Good man. 98% of this stuff is absolute tripe. But the other 2 % …’
The two old buffers wandered off.
So, anyone caught playing around with Witchy stuff would be sacked. Good job I wouldn’t be there officially. Forget it, I told myself. Get away for a couple of days.
But the lure of the Forbidden felt stronger than ever. And Jan was one of the people who wanted to participate in the Ritual. And the Sundays always stated that you had to be naked during these affairs. Nope, I had to attend.
‘******************************************
The rest of Thursday and Friday morning turned out to be very, very busy. Old Pop from the archives had dug up some radio broadcasts. A film can from the American avant-garde film-maker Kevin Ire turned up. And the ex-girlfriend of singer, bandleader and occultist, the late George Premium turned up to talk to McGregor.
2pm and the programme was completed, bar a couple of last minute edits. Colin McGregor was still having last minute doubts. The show was to be broadcast the following Tuesday, so a number of Sunday hacks had been sniffing around. They’d give us a great plug, but McGregor was convinced they’d be vilifying the Beeb for broadcasting filth. After the show, there was to be a round table discussion led by Joanne Bakelite and including Sandbag, the Bishop of London plus pundit Bryan Buggeridge as a damage limitation exercise.
The producers had some footage of goose-pimpled spotty herberts in the nude, dancing round a fire on a blasted heath, but there were reservations. How much flesh could be shown? There would be complaints, but the ratings would rocket. Decisions, decisions.
I was with editor Sam Markules, who was trying to fit some pictures of Krolok to a radio broadcast the Magician had made just before the Second World War. Markules was running with three pictures, trying to fade them into one another. Krolok’s voice, quavery with age but still with undeniable power, was droning on about an English magician of the 17th Century who had interested him. Krolok had been in America during the war, and commented that he’d picked up on the magician’s trail.
‘He don’t half talk some shit, don’t he?’ groaned Markules. ‘Still, they’ll tune in for the tits and bums. But I don’t think Mr McGregor will be returning for another series, if the balloon goes.up. The Blackhouse woman is on standby. We’re already trying to line up a repeat week after next. Will you be down the pub?’
‘No. No. I’ve got to get off when we’re done. Visiting the folks.’
‘You might miss a treat. I think old Windbag’s going to go ahead with his ritual.’
‘I thought McGregor forbade it?’
‘He’s gone. What he doesn’t know….’
I tried to make light of it.
‘What if he did bring old Anton back?’
Markules laughed.
‘We’d stick an extra ten minutes on the repeat, and get Anton on the next available chat show.’
I sloped off thirty minutes later.
‘****************************
Returning to the studios at nine, I managed to slip past Scranton the night watchman. I’d forgotten about him. I wondered how the returning staff would explain their presence to him. Be a laugh if he walked in on the lot of ‘em starkers.
I climbed up into the light cradle, and positioned a couple of cushions to make my self comfortable. I’d bought a child’s periscope so that I could watch the proceedings and remain hidden. I just hoped no-one would look up and spot it.
I must have dozed off, as I jerked awake to the sound of shushings and giggles below. I glanced through the periscope aperture. It was dark below. I could make out three, four, five (?) figures. All sounded drunk. One fell over which caused hysterical hushed laughter. They sat down in a circle. One spoke to the others. I assumed that it was Sandbag. God, he sounded boring from up here. The vocalist stood up and began to move around. I couldn’t make out what he was up to until he lit some candles. Black ones. He’d drawn a shaky pentagram on the studio floor. A black candle was at each point. I tried to make out the indistinct figures, but couldn’t identify anyone. They all wore hooded robes, to my disappointment.
The main speaker rejoined the others on the floor inside the pentacle. He lit an incense pyramid, and began to lead an undecipherable chant. The others joined in. They might be pissed, but they knew the words.
The plumes of smoke from the incense seemed to coagulate in the candlelight, above the ritual participants. A real atmosphere was forming down there. I felt uncomfortable, but daren’t move. I moved the periscope slightly, but still couldn’t identify any of the people below, apart from the leader of the ritual whom I was sure was Sandbag.
A red light caught my attention. Focusing the periscope, I saw that it was atop a camera. A camera that was pointing at the participants. They were being filmed? There was no cameraman, and I had not seen anyone move the camera, or turn it on.
I was definitely feeling uneasy now. The chanting was getting louder. Surely Scranton must hear them. The small ring of people had their arms out stretched toward the cloud of smoke above them. Something moved within it. I strained my eye, but could not make it out. It grew larger. The robed figures were standing now, caressing the smoke. Was it solidifying? Impossible!
The circle of ritualists guided the thickening smoke to the floor. It had assumed a human shape. There was definitely something in it. My hair was standing on end. I couldn’t believe my eye. I slowly, carefully put the periscope down within the cradle, and tried to pull my self upward to look over the side of the cradle. I made it just as the smoke cleared. The hooded figures stepped back and revealed what could only be Anton Krolok lying naked on the floor. The figures disrobed. I saw Sandbag, Jan, Liz, Sam and old Pop! Leaning forward in disbelief as they began to run their hands over Krolok’s body, one of my cushions abandoned cradle. I tried to grasp it but was too late.
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The cushion floated, achingly slowly, down between the circle of ritualists and landed on Krolok’s chest. As it did so, I came out of my trance and clambered from the cradle as fast as I could. Shouts came from below. I didn’t dare glance down. I ran across the gantries, into the next studio, and tried to slide down a thick cable, burning my palms, and falling the last 20 or so feet. A heavy, but otherwise uneventful landing, meant that I could run like hell for the exit door. I froze as it began to open toward me, but became reanimated as a puzzled Scranton looked around the edge.
‘What’s all the racket?’
‘There’s been a break-in, Officer Scranton! Thieves are in the next studio! Arrest them! I’ll get the police!’ I shouted, then dodged around him and ran like the wind.
I successfully escaped the main building and kept on running for home.
Lying sweating in my bed, I tried to make sense of what I’d been witness to. Had Britain’s King Of The Warlocks and some TV technicians managed to raise a long-dead Black Sorceror? I couldn’t take it in. A couple of Scotches made me feel ill, but successfully knocked me out.
I woke up feeling less than ready to face the day. Arriving at the Studio late I was summoned to a senior producer’s office, where I was read the riot act.
She didn’t give away too much of what had happened, except that apparently a camera had been stolen. Scranton had recognised me and grassed me up. He’d discovered ‘thieves’ in the studio, and been knocked out for his trouble. He didn’t recognise anyone else.
I realised that I was being accused of being a lookout or a decoy, for the theft! I denied everything. They didn’t press charges, but I lost my job. I didn’t see anyone I knew as I left, and didn’t particularly want to stay in contact with any of them. They hadn’t been the good friends I’d thought.
‘*************************************
Colin McGregor died of a brain haemorrhage on Monday night, so the programme was never transmitted. Some of what was considered his more worthwhile journalism was aired instead. In hindsight, I expected the tabloids to make more of a fuss, but no mention of the last in the series of ‘McGregor Investigates’ was made.
I’d moved on to a more mundane office job, when I saw Sam Markules obituary in The Guardian. A car crash.
Within the next month Alexis Sandbag succumbed to heart failure. He went as he probably would have wanted, conducting a ritual on a remote Scottish Island in the middle of a circle of standing stones. I felt sure that at least some of the programme would be used , but the reports were very terse.
Visiting my Grandfather I renewed my acquaintance with the good old lurid Sundays. It was a good weekend for them. Two ‘high-flying television back-room girls’ were revealed to be not only lesbians, but one had murdered the other, then committed suicide. I recognised Jan and Liz from the blurred photgraphs, and my paranoia began to grow.
On a whim, I telephoned the TV studios and asked for Pop. I was told that he no longer worked for the Corporation. They were unable to provide any further information. I hung up when they asked who I was.
Back home, I did some thinking. Assuming that Pop was dead, that meant everyone involved in the raising of Krolok had passed on. Was I safe? I thought so. I hadn’t participated. Perhaps Krolok (I also assumed that, not only was he back from the dead, but also was responsible for the elimination of his resurrectionists) didn’t know who I was, or didn’t care. I wasn’t important or involved enough.
I toyed with two possible ways forward. To try and have a chat with Gregory Pendennis. Or, as the longest possible shot, to try and contact Danny Leaf, rock musician extraordinaire, and owner of the second biggest collection of Krolokiana in the world. (Just behind Kevin Ire. But compared to him, Leaf seemed relatively normal)
Pendennis was unobtainable. Apparently he’d gone to his Cornish country cottage with his nephew, and it was unknown when they would return.
Surprisingly, I had much better luck with the famous guitarist. I telephoned his agent, and mentioned that I had been involved in the McGregor Investigates programme. She assured me that she would pass the message on.
Danny himself telephoned me two days later, and offered to meet me in an obscure country pub near his Surrey mansion.
I took the requisite day off, and turned up at the pub early. Leaf was there, on his own. We retired to the snug, a tiny room that could just contain the pair of us, and he asked what was on my mind. I blurted out the whole story, finishing with ‘You must think I’m mad.’
‘Oh no, ‘ he replied gently. ‘You’re nowhere near mad. If you think I don’t believe you, I do. I’ve been offered the film.’
Sitting there surrounded by cool whitewashed walls, the sunshine streaming in through a tiny window, watching the streams of bubbles in our pints, I found it difficult to think about those previous dark events.
‘You know all the other people involved in this are dead?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘But then an awful lot of people who became involved with Anton Krolok died. And not of natural causes.’
I didn’t know quite how to say what I wanted to say.
‘If you believe me….’
‘I do.’
‘Then….you accept….the possibility….that Krolok is alive. And out there somewhere.’
I gestured vaguely.
Leaf smiled.
‘Oh yes. I’ve talked to Kev about this. He told me he’d seen the film. And was convinced that it was genuine. He’s going to conduct a ritual on April 30th. To call Krolok to him.’
‘Will you be there.’
‘No. Despite my interest, I’m a bit like you. I don’t want to practice magic. I’m interested in those who do, but it’s ….too dangerous. As I said, there have been so many deaths.’
Our conversation petered out, and I thanked him for his time and left. Just before my departure, he took my address and promised to send me a bootleg DVD-r of the McGregor Investigates programme.
It arrived the next week, but I put the package to one side and left it unopened. Fortunately, work became hectic, and I struck up an acquaintance with some fellow office workers. The cinema, gigs, the theatre.
I didn’t think about anything Krolok-related until May 5th, when I caught a news bulletin about the death of Kevin Ire. Police in Beverley Hills were confounded by his apparent spontaneous combustion during ‘an occult ritual.’ It had taken a few days to identify his body.
I saw the package from Danny Leaf on the floor of the lounge. I opened it up, and took out the shiny blank disc.
Krolok’s face appeared reflected in the silver. I dropped the disc and whirled around. No-one there.
I tried to control the shaking of my hands as I picked up the disc. Had the lights in the room dimmed? I turned the television on and jumped at the harsh blare of white noise. Static filled the screen. The remote control slithered as though alive in my sweaty hand. I pushed button after button. Had the batteries gone? Finally, a picture appeared. One of those property programmes. I normally hated this sort of thing, but the asinine presenters and money-hungry would be buyers cheered me up no end. I sighed with relief and flopped onto the sofa, my heartbeat gradually beginning to slow.
I realised that I still had the disc in my other hand. Cautiously, I looked at it. No sinister reflections. Just my own pasty, nervous face. The face tried a smile. Did I really want to watch this? Get it over with. Watch it , then throw it. Send it back to Leaf.
Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and watch the DVD player swallow the disc.
I don’t quite know why, but I expected the quality of the sound and images to be poor. It was pin-sharp and perfect.
The familiar theme tune of McGregor Investigates blared out, an almost discordant fanfare. I felt tears in my eyes as the late Colin McGregor appeared behind a desk and barked
‘Witchcraft – Seventeenth Century Superstition – or a real and terrifying menace even today?’
I hoped that there was a copy of this in the BBC archives, and that it might be transmitted one day. I was enthralled. McGregor’s fears that it would come over as a load of rubbish were quite unfounded. The programme was riveting. Even the late Alexis Sandbag came over as interesting (thanks to the sterling work of the late Sam Markules, I suspected. What an editor!).
In fact, I was actually enjoying the programme until the first of the pictures of Anton Krolok appeared on the screen. As his quavering but forceful tones from the crackly radio broadcast detailed his researches into the work of one Doctor Dementer, the eyes in the photograph moved to stare at me. I felt pinned to the sofa. The head turned to follow the eyes. The moon face filled the screen as I gasped for breath.
The telephone rang. My eyes were torn from the screen, and I felt released. I practically ran across the lounge to pick up the ‘phone.
‘Yes?’
A familiar voice spoke my name.
‘Danny?’
‘Yeah, it’s me. Look, are you free this weekend?’
‘Erm…yeah…why?’
‘I’d like you to come up to Scotland. To my place up there, by Loch Ness. There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I’m sending a motorcycle courier round with some cash for travelling expenses and details of how to find my place. I’ll see you there.’
‘Great!’
‘Have you watched the programme yet?’
I felt a chill, and glanced back at the screen. To my relief, old man Pendennis was holding forth on the fact that 98% of Black Sorcery was, in fact, cobblers.
‘I’m just watching it now.’
‘Turn it off. Don’t watch anymore. And bring the disc to Scotland with you. Can you do that?’
His voice had an urgency about it.
‘No problem. See you Saturday.’
‘See you. Turn that thing off now.’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’
I put the ‘phone down and grabbed the remote.
Colin McGregor was talking to music journalist Sandy Beech as they strolled beside a large lake.
‘And the guitarist Leaf has actually purchased this property?’
‘Yeah, Col. Bolokskin. Krolok’s old place by Loch Ness.’
The black-clad, long-haired, bespectacled journo gestured at a large house nestling in the trees not far from the Loch shoreline.
McGregor, in trademark deerstalker, and Ulster, leaned on his walking stick.
‘And it was here that Krolok…’
I pressed ‘stop’.
The journey to Scotland was uneventful. I caught the train from Kings Cross and dozed, reread The Huge Monster, listened to Danny’s group performing The Songs Are All The Same on my MP3. I had to change at Edinburgh and eventually rolled up at Inverness just gone 5 pm. Over nine hours! I was sick of that album. And had binned the Simmons’ book.
The taxi from Inverness station didn’t take long, and wasn’t expensive. The driver didn’t even comment on my destination. It had gotten dark by now. As I stood outside the house, I noticed the graveyard across the road. It was freezing cold. An owl hooted. I could see the moon, as well as my breath. I suddenly wished I’d bought some sort of gift for Dan. I always thought of these things too late.
I walked down a small gravel path to the front door. As I raised my fist to knock, the door opened. Danny stood in the hall.
‘Come in.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Good journey?’
‘Fine. Bit dullsville.’
‘You didn’t fly?’
Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Had he been expecting me eight hours earlier? Did he think I was secreting my expenses?
‘I came by train. I didn’t think…’
‘Come in here.’
Danny opened a small door on his left. I followed him into a large room, with a massive bay window, overlooking the Loch. Moonlight glinted on the black water. Subdued lighting kept much of the room in a kind of semi-darkness.
I became aware of three other occupants of the room. A black leather sofa was pushed up against the wall. On it squatted an obese, bald, toad-like man. His body was encased in a long black coat, from throat to ankles. Both hands were fisted around the handle of an ebony walking-stick.
Sitting on the arm of the sofa, next to the man was a young woman, clad in a figure-hugging black dress. High-heeled black shoes adorned her feet. Long dark hair, flanked by two white streaks, curled around her shoulders.
On the other side of the man purred a large black cat, it’s green eyes fixed on me.
Danny coughed.
‘I’d like you to meet Anton Krolok, Lorelei and Satan.’
Despite a log fire blazing behind us, I’d never felt colder in my life.
‘*****************
‘Did you bring the…film?’ Krolok’s voice had none of the querulousness of the radio broadcast. He sounded powerful, in his prime.
I realised that he meant the disc.
‘Yes.’
I took it from my jacket pocket, and tried to give it to Danny. Leaf moved away, and looked out of the window.
Krolok extended his hand. I did a double take. It had only three fingers, all of which ended in talons.
The thought went through my head that I was being set up, the victim of some kind of practical joke. This was being carefully stage-managed.
I put the disc back into my jacket pocket.
The woman stood up and walked toward me. She hit me very, very hard. I stumbled backward, felt the heat from the fire and jumped forward, tripping over a set of fire irons. They and I hit the floor simultaneously.
The woman took a step forward, picked up the poker and thrust it into the fire. Her high heel then stabbed into the back of my hand and drew blood. I squealed, more in shock than pain.
‘Danny? What’s going on?’
Leaf remained stationary, gazing out at the Loch.
Krolok rose from the sofa. He pulled at the curve of his walking-stick. The handle came away, unsheathing a thin rapier-like sword.
The cat spat.
‘I’m not here to play games. You can have cold steel. You can have a red-hot poker. Mr Leaf has told me that you witnessed my….comeback. Well, my dear boy, you are the last. We are isolated here and can take our time. It’s been a while since I’ve had time on my hands. I hope you don’t break down too quickly.’
‘DANNY!!’
‘He can’t help you. He’s beholden to me. For his skill, his fame, his money, and his mystique.’
I heard the coals behind me move. The cat’s tail lashed back and forth. I felt in my jacket pocket, but the disc was no longer there.
Lorelei pulled her spiked heel from the back of my hand. I winced and thrust the damaged extremity into my other jacket pocket. The disc was there! I fumbled it out, and offered it to Krolok.
He threw his head back and laughed.
‘It’s too late for that, boy.’
‘Oh no.’
I saw Krolok and Lorelei turn towards Danny. He was still staring out of the window, but was now pointing a shaking hand at the sky.
‘Look!’
The sky was turning darker. A flock of strangely shaped objects were flying toward Bolokskin. Danny ducked beneath the window sill as glass shattered and the objects filled the room, buzzing in anger around Krolok.
I tried to make out what they were. Cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cabbages, aubergines, carrots, leeks….
Krolok was screaming and slashing at the vegetables with his swordstick. The cat, Satan, ears flat against his head, tail twice its normal size and lashing from side to side, growled and sprang at me. Claws and teeth sank into my neck and back. I howled and rolled over. The cat was dislodged and dazed. I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and hurled it into the fire. An almost human scream came from it, as it immolated.
‘Bastard!’ hissed Lorelei. She thrust the poker at my face, and I rolled to the side once more. Danny appeared through the vegetable storm, and grabbed her shoulders.
‘Come on!’ he bellowed, and shoved her through the door.
Despite Krolok’s slicing and dicing, the cut vegetables were attaching themselves to him. He was disappearing under layer after layer of rotting veg. Two perfectly circular cucumber slices settled on his eyes. He dropped the sword which pierced the parquet flooring and quivered before my nose.
He was now almost unrecognisable. His arms outstretched, he slowly began to rotate. Spinning crucifixion in salad form. The figure slowly left the floor and span toward the window. I crawled over the sticky floor toward the smashed window as the vegetised Krolok passed through. The figure slowly rotated through the air until it was above the Loch, then dropped suddenly into the water with a disappointing plop.
A short silence was shattered by the revving of an engine, and a brand new SUV careered into sight, two hunched forms in the front. It reached the main road and disappeared into the night.
I watched the Loch until I became aware of the intense cold. Hunting through the now empty house, I found a bedroom with a made bed, and slipped in. Before dropping off into a dreamless sleep I considered the fact that there was now a real monster in the Loch.
Despite the previous events, I woke early. I found the taxi firm’s card in my jacket and called them. While waiting, I strolled down to the nearest point of the Loch. A few sodden vegetables floated on the black water, like a cheap and awful stew.
I slept for most of the train journey, awakened only by the food and drink trolley. I bought a newspaper and frowned at the stop press picture of Danny Leaf, arm outstretched toward the flashbulbs, hurrying through Glasgow’s departure lounge, ‘with an unnamed woman.’ The paparazzi had slipped up. The woman was clad in a voluminous cloak, with a hood pulled over her face. You could just make out the tip of her nose.
On arrival at King’s Cross, I mooched around the station.
‘Spare some pence for a cup o’ tea, Son?’
‘No Big Issue?’
I grinned at the tramp. Then frowned. And tried to see past the balaclava, grime, salt and pepper stubble….
‘Pop?’
The ex-BBC archivist cackled with glee.
‘I thought it was you! You got away then, Son?’
‘Yes. I….How did you…?’
‘Get the drinks in, Son, and I’ll explain.’
Fifteen minutes later, we sat on a bench next to a tiny green enclosed lawn outside the railway station. I sipped some vegetable juice, Pop slurped from a can of Atomic strength lager.
‘How did you know…’ I began.
‘I saw you in my Mirror Of Illusion.’
‘Your…are you some kind of magician, Pop?’
‘I dabble.’ The old man looked away.
‘Folly of youth. I was in the Emetic Order of the Golden Yawn. Krolok attended a couple of our meetings. Funny thing, you know, Matheson McGregor was the founder of the order. Colin McGregor’s dad. I always felt Col was a bit ashamed of that. And that’s why he didn’t want to do the programme.What a programme, eh? Shame it’ll never be seen. That radio stuff. That was from my own archives, not the Beeb’s. I think there was some…kind of ….ritual stuff in what old Anton was saying. I think that may have helped bring him back. I should have been more careful.’
‘So it wasn’t Sandbag?’
‘Yeah, it was. In a way. He’s…was…just a chancer who got lucky. Fantastic memory. Could recite ritual stuff for hours. But nothing going on there.’ Pop tapped his temple.
‘I think that’s why his rituals worked. His mind was blank when he performed them. Totally receptive. What happened to Krolok?’
‘He’s in the Loch. Attacked by…’
‘Vegetables.’
‘You know?’
‘I sent them.’
‘What?’
‘It was all I had! I was holed up in New Covent Garden. I’d cloaked myself so old Anton couldn’t find me. I don’t think he was that bothered, just tidy. Wanted everyone involved out of the way so he could move about with no-one knowing. You were the only other. I watched what was going on. I conjured up a spell to send whatever was to hand to help you.’
‘Thanks. Do you think Krolok's dead now?’
‘You can’t kill something that’s already dead. He died, physically, in 1947. But he always claimed that he’d been around for centuries previously. He’s been resurrected before. That’s how his daughter came about.’
‘Lorelei?’
‘Yup. Wish I could find out who her mother was. Then we’d know a lot more.’
‘So, what do we do now?’
‘Don’t worry, Son. I don’t think he’ll bother us again. I’ve put up a couple of protection charms, but when he gets out of the Loch, he’ll have other things to worry about. Take care.’
The old tramp heaved himself up off the bench, and tottered of down the road. I heard a squeal of brakes and watched a slanging match between a taxi driver and a bicycle courier. Blessed normality!
I stuck my hands into my jacket pockets as I stood up to go home, and felt the edge of the battered, bloodstained, cracked DVD-r case.
I decided to make for the river, and walk home that way.
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