Mikey’s switched on the TV. Boring. Just some Anglia local news bulletin bleating on about the A47 being closed by a traffic accident. ‘Find something more exciting,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to,’ says Mikey, stabbing at the remote control with his fingers but the channels aren’t changing. ‘There’s something not right with the remote. Batteries must be dead,’ he adds, as he starts trying to pull open the remote’s battery compartment.
‘There’s also something not right with the ale,’ says Jez. I take a swig from my tin. It does taste foul. Like it’s been left open for way too long and gone stale.
And there’s also something seriously not right with Jez.
As I look at him, his outline somehow changes, becomes less distinct, blurry, I suppose. And then I see him begin to slowly fade before my eyes. I can even start to see the patterning on the chair he’s slumped in begin to show up right through him.
I look down at my own hands. Do a quick double-take and look again. Like some nightmare X-ray I can see the beer can through my own increasingly transparent flesh. ‘What the fuck?’ I say.
On the TV, the yellow headlines ticker at the bottom of the screen is now displaying a report saying the emergency services have just recovered three bodies from the wreckage of a stolen car.
I look back over to the couch where Mikey had been sitting. But Mikey has already gone.
This is the Quickest Way Down
‘At the dissolution of things, it is Kali who will devour all’ - the Mahanirvana-Tantra
THE ATMOSPHERE AT THE PARTY is dead, the conversation stilted. Hardly surprising since there’s a serial killer on the loose in the city. A killer who has already slaughtered at least two undergraduates and littered the campus with their neatly-butchered remains.
Madeleine is here (she’s the French political science researcher I’ve been lusting after all semester), but she’s hanging around the new philosophy lecturer - as are most of the eligible women in the room. I sidle up to this little coterie to sample the conversation and overhear him talking some shit about: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you are mortal or divine, if your behaviour transcends the mundane, you will escape the flesh and be worshipped as a god.’ And then he adds, ‘But remember: whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.’
Jeezus, not just talking shit but talking postmodern, deconstructuralist, Nietzschean shit. And to think the latest faculty spending cuts saw lecturers with solid science qualifications being shown the door, while pseuds like this are still being hired.
I drift away to the bar to get a refill and then head over to survey the talent on the dance floor. It’s a poor night’s showing but, standing by herself, is a cute Asian chick I’ve never noticed before. When I look her way, she definitely flashes me the come-on. Needing no further encouragement, although this may be my beer-goggles talking, I ask her dance, and with a distinctly less-than-demure smile, she says yes.
Her name’s Kelly or Carly. Its a bit hard to make out as the music is loud and she has a strong Indian accent. She’s a postgrad from Delhi doing medical research. After about five minutes, Carly shimmies up close and personal and whispers in my ear, ‘I think I know where there’s a better party, are you game?’
‘Game on, lady,’ I reply. And with that she tugs me firmly by the ends of my yellow silk scarf (vintage Hermes, I picked it up for 50p in an Oxfam shop the other week) and leads me out of the room and down the corridor towards the elevator vestibule.
She presses the ‘down’ button on the lift marked Absolutely No Unauthorised Use. ‘This is the quickest way down,’ she explains. The lift arrives. The doors open. We go in and before the doors are even fully closed, she’s pinning me up against the wall with her body, with one hand exploring the front of my jeans and her tongue half way down my throat.
With my body now packing a suitcase for an imminent trip to Kama Sutraville and my brain trying to remember some tips I once read in an article about tantric sex, I slip one hand beneath her choli to fondle her breasts, while I thrust my other hand, my fingers itching to explore the topography, down the back of her sari.
After descending past several floors, I’m vaguely aware of the lift gliding to a halt and of a medic - well, he’s dressed from head-to-toe in green scrubs - pushing an empty dolly into the lift. I’m relieved it’s an empty dolly as I know this lift is sometimes used for taking stiffs to the pathology labs in the basement. Carly clearly doesn’t care we have an audience, as our mutual groping and petting becomes even more urgent and intimate. Or perhaps the presence of an audience is why it becomes more urgent and intimate.
Suddenly, with the speed and dexterity of someone who’s done this many times before, Carly begins twisting my scarf into a garrotte, a garrote with an ever-tightening noose. At this point perhaps alarm bells should have started ringing, but with lust having taken over from alcohol as my principle source of impaired judgement, all I can think of is that I’m growing a prize-winning erection and am about to enjoy an orgasm that will surely register on the Richter scale.
I hear a male voice speaking’ - it must be the medic - he says, ‘But he’s not resisting you, is he, he’s smiling.’
‘Have you learned nothing?’ Carly snaps back. ‘When the brain’s deprived of oxygen, it induces hypoxia, a semi-hallucinogenic state. When you’re in the library next, check out erotic asphyxiation and AEA.’
The medic laughs. ‘Oh Kali,’ he replies, ‘you never could resist hot, fresh meat.’
But now things are starting to go black. I feel myself collapsing. I fall. I tumble onto something soft. It must be the dolly. Unconsciousness washes over me.
More Important than Baby Stenick
WE’D FOUND SOMEWHERE to stay for the night. An old garage workshop, somewhere south of the former army base at Catterick. Not that the location matters.
Like most large, still-standing buildings, it had suffered a ‘visitation’. The interior had that way-too-smooth, leached-clean, sucked-empty look all visited properties have. Still, that was only a benefit as far as we were concerned, as it meant we were less likely to suffer a revisitation anytime soon. The roof was still intact - another bonus. The hangar-like roof structure had no windows and the inside was cavernous, so we could safely light a fire without the risk of being seen.
A fire. A chance to cook hot food. A chance to dry out our sodden belongings. And a chance to be warm and out of the relentless rain for once.
Some long-dead briar had collected inside the building and, along with an old desk and a couple of broken chairs we found in a side room, we soon had a fire burning.
It was while we were first making a quick recon outside that something caught my eye, so, while the others were heating some stew, I ducked back outside to take another look. I hadn’t been mistaken. There was something in the lea of the building. It was one of those old American-style mailboxes with its signal flag still raised to indicate there’d been a delivery.
I peered inside the box. There were a couple of unopened letters in there, along with a magazine still in its cellophane wrapper.
I took them back inside. The envelopes just contained bills, which I tossed onto the fire. Nobody would mind. There was nobody left to pay the bills. There was probably nobody left to receive the payments anyway. Even if there were, there was no longer a postal service or any banks to process the payments.
But the magazine, now that was different. The paper it was printed on had turned yellow and brittle, but it was still legible. I read it. I was one of the few in our group who could still read. It was a beaut. It was an issue of one of those weekly gossip magazines that once used to be so popular. It must have been one of the last ones ever published. And it carried a big spread about Baby Stenick.
Baby Stenick? Of course, forgive me, you won’t have heard of her. Back then, her mother, Stacey Stenick, was, for one brief moment, the teenage darling and global supers
tar of the country and western music scene. Her career took off after she won one of those television talent competitions. She must have been about 12 or 13 at the time. They described her as having the looks of an angel, a voice from Heaven and the soul of Hank Williams.
That’s a big build-up for anyone to have to follow, so we really shouldn’t have been surprised when, after three years on the treadmill, touring the world almost non-stop, young Stacey went gloriously off the rails. Drink, drugs, parties and plenty of sex.
Then she got pregnant. In a world of rhinestone cowboys and the Grand Ole Opry, for Stacey Stenick to be so young, so pregnant and still unmarried was a huge scandal that left the conservative and religious folks in Nashville more than a little outraged.
Who was the father of her child, everyone wanted to know? And was she going to marry him?
It is hard to believe how obsessed we once were with gossip about so-called celebrities and their babies. Nowadays we’ve got more important things to worry about, but at the time it seemed as if there were few things in life more important than Baby Stenick.
Did it really matter who the father was? Of course not. Besides, the father, Stacey and Baby Stenick, along with most of the population of Nashville, are no doubt all long dead.
I only mention Baby Stenick because reading that old magazine jogged my memory. The Stenick story broke at the point when the war first started to go badly for us.
Back then, I was a pilot in the airborne cavalry, flying helicopter gunships against the enemy as they began creeping their way across Europe. It was on the eve of the Battle of Rome, the battle that left the dome of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City cracked open like a broken egg, or a broken skull, when our commander came into the briefing room to give us our final orders.
Much of it was routine, but I remember his final words. Pulling a copy of a magazine out of his back pocket - a magazine a lot like the one I’m now holding - he showed us the front cover: ‘I’ve got tonight’s job to think about. Possibly the most vital mission ever flown in this war. You guys need to remember that there are some things in life more important than Baby Stenick.’
Two hours later, the commander and most of our flight were dead - some of the first casualties in the Battle of Rome. I survived, but I learned a valuable lesson: that our side was on the losing side in this war.
And now? Well, that’s why we’re here. Sheltering in this place tonight. Fugitives in our own land. On the run from an enemy we can never defeat. Harking back to a time when there really was nothing more important to concern us than the fate of Baby Stenick.
I folded up the magazine carefully, slipped it back into its cellophane wrapper and then stashed it away in my jacket’s inside pocket.
‘What you keeping that for, fly-boy? You planning to read it again sometime?’ asked one of our group, pausing only momentarily from slurping down his soup.
‘No,’ I replied, patting my pocket. ‘But it’ll make good kindling next time we need to light a fire. You guys need to remember there are some things in life more important than Baby Stenick.’
The Last Train Home
PICTURE THIS... The time is the present. The location is East Anglia in England, that’s the big island off Europe. And the mode of transport is by train. It is late in the evening and the carriage contains all the debris of a busy day. Across empty seats lie crumpled newspapers, their crossword puzzles left unfinished by bored commuters. Cardboard cups, their contents long since drunk, roll up and down the aisles, while on some of the tables there are the crumbs and cellophane wrapping papers belonging to that most peculiar of British railway catering delicacies – Genoa cake. A young couple are seated at one of these tables...
“Parallel universes? Alternate realities? Just hypothetical nonsense that appeals to pimply adolescents who’ve read far too much second-rate science fiction!” said the young and prissily pompous quantum physicist (let’s call him Rupert) to his fiancé Carolyn (she’s surely not going to marry him) as they took the train home. The carriage lights flickered as their train, the last one back to Norwich that gloomy November evening, rattled over the points at Manningtree, rolled past the sewage works.
“Parallel universes? Alternate realities? Just hypothetical nonsense that appeals to pimply adolescents who’ve read far too much second-rate science fiction!” said the retired and perennially grumpy quantum physicist (let’s call her Brigid) to her husband Arthur (we’ll never understand how he’s put up with her for all these years) as they took the train home.
The carriage lights flickered as their train, the last one back to Liverpool Street that gloomy November evening, rattled over the points at Manningtree, rolled past the sewage works... and ploughed straight into the oncoming Norwich train.
Sparks flew. Steel wheels screamed. Carriage compartments crumpled. And, newspapers, drinks containers and food wrappers all swirled in fatal disarray as people died.
Metal fatigue in one of the bolts on a crucial set of points? An electrical fault in the signalling? Human error? Something altogether more mysterious? Who knows? Whatever the real cause, it was just another tragic accident on the railways that would grab the newspaper headlines for a few days, to be followed – months later – by an inconclusive enquiry and unctuous protestations by some junior government official that ‘there were lessons that would be learned’. Then, and only then, would the bereaved be left to mourn for their loved ones in peace and privacy.
“Parallel universes? Alternate realities? What a coincidence! I’ve always thought there was something in all that,” said Carolyn to Arthur (or ‘Art’ as he liked his friends to call him although Brigid never did – she said it was common) as they left the memorial service for the victims of the rail crash. They talked and talked and so casual acquaintances, thrust together in shared grief, discovered mutual interests and became firm friends.
The carriage lights flickered as their train, the last one home that spring evening, rattled out of the station and over the points at Manningtree.
# # # # #
“Shall we do it again?” sniggered the tubby blue gremlin lurking by the track-side points, wrecking bar in hand, as his companion – a green gremlin – swung by the six spindly fingers of his left hand from the cables leading up the signal gantry. In his right hand he clutched a pair of shiny, new wire cutters – their pincers glinting red by the light of the warning lamp...
# # # # #
“That’s it! That’s the denouement? The train wreck was caused by little green men? Why that’s even more preposterous than all your twaddle about parallel universes and alternate realities,” said the young and prissily pompous quantum physicist (we’ll also call him Rupert) to his fiancé. (She’s surely not going to marry him?) “I can only say,” added Rupert, swelling up his puny pigeon-chested chest the way that only the prissily pompous can truly do, “that if that’s the best you can come up with after attending creative writing classes at that college for the past six months, then you’ve clearly been wasting your precious time.”
“And,” he said, after a further pause for dramatic effect, “I really don’t think it’s very amusing that a character with my name gets killed off in the first few lines of your story!” With that, he turned away and stared sulkily out of the carriage window. From her seat, his fiancé flashed him an icy look that said she most definitely would not be marrying him now.
The carriage lights flickered as their train, the last one back to Norwich that gloomy November evening, rattled over the points at Manningtree, rolled past the sewage works and headed out across the Stour estuary viaduct. In the distance, the Liverpool Street train could be seen coming down the track in the opposite direction...
# # # # #
Deep down in the dank yet somehow still surprisingly cosy bogey hole, where the Manningtree gremlins had dwelt for generations, a brood of young blue and green gremlins clutched their mottled baldy bellies with mirth and fell about the floor laughing as Uncle Greeny Gremlin s
napped closed the story book he’d been reading from. “Come on, finish up your milk and cookies, its time for bed now,” he said, to protests from the tiny gremlins that they weren’t really sleepy and could they have just one more story please. “You’ve all got a long day ahead of you at school tomorrow, starting with Double Mechanical Mayhem, followed by Mischief with Internal Combustion Engines on Cold Winter Mornings 101 – and you know how the teachers don’t like you being late.”
Uncle Greeny Gremlin grinned a toothy grin from between his mottled, green lips as the youngsters trooped off back to their nests. “Humans eh?” he said, patting a passing nephew on his little mottled head, “all those accidents and they still don’t believe in us gremlins...”
# # # # #
In a towering apartment block perched high upon a hillside far above the city, a writer of tall tales clicked the file menu on his wordprocessor to save and print the story he had just finished. He smiled a satisfied smile to himself as he knew a magazine editor who would love this story’s trick ending. The printer broke into life, he collated the pages and then carefully placed the printout under a heavy paperweight, in readiness for a final edit the following morning.
It was late afternoon. He checked the clock – he could leave it another 30 minutes before he needed to catch the subway train over to the college, where he taught a creative writing class. He pulled his chair round to his favourite vantage point to watch the daily light show begin as – soaring high in the skies above the city – the rings of Saturn started to emerge one by one. The writer smiled again. No matter how many times he watched the spectacle, he never ceased to be impressed by the sight of the rings.
Life was good here on the Titan colony. He was already making a tidy sum writing his fantasy stories, both for the local market and the audience back on the home world. But now, the discovery of intelligent life forms on another planet within the same solar system had totally galvanised the genre and was attracting a whole new generation of readers to his novels and short stories.
The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales Page 3
