by Rod Rees
And then something fucking strange happened. Instead of standing there pissing herself, as Billy reckoned any sane person would do when a couple of tons of irate aurochs was heading at high speed in their direction, the girl began to run towards the aurochs.
Crazy fucking bitch.
Fascinated by the prospect that in about five seconds a beautiful piece of black ass would be reduced to guacamole, Billy watched goggled-eyed as aurochs and girl tore at one another, amazed by how fast the girl could run. Seriously fast. But if her speed was amazing, what happened next was right outta DC comics. Girl and aurochs met midway along the runway but, rather than the truck wreck of a collision that Billy had been expecting, the girl suddenly leapt at the aurochs and using its horns as a fulcrum, executed a full somersault, flying way over the bull’s back to land – fucking gracefully – at least ten yards beyond it.
Now Billy had seen Polly footage of Olympic gymnasts, but he was willing to lay good money that none of them – none of them – would have been able to do what that girl had just done. It wasn’t just the timing of the leap, which had been fucking amazing; it wasn’t just the height of the leap, which had been fucking amazing; and it hadn’t been the distance she’d covered, which had been fucking amazing. No, what had been really fucking amazing was how effortlessly she had done it. Shit, the girl had actually incorporated a double twist into her leap and that, as far as Billy was concerned, was just taking the rise.
And it wasn’t only him stunned by what the girl had done: the aurochs was pretty perplexed too. The thing slid to a halt – which, when you weighed close to two tons, were travelling at the thick end of twenty miles an hour and didn’t have the benefit of brakes, was no mean feat – and attempted to turn around. The thick wooden walls of the runway prevented it doing this which went down like the proverbial weighable inflatable. The aurochs went apeshit, leaping up and down and using its horns to rip the shit out of anything there was to rip the shit out of, which mainly consisted of the wooden walls of the runway.
But the aurochs’s humiliation wasn’t finished. Barely had the girl landed but she’d performed a pirouette and with a hop, a skip and a jump had landed gracefully square on the aurochs’s back, then tumbled forward and, once more using the horns as her barre, had sprung a dismount outside the runway.
Un-fucking-believable.
All the priestesses and the handlers began to applaud, the protests of the aurochs being ignored. And then, much to Billy’s surprise, the bull leaper turned to walk towards him.
Woh, this must be my lucky day.
He tried to stand up straighter and to look more Dukely; the prospect of screwing this honey was really jingling his jangles. And as she came nearer, he had a chance to study this remarkable girl up close.
Looking at her, Billy could see there were subtle differences in her proportions that marked her out as someone – as something – different. The mouth that peeked out from under her mask was just a little larger than Billy would have expected and her neck was just a little thicker. Her chest – he noted en passant that she had really great tits – was much more barrel-shaped than was normal in a woman, and from what Billy could make out from a cursory examination of her arms, the configuration of the muscles was … wrong; a number of the muscles seemed to have been rearranged and emphasised at the expense of their colleagues. It was as though she had been remodelled … re-engineered … redesigned.
Yeah, she looked odd. Different.
The girl came to a halt just a pace in front of him and then with a flourish pulled the mask from her face. It was Ella.
Shit, my sister’s built!
He had to do a double take and for a moment wondered why he hadn’t recognised these physical oddities of hers before. It was only then that he remembered that Ella – back in the Real World – had had a peculiar reluctance to show off her body. He’d never seen her in a swimming costume and she had always worn dresses with sleeves. Sure she’d worn short skirts, but her legs, as best he could judge, were the only normal thing about her.
‘Well, what did you think?’ she asked.
For a moment Billy didn’t know what to say, stunned into silence by the thought that it was his sister – his sister – who had done the bull leaping, that it was his sister who had just done what he judged to be impossible and that it was his sister who seemed to be physically so different. Shit, she didn’t even seem to be breathing hard.
‘Billy?’ she prompted.
‘Shit, Sis, yo’ the bomb, fo’ sure. That was awesome. Way I see it you’d have to be a fucking mutant or something to do what yo’ just done.’
Wasn’t that the fucking truth.
Ella laughed and then, taking him by the arm, led him out of earshot of the others gathered in the Temple. ‘That’s a very insightful observation, Billy. Yeah, you really do have to be a mutant to perform in the bull run: no normal man or woman could ever move as quickly as I did or have the strength to perform the gymnastics you’ve just seen me perform.’
‘Oh yeah? Then how come you can do it? Way I see it you ain’t no mutant.’
‘You’re right, Billy, I’m not a mutant, but neither am I human. I am Lilithi. I am Homo perfectus.’
Fuck, where were the cats in white coats when you needed them?
20
The NoirVillian Hub
The Demi-Monde: 10th Day of Summer, 1005
And the Master said, ‘There will be ultimate harmony in the Nine Worlds. Though the Yin/Yang of the Kosmos will ebb and flow, wax and wane, finally all will be in balance, all will be in harmony. When the pans of the Scales of Life are set equal, wu wei will suffuse the Kosmos.’
Puzzled, the favourite student, Wun Zi, asked, ‘Tell me, Master, what should I do to further this harmony and to help the scales of the Kosmos move into balance?’
To this the Master replied, ‘Get that interfering fuck ABBA to take His – or possibly Her – thumb off the right-hand pan.’
The Eighth Book of the BiAlects, Verse 27
A couple of Ella’s priestesses led Billy from the courtyard to an ante-room while Ella changed. And, boy, when she re-appeared, he knew he was gonna have real trouble getting used to her wandering around in an ankle-length robe that stuck to her body like glue and gave everybody and his father a great idea about the goodies hidden beneath. And with the horned crown she had perched on top of her shaven head she looked like she was dressed to attend a really loco Halloween party. The problem was that with such a serious, far-out look on her face he guessed she wasn’t in the market for doing a lot of trick-or-treating.
But then Ella had never been one for the lighter side of life. Back in the Real World she had been a real nerdnik, a straight-A student who didn’t do drugs, didn’t mess with boys and was about as much fun as a kick in the nuts … pretty much the same as she was here in the Demi-Monde.
She ordered the servants out of the room and, when they were alone, turned her black, empty eyes towards him. When she spoke, her voice was misty, faraway. ‘Lammas Eve approaches, Billy, the time of the Awakening. And the reality is that I am not as I once was: Ella Thomas is gone and in her place stands Lilith, the first Goddess.’
‘Wha’? Ah, c’mon, Sis, keep it real. What yo’ laying on me? This is Billy yo’ talking to. Yo’ don’t have to play-act with me.’
Ella laughed. ‘I can understand your surprise, Billy. It must come as a shock to hear your sister announce that she is the reincarnation of an eleven-thousand-year-old goddess …’
Right on the fucking money!
‘… but that is the reality.’
‘How?’
‘How did this happen?’ She gave a rather disconcerting little laugh. ‘By serendipity. My enemies were trying to destroy me here in the Demi-Monde but instead they woke Lilith from her slumbers, woke the power that was dormant within me. Serendipity, Billy, just as it is serendipity that Septimus Bole – the son of my greatest enemy – sent you to the Demi-Monde to try to control me, and by
doing so has made my triumph inevitable.’
What the fuck was she talking about?
‘Yes, Lilith is risen again. I am returned to cleanse both the Demi-Monde and the Real World of the contaminants that are the Grigori.’
‘Grigori? Nigga, please; this is some ultra-weird science yo’ droppin’ on me.’
‘I’ll explain in a moment,’ Ella crooned. ‘But for you to truly understand the miracle that has occurred it is necessary that I first tell you about the real history of our world … of the Real World.’ Then as Billy stood there, his sister began to circle him, finally coming to stand out of sight behind him. It was really fucking disconcerting.
‘Try to imagine our world as it was eleven thousand years ago, a world held fast by an everlasting winter, tight in the frozen grip of the last Ice Age. Then it was a vast frozen wasteland, a land where the few beleaguered examples of Homo sapiens huddled in a haven beside what is now the Black Sea.’
Billy stood silent: Ella, by his reckoning, had flipped.
‘Then the Black Sea was a large freshwater lake, an oasis of fertility in a brutal world. And it was into this world that a woman was born, her coming marked by the impact of a meteor that bathed the land in a strange green radiation … a radiation that changed her … improved her. That woman’s name was Lilith and thanks to the meteor she came to possess an intellect exceeding any who had ever lived. Such was her genius that she alone realised that for HumanKind to survive there must be cooperation, that the selfishness and individuality of the hunter were traits that would lead to the destruction of the tribe and to the extinction of the race of Homo sapiens. But there was more to Lilith than simple genius: she was blessed with the miracle of Atavistic Thought Inheritance.’
‘What?’ As Billy stood there open-mouthed, he wondered if they sold weapons-grade psychotropics in the Demi-Monde. He had a sneaking feeling he was gonna need them. This bitch had issues.
‘Atavistic Thought Inheritance is an example of those occasional and arbitrary evolutionary leaps made by Nature. The first Lilith was a mutation … a freak of Nature … the first person to be able to convey ancestral memory – instinctive and acquired knowledge – to her daughters. The whole of the knowledge and the experiences of that first Lilith was transmitted to her daughters at birth, and her daughters, in their turn, passed this knowledge – supplemented by the knowledge they themselves acquired in their lifetime – to their daughters.’ Ella sighed. ‘I am the last of the Lilithi, but because I possess Atavistic Thought Inheritance I am simultaneously the first Lilith incarnate. I am the Lilith who carries the accumulated wisdom of five hundred generations of the Lilithi, the descendants of Lilith.’
‘Ah, c’mon, Sis, yo’ blowing me smoke.’
Ella ignored him. ‘For the Lilithi the body is not the decaying prison of the soul that it is for Fragiles, those unfortunates who make up the majority of humankind. Our souls are not condemned to die with our bodies; they live on in our daughters. Atavistic Thought Inheritance makes the Lilithi immortal, so that a thousand years is as nothing to us. And the Lilithi used the knowledge they acquired to bring peace and prosperity to their tribe, and as the years went by, Lilith was elevated to the status of the Supreme Goddess, and as a Goddess her word became law and all bowed before her.’
Reluctantly Billy asked a question, almost afraid of what the answer might be. ‘Okay, whyn’t yo’ school me some more? What was the name of this tribe?’
‘The Adin, though you would better know them as Atlanteans. Lilith’s people were the ones who inhabited the lost world of Atlantis.’
Billy couldn’t stop himself: he started to laugh uproariously. ‘Kill that shit, Sis, you’ve got to be yanking my chain. First you lay the line on me that you’re eleven thousand years old, that you’re the reincarnation of a long-dead Goddess with a really far-out ability to transmit knowledge through the generations, and now you start gassing that you’re a refugee from Atlantis.’ He shook his head. ‘Shit, Sis, when we get back to the Real World you don’t wanna waste your time becoming a geneticist … you wanna be a scriptwriter. James Cameron will just love you.’
Ella’s voice hardened. ‘You may mock, Billy, but what I have told you is the truth. And as they watched and studied the world around them, the Lilithi determined to manipulate the bloodlines of mankind. They determined to better Nature, to breed three new species of humankind. The first of these were the Lilithi, Homo perfectus: the priestesses who alone bore the gift of Atavistic Thought Inheritance.’
‘Hey, girl, yo’ gotta stop all this madness. Yo’ can’t be sayin’ that yo’ a different species to the rest of us cats?’
Ella came to stand in front of Billy and gestured to her body. ‘Of course. You have the evidence of your own eyes, Billy, you have seen me perform the Leaping. No one human could have done what I did and the explanation for this is simple: the Lilithi are not human. Just as Neanderthal man was inferior to Homo sapiens, so Homo sapiens are inferior to the Lilithi. We Lilithi were bred and refined over thousands of years to produce a species of woman that is physically and mentally superior to Homo sapiens. It was we who understood that the potential of Homo sapiens is circumscribed by their bodies, so by selective breeding we overcame these physical obstacles. The apotheosis of three thousand years of eugenical effort is seen in me.’
With a flourish she threw wide her arms, opening herself to examination, and despite his instinctive reluctance – she was his sister, after all – Billy found himself studying her. As he did so, he came to the worrying conclusion that perhaps – just perhaps – what she was saying wasn’t all froth and fiction … and that there should be a law against sisters looking that good.
‘The second of these new species created by the Lilithi were the Grigori, Homo callous, the race of warriors charged with protecting the people of Atlantis.’ Ella let out a long, dispirited sigh as though recalling the Grigori brought back sombre memories. ‘Young men, like you, Billy, are dangerous: males in every species known in Nature are at their most ferocious when they are in their physical prime and are searching for a mate. So, we bred the Grigori to achieve a paedomorphic aspect, to be a species that preserved these juvenile urges and angers … we bred them to prevent the onset of a more equitable and peaceable maturity. The Grigori were the troublesome and destructive juveniles who never grew up.’
For a moment she seemed lost in her reminiscences. ‘The Grigori were never many in number, but even though they were so few, their reputation for ferocity and skill in battle made them figures of myth and superstition. Even today their names resonate … Satan, Azazel, Semiazaz.’
‘So what happened to the Grigori?’
‘We Lilithi might have conquered evolution, Billy, but we could not control Nature. And in a day and a night Nature unleashed her fury and destroyed the civilisation of the Lilithi and smashed the cities of Atlantis. Nature sent the Deluge that drowned Atlantis and threw those of her people who survived, bemused and leaderless, out into the world.’
‘Whoa, slow the flow, Sis. Is this the same Flood they used to talk about in Bible class?’
‘It is. As the earth warmed after the last Ice Age, the enormous glaciers that covered the planet began to melt and the meltwater created vast lakes in the middle of North America and Russia, great lakes trapped behind shrinking glaciers and melting mountains of ice. One day, eight thousand years ago, these walls crumbled and the huge melt lakes released enormous quantities of water into the oceans, creating gigantic tsunami. The land bridge between Atlantis and the Mediterranean – the Pillars of Hercules – was destroyed, and the freshwater lake that was the Black Sea, and the city of Atlantis that bordered it, were inundated.’
Ella was silent for a few moments as though overcome by the emotions rekindled by these memories. ‘The work of three thousand years destroyed in moments, drowned under a thousand feet of sea water. Only two thousand Atlanteans survived, less than one in a hundred. The few surviving Lilithi wandered the earth as a
broken people; our gift of Atavistic Thought Inheritance meant that we not only shared all our knowledge, but also our experiences. We felt the pain of a sister’s death as vividly as if it were our own and the destruction of so many of our Lilithian sisters emotionally crippled us. Numbed by collective grief, we retreated from the world. We slept, until I was roused here in the Demi-Monde.’
A miserable tear coursed slowly down Ella’s cheek. ‘But the worst was that the Grigori also survived, becoming a pernicious diaspora, spread like seeds on the wind, deracinated and disgruntled. They fled north into Russia and Europe, and east to the Indus, infecting the race of Man as they went. For the first time they bred outside their species and so their penchant for violence and evil began to infect the rest of HumanKind. Like the Lilithi and the Kohanim – the third race created by Lilith – the Grigori were never meant to breed with those who were not of their kind … but the Grigori were wild animals who could not be tamed or domesticated.’
‘Wild animals?’ Billy prompted.
‘You must understand, Billy, that the Grigori are a different people – a different species – from Man. They are stronger, taller, quicker, free of the restraint imposed by conscience.’ She laughed. ‘The Grigori have no conscience. Oh, they have other weaknesses, but they are not fettered by moral scruples.’
She took a moment to calm herself. ‘And as the Grigori bred with Man so a hybrid species emerged … the Dark Charismatics … psychopaths … mongrel Fragiles infected with the Grigori’s evil. The Dark Charismatics are the bastard progeny of the Grigori … or as the rest of the world knows them, vampires.’
‘Shit, Sis, yo’ sayin’ these Grigori of yours are vampires?’ He could hardly keep the mocking tone out of his voice.
