‘I like her style,’ says Georgia. ‘A woman after my own heart.’
‘Georgie, dearest,’ I reply, ‘you don’t have a heart.’ Georgia gives me what my mother used to call an-old-fashioned-look.
‘But,’ I add, ‘the story doesn’t end there, for over the past few years somebody has started placing bunches of fresh flowers in the arms of Ethel Preston’s statue. Which is kind of odd as all her family are long dead and mouldering in their own graves by now.
‘There was also the time,’ I continue, when I was cutting across the campus by way of an old graveyard - the St George’s Field Burying Ground - which is now surrounded by university buildings. It was about midnight when something swooped down out of the inky-black night sky and knocked me to the floor. I could feel that whatever had attacked me had drawn blood. And, when I went back to my flat to clean myself up, I could see, reflected in the bathroom mirror, three parallel gashes in my scalp. Like something with sharp talons had slashed at my skull.’
‘You are making this up now?’ says Georgia. ‘That, or it was an owl.’
‘That’s what they said when I took myself down to A&E. Mind you, the stitches and the tetanus jab they gave me hurt more than the original wound. And then it was on to London.’
‘You’d have been in your early twenties by then,’ asks Georgia, ‘when you were attending law school?’
‘Correct. By this time I was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and I also belonged to this outfit, called the Ghost Club, that used to meet in one of the Pall Mall clubs to discuss apparitions and hauntings. It was full of ghost story novelists and Madame Arcati - the Margaret Rutherford version - look-alikes.
‘Anyway, somewhere along the way I found myself on an expedition to look for a nest of vampires in Highgate Cemetery. This was the spooky, overgrown Western Cemetery with its crumbling family mausoleums and Gothic vaults, rather than the smarter and tidier Eastern Cemetery that houses Karl Marx’s grave.’
‘But vampires don’t exist,’ says Georgia interrupting me mid-flow.
‘I know that and you know that from first-hand experience,’ I reply, ‘but that doesn’t stop people believing in them, acting as if they are real and going the whole Van Helsing nine yards with the pointy wooden stakes and everything.’
‘So did you find this vampire infestation?’
‘We did, there was an underground vault that had been broken into and inside we could see one of the coffins had been prised open and its contents sowed with salt before being set ablaze. All that remained were some gobbets of melted lead from the coffin lining, embedded with flakes of charred bone. Oh yes, and there were about a dozen bulbs of garlic strewn around the tomb.’
‘Well, that’s one vampire who never existed in the first place that won’t be returning to plague the living,’ says Georgia.
‘Of course,’ I go on, ‘I was still a feckless youth back then, which is probably why I pulled a lump of the coffin-lead from the grave and took it home as a souvenir. I used it as a paperweight.’
Georgia winces, then pokes her fingers down her throat to simulate retching. ‘Where is it now?’
‘I dumped it years ago. My first serious live-in girlfriend said it was gross, freaked her out and wanted me to get rid of it. As she was providing me with pretty much on-demand sex, as well as catering and laundry services, I certainly wasn’t going to protest.’
‘Always the New Man, eh? And then what?’ says Georgia.
‘And then nothing,’ I reply. ‘The day job took over. And there was the first wife and there was a mortgage to pay. You know, all those little distractions that suck the life out of us mortals.
‘So that was your last encounter with the supernatural?’
I laugh. ‘You know that’s not true.’ I haul myself out of the chair and head for the kitchen. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ I ask out of habit, before remembering. ‘Of course not,’ I say, ‘you’ve stopped drinking, haven’t you?’
The kitchen is unusually cool, as if a chill has crept in with the night.
‘No wine,’ says Georgie, ‘but I’d sell my soul for some chocolate. Ideally a 70 percent cocoa-solids bar of dark chocolate.’
I nearly jump out of my skin. I hadn’t realised she’d followed me into the kitchen and is now standing immediately behind me.
‘Oops,’ she giggles, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’ve scared the dog.’
I look down. Woolfie is in his basket looking terrified, his eyes rolling white in fear. ‘Oh Georgia,’ I say, ‘you know the house rules. You can sit around all day watching TV and never raise a finger to help with the house only please use the doors and don’t do that walking through walls thing you do.’
I smile. ‘What do you want to do now? Mythbusters are running a feature on horror movie special effects. Should be right up your street.’
Georgia laughs. One of her deep down, dirty laughs. And then she vanishes. A split second later I hear her call from upstairs, from our bedroom. ‘You bring the soot,’ she says. ‘And I’ll show you how to really make a bed shake.’
The Hot Chick
FLUSHED FROM DRINKING TOO much blood wine, the Klingon warrior maiden threw her puny Earthling prisoner onto the bed. Tossing aside her fearsome bat’leth blade, she tugged open the top half of her tunic, allowing her firm, ample breasts to fall free. ‘jIH DichDaq non lIjHab Quch yab tlhej wIjneH,’ she growled. (‘I will blow your smooth-foreheaded mind with my lust.’) Then, grabbing her prisoner’s engorged penis with both hands, she plunged it deep within her mouth. As he watched the Klingon’s head rhythmically bob up and down at his crotch, the Earthling smiled. All was well in his universe.
You may not recognise my name, but if you are interested in sci-fi, you’ll have probably read some of my stories.
I always describe myself as a C-list science fiction writer. And when I say C-list, I don’t mean anything detrimental, it’s merely a realistic assessment of my place in the market. I’ve never been one of those A-listers who have film studios clamouring for the movie rights to everything they even think of writing. Nor am I one of those cult writers, who are hot and in vogue for a few years, but then fade away when that difficult-to-write second or third novel fails to materialise.
Instead, I write meat-and-potatoes sci-fi. It keeps my readers happy. It sells enough books to ensure my publishers never drop from me from their lists. And then there’s all the other stuff I do.
I won’t mention the pen-names I work under, but I’ve been writing tie-in novels for movies, TV serials and role-playing games for years. I once even managed to churn out a couple of tie-ins for The Clangers, the old BBC children’s TV series. And, of course, using yet another set of aliases, there are my stories for what is delicately termed the top-shelf men’s interest and lads’ mags market. I know it’s just soft-porn padding - stroke material - to fill out the gaps between the centrefolds, the pictures of readers’ wives and the ads for premium-rate phone-sex services, but it pays well. Very well.
I do, however, have a dirty little secret to confess. I am addicted to sci-fi conventions. I rarely miss a major event and I try to attend as many of the smaller ones as I can. Of course it does my career no harm and I’m always happy to make a few outrageous comments during the panel sessions. But that’s not the full extent of my guilty secret.
The real reason why I attend so many conventions is I’m addicted to the fans. Let me rephrase that: the real reason why I attend so many conventions is I’m addicted to the women who attend these events. The type of women who have worthy-but-dull day jobs working as accounts clerks in dreary offices and whose idea of escapism is to immerse themselves in the world of science fiction and fantasy.
The type of women who get so immersed in these fantasy worlds they spend their free time designing their own costumes for the characters they’d like to be if only they could live in another time or place or dimension. The type of women who will trail off to anonymous hotels, located on anonym
ous ring-roads, on the outskirts of anonymous cities, to attend sci-fi and fantasy conventions and then spend the entire weekend dressed in the full make-up and costumes of their fictional heroines.
Of all these women, my absolute favourites are those ladies of a certain age who are so grateful when a fully-grown adult member of the opposite sex pays them a few compliments and takes an interest in their costumes and characters, that after a couple of drinks or six they are happy to act out some of their fantasies in the comfort of a king-size hotel bed.
And so it is one Saturday morning in October I find myself lying on a bed, in an anonymous hotel room, located on an anonymous ring-road, on the outskirts of an anonymous city (all right, it’s Nottingham in the English Midlands) with a chunky, half-naked Klingon maid enthusiastically bouncing up and down on top of me as we exchange bodily fluids.
Her name is Marlene. When not attending Star Trek conventions, drinking Klingon blood wine, wearing a less-than-fetching latex prosthetic ridged-brow piece or singing the praises of Sto-Vo-Kor, she is a data-entry clerk with Her Majesty’s Government’s Inland Revenue Stamp Duty Land Tax collections division in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
OK, so I’m a typical, shallow, one-dimensional male, but hey, I’m single. What’s the problem? What two (well, on a couple of occasions, three) consenting adults do in private is their own affair. Everyone goes away happy.
In my case, having encountered (and in some instances, nearly choked on) so many exotically located body piercings and scary tattoos, I’ve also become a mean expert on body decoration. I often find myself engaged in post-coital discussions on the relative merits and symbolism of Maori, Celtic and Yakuza warrior tattoos with women from such exotic locations as Macclesfield, Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Basildon.
This particular Saturday, Marlene has to leave early afternoon to catch a train back home (with her bat’leth securely tucked away in her suitcase to avoid frightening the other passengers) because the following day her Nan is celebrating her 90th birthday at the Bessie Braddock Jarrow Crusade Memorial Nursing Home on Tyneside. So we say our fond farewells (actually, she whispers, ‘Heghlu’meH OaO jajvam’ - ‘today is a good day to die’ - which I take as a compliment) and go our separate ways.
Later in the afternoon, after catching up with some email and working on an idea for a new story, I rejoin the convention to catch a panel session. Picking up a cup of only slightly stewed builders’ tea and a halfway decent hunk of Genoa cake on the way, I settle down at back of the conference hall to listen.
As I do, I notice another late attendee. She is stunning. And I don’t just mean the fact she is tall, slim and wearing a tight, figure-hugging, white trouser-suit. One of those tight, figure-hugging, leaving not a lot to the imagination, white trouser-suits that sci-fi TV serials in the 1970s inevitably reckoned we’d all be wearing by the 21st Century. (In fact, she does look a bit like Erin Grey playing the Wilma Deering character in the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series.) What really catches my eye is that her hands and face are bright blue in colour.
I’m trying to work out in my mind who she is meant to be. There were a couple of blue alien chicks, I recall, as part of Jabba the Hutt’s harem of slave girls in Star Wars Return of the Jedi, but they had tentacles sprouting from their heads. There was also that blue opera singer in the movie The 5th Element, but she also had tentacles coming out of her head. (What is it with the tentacle heads?) She also clearly isn’t Zhaan from the Farscape series and this is way before the Avatar movie hit the screens. But then Star Trek Next Generation did have a few blue aliens in minor parts. Maybe she is one of them? That or there is a sexy lady Smurf whose existence has somehow previously escaped my attention.
Despite the fact that there are plenty of empty seats in the hall, she comes over and sits herself down right next to me. Now this is surprising for although I make myself out to be a bit of ladies’ man (in one of his magazine columns, the esteemed, multi Hugo award-winning, sci-fi journalist David ‘Dave’ Danders once described me as the ‘Mick Hucknall of the speculative fiction scene’), I’m not deluded about my pulling power and never - OK seldom - make passes at women who are out of my league. Show me a skinny, good looking blonde dressed as Star Wars’ Princes Leia in that gold, metallic bikini slave girl outfit, and I’ll show you a woman who fancies herself a little too seriously.
However, not only does this blue chick sit down next to me, but she immediately starts talking. She knows who I am and she even asks for my autograph, which I sign on a sheet of pink paper she pulls from her jacket pocket. Did I say she’s talking to me? No, she’s coming on to me, flirting with me, giving off all those little body language cues. She’s picking me up - and fast. Let’s just say that before my tea has a chance to go cold, we are in an elevator heading up to her room.
After that, it’s a blur. An enjoyable, energetic, inventive, lust- and booze-fuelled blur. The way she hits the vodka and RedBulls in the mini-bar, I’m glad we’re in her bed and those items are being charged to her room and not mine.
Then there’s her colour. I said it was blue, a bright cornflower blue, but she is blue all over. And I mean all over. I’d expected her colouring to be limited to the parts of her body not covered by her clothes but after she gets naked with me (and we get naked quickly), I’m amazed to find that every part of her is blue.
I can see the scalp beneath her short-cropped blue hair is blue. As is her tongue and, well, even those parts of her anatomy on which the sun doesn’t usually shine. They are all bright blue. It’s not a normal pan-stick or body-paint either. It must be some sort of spray-on body-dye as nothing runs, smears nor smudges, no matter how hot, sweaty and moist we get.
It is during a respite in our love-making (perhaps lust-crazed, like rutting animals on heat, crazy fucking is a more accurate description) - it must have been around midnight and we are talking and drinking - that I finally get around to asking her name. She says its n’Drangheta. This is an odd mix of genre mash-up as, last time I checked, n’Drangheta was one of the names for the Calabrian mafia. It is on the tip of my tongue to ask her why that name and who her blue character is meant to be, when I notice the cameras.
They’ve obviously been there all along, but in my haste (I’ve always been a sucker for an attractive woman offering outré sexual experiences) they hadn’t registered before. ‘What the fuck are they doing here?’ I ask, stating the obvious, as I spot not one, or two, or three but four small cameras discretely located on wardrobes and cupboards and all trained on the bed.
n’Drangheta blushes a deeper shade of blue and explains she has a boring job working in an office, lives alone with her old widowed mother, doesn’t get to attend events like this very often and so for weeks at a time the only way she gets her kicks is by watching replays of the action. ‘Besides,’ she adds, ‘I live so far away from here I can guarantee nobody you know will ever see these recordings.’
I’m not planning to drop the subject, but then she proposes we try some role-playing games. This also gets my undivided attention, particularly when she suggests we play a game sounding remarkably like the plot-line from one of my lads’ mags stories.
In case you’ve never come across one of these before (OK, that was a poor choice of words), they tend to follow a similar pattern. Earthman crash-lands on faraway planet and is taken prisoner by an improbably attired, infeasibly breasted alien dominatrix. She subjects him to some gratuitous S&M - usually with her thin lips forming a cruel smile at the sight of his pain - before confessing that actually all she wants is the love of a good man. As it’s a fundamental rule of these stories that evil can never be rewarded, our dominatrix inevitably meets a violent and unfortunate end by falling into an erupting volcano or being eaten alive by a dinosaur leaving the Earthman to then find solace in the arms of the harem of scantily-clad slave girls who used to serve the dominatrix.
n’Drangheta doesn’t have any slave girls to offer but instead suggests a little game where unless I satisf
y her basest and most sordid desires, she will call up an alien star ship, currently concealed in a parking orbit on the dark side of the Moon, to sweep down and blast Planet Earth into a cloud of radioactive rubble. Turns out she has some very base and sordid desires (the bondage was actually a lot of fun although I could have done without some of the sex-toys), but I give as good as I get and by the time we finally collapse into a drained, satiated sleep, I think I’m winning.
I sleep heavily and probably could have slept on much longer into the morning had I not been woken by a sudden roar of noise from what I assume are the jet-engines of a plane taking off. ‘Fucking Ryanair,’ I say to myself, remembering the hotel is located close to the main runway of East Midlands Airport. ‘Fucking cheap-skate holiday-makers and their fucking budget airlines on their way to fucking Malaga.’
I sit up in bed and look around the room. I’m alone, n’Drangheta has gone, taking with her all her belongings including the cameras. I head for the bathroom. There, tucked into a corner of the mirror surround, over the sink, is a folded slip of pink paper. It’s a note from n’Drangheta and reads:
Had to catch early flight. :-(
We must do this again, next time you are in my part of the galaxy.
Drang xxx
PS room tab sorted LOL
I shower, apply some of the hotel room’s free body lotion to the sorest parts of my anatomy, dress and go in search of some breakfast, taking the note from n’Drangheta with me as I leave the room.
Normally a Sunday morning at a UK fantasy convention is hangover central, with most delegates nursing sore heads in darkened rooms until the wrap-up sessions start just before noon. Today, despite the early hour - it’s only just gone eight o’clock - the joint is jumping with excited delegates rushing around in all directions.
Halfway across the lobby I run into Dave Danders. I’ve long since forgiven him for the Mick Hucknall remark. ‘I think I’m missing out on something,’ I say.
The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales Page 6