by Hughes, Rhys
She snatched up her brassière and carried it into the kitchen. When she reached the stove she filled the iron cups with charcoal and grilled a whole poodle over the pulsating flames. Her brassière often doubled up as a brazier: it saved on vocabulary.
A week after Artery and Appalling left for Arkham, the exchange graduate arrived at the college. She was almost twelve feet tall, with snaky hair and four visible arms. Softly spoken and darkly cowled, she teetered on a pair of stiff legs. She introduced herself as ‘Oldona’ and seemed a little confused in her new environment. She was a civil engineer and her main interest was in building bridges. The Chancellor had commissioned a crossing of the local river as a test. The college stream was a trickle, but it cut into the campus like a festering wound, dividing one faculty from another. For the flying staff this presented few problems; but the Social Science Departments were run by zombies, who had to be rowed from bank to bank by galley-slaves hand-picked from the student ranks. The loss of scholars was high; the gondolas were often capsized by the uniformly suicidal punters, fatally dampening the reputation of Stakehampton Institute of Parasitical Studies.
Wasting no time, Oldona experimented with a large number of designs before submitting the most suitable for approval by the Chancellor. A suspension bridge would look best, she maintained; but only if it was well-hung. This was Arkham gallows humour.
Lilith planned to make her acquaintance as soon as it was feasible, but in fact the engineer sought her out first. Officially, Mrs Robinson was a student counsellor. Undergraduates came to her with their problems and her job was to make them worse, offering bad advice on dilemmas in housing, nourishment and faith.
“I just can’t seem to settle in,” Oldona lisped, as she entered Mrs Robinson’s office. “The climate is horrid and I can’t get used to biting on the left hand side of the neck.”
“Sit down.” Lilith indicated a chair.
Oldona lowered herself, rather awkwardly, onto the seat. She winced and adjusted her position. “I’m quite happy with my working arrangements here; it’s the social side. I feel lonely.”
“Perhaps you need a lover. There are some eligible gargoyles on the shelf in the college chapel basement.”
“I’m a married entity. I couldn’t possibly consider a paramour. How would I appease my conscience?”
“A paranormalmour,” corrected Mrs Robinson. “I had one myself, very recently. See this cleaver hung around my neck? The first gift he bought me. I sharpen it once a day. Actually, he’s the bat who’s gone to Arkham in your place. He’s a songwriter.”
Oldona’s eyes grew bright. “Is he any good?”
“In bed? Certainly! Or do you mean his music? Well actually...”
Lilith bit her lip, a painful gesture. Oldona seemed flustered; she mopped her brow with one hand and twiddled the thumbs of two others. Mrs Robinson broke the uneasy pause with a lopsided grin. “We both need some company. Let me show you the local nightlife.”
Oldona chuckled. “I was hoping you’d say that...”
“I’ll meet you outside the Palais de Decadence at midnight. But you must lope along now, I’ve got work to do.”
Oldona staggered to her feet and lurched out. Lilith was astonished by a sudden screech which diminished in sinusoidal waves. Then she guessed that Oldona had eased her alarming bulk onto the balcony of the spiral stairs and was enjoying an unconventional descent. She brushed tears and smiled indulgently at the same time. Youth was such a marvellous attribute, but no matter how it was spent, it was squandered!
Mrs Robinson thought of Artery Garfunkle, swooping over the maggoty campus of a foreign college, or treading the boards of a graveyard dive, plucking his guitar and crooning to Appalling’s accordion. What would an American audience make of their portentous melodies? Lilith recalled her own heroes—Howlin’ Werewolf, Bloody Waters, Hellmore James. Artery had no chance of competing with those big bogies.
On the other talon, it was even more disturbing to envisage success for the duo. If it happened, it would go straight to their skulls, like a wine fermented from pumpkins, nightshade and cheerleaders. The pleasures on offer, the adulation, would rot Artery’s mind, leaving him a pathetic wreck on the rocky shores of folk.
At this thought, Mrs Robinson rubbed her palms in glee. Perhaps she ought to let them ruin themselves. But no, this smacked of quietism, she was determined to play a part in the final humiliation. With her sleeve, she wiped away the usual stain from the chair where Oldona had sat. Then she returned to work, shuffling her papers.
The afternoon progressed slowly. Seven distraught students, with a coffinful of depressions between them, came to visit, but she could only convince three that the answer was suicide. The others expressed doubts about its usefulness and her counselling skills could not persuade them otherwise. “It’s good for you!” she insisted.
Returning to her room, she made herself up with violet lipstick and crimson mascara, and hung dark pearls from her pierced nipples. Then she gargled with sweet nepenthe, stiffened her hair with lime and slipped on a revealing silk number, with thigh-length leather boots and a belt made from a heretic’s flayed back. Her mirrors being useless, she dressed a voodoo mannequin carved in her image in the same clothes. Satisfied, she added the final touch and strapped the pig-iron brassière to the outside of her dress.
How much longer could she strut her stuff like this? When would her fellow bats start wrinkling snouts and making disparaging comments? From the Anatomy lecturers, she had already heard some. “Mutton dressed up as aardvark!” was the cruelest jibe to date.
Perhaps some of Oldona’s vitality would rub off on her. The student was a peculiar creature, to be sure, but not unattractive. Spraying neck and cleavage with Chanel No. 666, Lilith opened the window and kissed the wind. She flung herself over the edge and headed downtown. She had a century of prime animus left, there was still time to dance and flirt. No mediocre songwriter was going to tarnish her dignity. She would split Artery and Appalling apart like mating toads.
Oldona was waiting for her outside the Palais de Decadence. The exchange student was wearing a poncho stitched with occult symbols and a sombrero with a sand-filled brim. A prickly cactus sprouted from the crown. “It’s the only formal gear I brought over,” she apologised. “I didn’t think to pack many posh clothes. Is it out of place?”
Mrs Robinson shook her head. “By no means! You look really elegant. I wish I had your bone-structure.”
“That’s just where I keep my purse!”
They entered the dance-hall arm in arm in arm. A gallows stood on a makeshift stage. Corpses dangled from nooses, clutching trumpets, double basses and saxophones, which they played with violent spasms. “Don’t you just love traditional Swing?” Oldona asked.
The floor was crowded with jazz-freaks: tattooed ladies, strong men and sword-swallowers in zoot suits. They were dancing the jittervirus, a new craze created in a test-tube in the Chemistry Department. Surprising herself, Lilith snatched Oldona and bounded onto the floor, kicking legs and gyrating hips to the insidious rhythms.
Later, exhausted, they sat in a corner on a comfortable sofa, knees touching. Mrs Robinson gazed into Oldona’s rheumy eyes and found herself blushing as white as a grub.
“I know it sounds corny,” she stammered, “but I feel I’ve known you for a very long time.”
“That’s exactly how I feel, Lilith.”
“Like really close sisters.”
Oldona leaned forward. “Or lovers...?”
Mrs Robinson turned away, burning behind her pointed ears. But she was excited by the suggestion. Her strict Satanist upbringing prevented her from continuing the conversation in this vein, so she attempted to change the subject.
“Tell me about Arkham, Oldona.”
For some reason, the student seemed unsure of herself. “Well, there are woods near there which no axe has felled. The food is quite good: an indigenous dish is Blue-Heretic Pie...”
Oldona appeared reluct
ant to say more about Arkham. Lilith wondered at this unnatural reticence; it was as if the student actually knew very little about her home town. Perhaps there were secrets in her past which she was not yet ready to confront?
Perhaps she could draw Oldona out by revealing secrets of her own. This would also complete the first stage of her revenge against Artery. She sipped her drink and remarked casually:
“My former lover was a cheat!”
Oldona spluttered and coughed. “Really?”
“Oh yes, he passed his euthanasia exams by resorting to deception. The blood he transfused for his finals wasn’t his own. I collected lots of samples and distilled a substitute!”
The student appeared to be going into convulsions. She regained her composure with some difficulty and cried: “That’s impossible! Samples of bat blood cannot be collected without a license, and these are locked in a safe in the Chancellor’s office. They are rarely issued to students or staff, and any illegal blood collecting is severely punished. A student who used human blood would be disqualified immediately. Cheating is not a viable option at this college!”
Lilith frowned. Why did Oldona know more about the rules of British vampire institutes than about the characteristics of her own town? There was something funny going on, not only in her lower regions. As if aware of her mistake, the student shrugged.
“That’s what I’ve heard, anyhow,” she said.
Lilith nodded. “Well, it happens to be true. But Artery and myself came up with a novel way round the problem.”
“Novel? I read one once: it was about a cannibal horse.”
Lilith tugged at a fang. Oldona had made the sort of slightly silly remark she was used to hearing from Artery. They were similar in so many ways. Was it the fact they were the same age and had absorbed identical cultural influences? Or was there a mystic element, an astral connection between the pair? Lilith distrusted the idea of elective affinities, but she had to admit there was an uncanny overlap of behaviour patterns. Was this why she felt attracted to the student?
Mrs Robinson returned to her confession: “To swindle the examiners, we collected the blood drop by drop, from unsuspecting donors, over many months! We were very patient.”
“But how did you do it?” Oldona shifted uncomfortably. “How did you manage to steal blood painlessly?”
“I didn’t say we did. But the pain was too minor to excite alarm. I am a counsellor, as you know. My clients are confused students. I invite them to sit on the chair opposite mine. It is fixed to the floor, with a solid base. A hollow needle protrudes above the level of the cushion and this pierces the flesh of a victim’s buttock. A drop of blood runs into a reservoir located under the floorboards. After the counselling session the victim departs my office none the wiser, attributing any discomfort in the posterior to psychosomatic causes.”
Oldona tapped her gigantic nose. “I thought I felt a puncture wound when I first came to see you!” She kneaded Mrs Robinson’s legs under the table and batted her eyelashes. “But wouldn’t the reservoir be mixed up with different blood-groups?”
Lilith smirked. “We discovered a process of refining blood-types. I borrowed from the petroleum industry and set up an ichor-cracker, gently heating the mixture so that the group we needed evaporated and condensed in a separate chamber. Artery was type z.”
“I’m type z as well!” giggled Oldona.
“The only worrying thing,” continued Lilith, “is that there’s still a chamber full of unwanted blood beneath me. Disposing of it might prove to be difficult. A pipe connects the reservoir with the river. Turning a faucet under my desk will make the whole lot cascade out. Then the water will turn red and the Chancellor will notice. It’ll be traced back to me and Artery’s degree will be stripped.”
Oldona moved her hands higher. Now four sets of fingers brushed Mrs Robinson’s thighs. “Better not turn that faucet then! Perhaps you should leak a little at a time? One drop a day?”
Lilith sighed. “No, the freshers on the gondolas have nostrils like sharks, capable of sniffing out a few molecules. They’ll do anything to escape a life on the galleys and would report the blood in the desperate hope of gaining parole.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“My plan is to pressurise the reservoir with helium and invite back my clients for a reappraisal. When they sit down, the needle will inject the blood they originally lost.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” Oldona threw two of her arms around Lilith, the others moving closer to her moist secret.
Lilith pulled away, flattered and unnerved by the unrestrained show of affection. Were American monsters always as exuberant? Why did Oldona keep winking at her, as if they were confederates in a plot? She worried over this for no more than a moment; Oldona pulled her to her feet, took her round the waist and dragged her onto the dance floor. This time, the mood and tempo were slow and intimate.
The student leant over to press her lips to Lilith’s yawning cleavage. At first, these kisses were given partly in a spirit of playfulness, but they quickly became more serious. Lilith abandoned the fight against her conscience and allowed herself to be swept away by the sheer audacity of the episode. Oldona’s tongue found a way under her brassière and flicked like a flame over her pierced nipples, swelling the nodules to grotesque dimensions and dislodging a pearl.
A little later, the student clattered outside with her new lover. A meteor shower was spanking the backside of the constellation Polidori, a zodiac sign recognised only by bats. Lilith and Oldona groped in the wet shadows, elastic snapping in the penumbra where fireflies singed a night ready to fold in on itself. But though they rotated in the vortex of the wildest passion, the exchange student was careful to keep Lilith’s hands away from her own breasts and yielding sex.
“Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson!” whispered Oldona, as her thumb found the bud of her batty clitoris.
Lilith sighed. “That’s what my lover used to say!”
“I’m your lover now, gorgeous! Do you know what I’m going to do for you? I’m redesigning my bridge without telling the authorities! When you cast eyes on it, you’ll be delighted!”
Moaning, Lilith dissolved in a puddle of lust.
The construction of the bridge proceeded at high speed. Mrs Robinson was able to watch developments from her office window. The structure was now taking on the appearance of something archetypal and familiar, something both welcome and strangely repellent. A knot of nostalgia tightened down in her gut, but she was unable to say exactly what the bridge resembled. Its form was still too vague to comprehend.
There was one piece of bad news: her husband was coming back from a lucrative teaching post in Yemen. The desert ghouls were bright students but they kept eating the necromancy exhibits. He’d had his fill: if they kept on like this, he’d have to teach them from textbooks. A necromancer worth his electrodes never relies on books, so he’d decided to return to the festering bosom of scholarship. He told her this in a letter written on the skin of a colleague who had been sacked for drunkenness. The last thing Lilith wanted was to see Woody again.
The only thing to make him change his mind would be the acquisition of inedible exhibits. If he could get hold of viscera for his work which his students couldn’t digest, he’d stay in Yemen. But corpses were tasty over there, soft and juicy, not like leathery British cadavers. He asked the Chancellor of Stakehampton College to send some over, but it was the end of term and there were none to spare.
Lilith shouldered this extra worry with stoic grace and whiled away the days walking by the river, watching cables being stretched over girders like guitar-strings. Just as the bridge seemed ready to crystallise into something she could comprehend, Oldona issued instructions that a canopy was to be placed over it, to shield the final preparations from prying eyes. Under the billowing fabric, the workmen’s shouts and oaths were muffled, like Bluebeardian brides asphyxiating in the nuptial pillow. Oldona kept stalking the banks with her whip and megaphone,
calling out instructions or lashing at a disobedient silhouette.
They met at the Palais de Decadence every midnight. The staff were discreet and showed them into an inner suite of rooms, done up in gaudy purple satins, where narghiles bubbled and clockwork zoetropes showed a panoply of moving erotic images. Lilith puffed the hashish, quaffed the petal-infused wine and listened to the cellos and violins of a hung and drawn quartet. She talked about Artery a lot, casting aspersions on his imagined talent, but this seemed to cause Oldona some pain. When they’d tired of each other’s thumbs, the monkeys and eunuchs, they returned to the dance floor, gyrating in a corybantic frenzy, as if releasing inner tensions as taut as cables on the bridge.
Eventually, the project was completed. It was the day before Artery was due to fly back over. He hadn’t sent her a letter since storming out all those months before. She assumed he’d hitched himself to a harpy his own age and this thought kept the hatred flowing through her veins. Once she started to spin the grinding wheels of her dramatic scheme, the hate would pour out, engulfing the campus.
Oldona still knew nothing about it. The opening of the bridge would make a perfect backdrop to Lilith’s plans for revenge. There was going to be a parade with fireworks and bunting; the Chancellor and his minions were supposed to be the first to stride over. Halfway across, they would pause to make a speech about unity and fraternity. That would be Lilith’s signal; with a twist of the faucet, she would release the reservoir of blood directly under them, turning the river the colour of slaughtered tomatoes. Artery would return to immediate disgrace, his degree stripped and orders given to exile him from Stakehampton’s limits.
Naturally, this would ruin Lilith as well. But she planned to throw herself on Oldona’s mercy, pleading with the student to take her back to Arkham. Once in America, she would propose living together as squid-and-bat, which would give her rights under the constitution. From this base, she could set about sabotaging any reputation Artery had managed to make in the music business. If he went Stateside to resume a music career, he would find himself greeted by jeers.
