by Larry Doyle
The Idol pushed Moondog to the sand, which segued into the Kuôn’s tail-chasing bit, classic but xenologically incorrect.
It was time for the Buxom Virgin’s thesis statement, a variation of which she did in every one of these.
“Good thing I’m not promiscuous!”
The Idol made his scary face (his happy face plus eyebrows) and said, in a southern-fried Transylvanian accent, “We shall see about that.”
He reached for her career.
The Virgin did her scream.
As the horned Idol chased the vestigial Virgin down a moonlit beach onscreen, the real show was behind the audience, five teenagers marching out of the Snack Bunker holding a struggling alien over their heads.
jelly concentrated, each of his collective yet selfish cells acting in concert toward a singular goal: the copping of a feel off Rusty Ford. Jelly had no brain per se but was in essence all brain, a shared consciousness programmed for desire. He had an appetite for consumption, of food, of entertainment, of everything, voraciously absorbing the culture that surrounded him and becoming it, only louder. In other words, he was extremely teenaged.
And so it was natural if unnatural to find him acting casual over on his side of the truck while his arm oozed along the seat behind Rusty’s head. His hand flowed over her shoulder, slowly, slowly, down the strap of her dress until, Jelly whistling, his fingers drizzled into her cleavage.
Without a word or look, Rusty plucked Jelly from her person and splattered him against the passenger window.
“Ow,” Jelly said, unharmed but wounded.
Rusty’s response was terrifically coarse but drowned out by the riotous yells of five boys passing the pickup, holding something over their heads.
“It would be my pleasure,” Jelly answered her challenge, “if you’ll watch.”
russ and his crew carried j!m to the area under the screen where a corroded slide was all that remained of a playground that once provided fun and tetanus for unwanted children whose parents had locked them out of the car.
Above them, the Virgin had caught her bikini top on a piece of driftwood, somehow.
J!m was thrashing wildly, but there were five of them, and one would’ve done, even Bennie. J!m was lean and well muscled but mysteriously lacked tensile strength. He wasn’t a weakling, simply weak.
The audience, fixated on the exciting plot development the Virgin had left dangling on the driftwood, paid no heed, except for Marie.
“Russ!” She stood up in the Ballistic. “Leave him alone! C’mon!” Then, desperate:
“It’s his birthday!”
Marie was so mature that she sometimes acted like she had no idea what teenagers were.
“Spankings!” Russ shouted.
The boys grabbed at J!m’s clothes.
“Let’s see what he’s been hiding in Gym!” said Tubesteak, pawing J!m’s jeans with impious zeal.
“Birthday suit!” Toad yelled. He wrenched the sleeve of J!m’s new jacket, separating it at the shoulder in a profusion of batting.
J!m made a noise. It was high and pure, otherworldly, a sound not heard on this planet in millions of years. His whole head vibrated with it, his brain dimly lit from a fire deep within. His mouth remained closed throughout.
The cry, or call, diverted the assembled from the entertainment product onscreen, and once they saw that J!m Anderson was about to lose his jeans, all eyes migrated downward.
“you’re tearing him apart!” Rusty squalled, standing outside the truck, stomping and carrying on, more wrought than if she herself were being stripped in front of everyone, appreciably more.
Jelly’s mouth extruded out the passenger window. “Yeah!”
Rusty punched the mouth back into the cab and activated her wristplex.
“Stupid, evil brother.”
Nick Ford sat in the dark, watching an old vizcom, a daffy redhead swamped by a confectionary assembly line. He was not laughing.
A photo of Rusty appeared in the lower right-hand corner. How much she looked like her mother.
He flipped his daughter onto the main screen. He had never seen her so upset, and he had seen her upset nearly every day of her life. He reached for his gun.
“Dad!” she cried, mascara runnelling her nose. “Russ is pantsing Jim Anderson! Hurry!”
Sheriff Ford put down his gun, got up to get his jacket. The screen returned to the daffy redhead, cramming chocolates into her mouth and down her blouse. He used to think she was so funny, when he loved her.
the topless virgin ran at camera, hands full, unwatched.
J!m’s jacket and boots were off, T-shirt asunder, and Tubesteak was all over the jeans, deeply invested in them, had them around J!m’s hips, about to expose the inner right thigh that struck terror into the hearts of men, and something else in the somewhere else of women.
“Stop . . . stop it!” Marie was up there, trying to pry 850 pounds of boy off J!m. A space opened and there he was, writhing, contorted, haunted. He saw her. His expression slid from agony to betrayal to contempt all in the time it took for Ice’s elbow to slam into Marie’s face—an accident, he shrugged later.
“Marie!” J!m yelled.
ever the professional, even postcoital, Deputy Furry settled accounts. “Okeydoke, there’s a hundred,” she fingered her plexpad. “And a little extra, for hooting like I like.”
“Thank ya very much,” Johnny mumbled.
“Next time don’t be late. I did half your work for you before you got here.”
Johnny wished he could vomit to get the taste out of his mouth.
“Exit the vehicle, Love Monkey.”
A horn blast directed their attention through the windshield. From so far way, Johnny could faintly make out five boys, horsing around, with something blue.
His nape bristled, and glowed.
mil and hel got out of the Turboflite to cheer on their boyfriends’ molestation of a classmate from a better vantage. The timing was propitious, or tragic, depending on how one felt about Mil and Hel, for they were well out of the car when a big green hairy thing landed on the cockpit, shattering it and getting glass in their panties.
Johnny bounded on, crumpling hoods and roofs, growing in luminescence, until he reached the front, where Russ and the boys huddled around J!m, admiring their handiwork. Johnny grabbed the back of Tubesteak’s waistband and flung him twenty feet, to where the merry-go-round used to be, which would have been highly comical, him spinning around and around to calliope music instead of eating gravel, only diverting. Johnny tossed Toad and Ice less far, as they were needed for the game tomorrow. Russ ran off, and Bennie remained, eating a SuperNuga bar. Johnny turned him around, and he wandered off.
j!m crouched, naked.
On the beach above, the Virgin stopped flopping and looked down, seemingly at J!m. She opened her mouth and
spun out to slashing violins, inadequate to wring fear from the flashed insert of a prop skeleton in a bikini, but worked for the horror proceeding below.
The first set of headlights blinded J!m.
One after another, across the lot, high beams elucidated his bright and shining plight, scored by a chorus of car horns.
J!m backed away. His hearts pounded, his ears flattened, autonomic signs associated with . . .
He reached behind him, but too late.
A long, hairless and previously unseen tail shot up from the base of his spine. He cowered, hands in front, fingers splayed. He froze.
His shadow, writ large on the screen, was that of a terrified, deformed cat.
Sandra Jane shrieked, with equal glee and disillusionment:
“He’s got no dick!”
It was true. There was nothing there, as only Marie had known, and never told.
Moondog arrived on the scene and gawked down, again, it seemed, at J!m. His eyes popped from their sockets, against the advice of his physician, and his ears stuck straight up, done with wires.
“Yipe-yipe-yipes!”
johnny was dispatching bennie when he heard Sandra Jane and saw what everybody was laughing at. He leapt in front of J!m and encased him in fur.
“I got you,” Johnny said. “I got you.”
Rusty rushed to gather in J!m’s clothes, possessively, charging at Marie when she tried to help.
Deputy Furry sauntered onto the scene, hair spilling from her Stetson and shirt tail sticking out, her swagger a little stiffer.
“Show’s over!” she shouted, patting her gun. “We all saw it! We all saw it!”
lightning struck the sky.
The Monster hurried down the steps to meet his Bride. She looked sensational, for a corporation of dead body parts, if a trifle standoffish.
“Friend?” the Monster asked, a gentleman.
This was why J!m worked here. Bill Schloss owned two Super Simplex carbon-arc projectors and thousands of 35mm prints the studios had planned to incinerate after transferring them to plexcode. Schloss was not a preservationist; he spliced new titles onto the old films and showed them at the bottom of double bills to save money. This one he called She-Mate.
Every night after the patrons left, and before his mother got off work, J!m watched another of the movies they didn’t make anymore: Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, Marty, shown to the teenagers of Manhattan as Tropical Triangle, Man with the Iron Hand and Heavy Lust. Tonight, feeling sorry for himself, he had gone with a Frankenstein.
The built-to-order Bride shrieked at the Monster’s offer of friendship, sussing out his full intentions.
Three more bolts, originating from a single source on the ground, struck upward, an exciting feature of the PLEX, that it could not be turned off, necessitating these releases from time to time. No one ever asked what would happen if they did not occur.
J!m patrolled the berms with a Vapo stick, zapping cups and wrappers and butts and prophylactics and vomitus and fresh mammal scat, probably not from a 150-pound dog. Teenagers were the vilest creatures on the planet, and that included the Cûlusi, who couldn’t help being giant anuses, since that was all they were.
No one had remembered anything when Sheriff Ford arrived. Rusty was all for her brother’s arrest by her father but less keen on Johnny facing multiple counts of criminal destruction, and so blamed her hysterics on the viz, which she mistook for reality. Marie’s nose was bloodied but unbroken, so J!m had nothing to add. Deputy Furry had arrived only seconds before the sheriff, she reported.
But they had all seen it, and were laughing about it still, at Googie’s over fried carbohydrates, snickering into their pillows as they fell asleep. J!m could hear them.
The Bride continued to react poorly to her prospective groom, hissing at him, and he took it badly.
“She hate me,” the Monster said. “Like others.”
“Huh,” J!m said.
The reverse lightning struck in sixes, then nines. The air tingled with anions.
J!m felt dizzy, fissile, his head splitting, his febrile mind sparking in answer to every strike. The pain was greater but cleaner than before, pure and intent.
He looked up.
Tendrils of light spread across the night, branching dendritically to the stars, connecting them in a matrix shimmering with meaning, with the feeling of meaning. The inscrutable static mirrored in J!m’s brain, confounding and debilitating him. He fell to his knees.
“What?!”
“We belong dead,” the Monster said, not the answer J!m was looking for, but a solid one. The Monster pulled the conveniently placed self-destruct lever and the tower collapsed with explosive precision.
The monster was dead, until next time.
Behind the screen the sky quieted, the nocturnal emission completed, the night again a random and meaningless array of stars.
J!m heard a buzz. Miw was more than an hour early. He should have wondered who called her, who knew where she worked, but he didn’t.
His mother ran to where he knelt. She held him, which he hadn’t allowed in years, and for the moment could not imagine why.
Chapter 14
Horrorific and All New!
A gash of white across the black . . .
. . . silent, and then THUNDEROUS.
EXT. HIGH SCHOOL—NIGHT
The approaching storm silhouettes the building, dark but for the Bell Tower.
INT. BELL TOWER
The laboratory is splendidly diabolical, more gorgeous than it has any right to be, German Expressionism in the service of mass-market hysteria.
THE CREATURE lies on a platform, naked and dead.
Human adolescents gather around the body. A BLOND FEMALE lifts the Creature’s long, limp tail. She drops it, disappointed.
THE DOCTOR, his operating gown spotless, his hair precise, his mind not as tidy, lectures his students.
THE DOCTOR
Tonight I shall take dead flesh and endow it with life!
The LIGHTNING is well timed.
THE DOCTOR
And this will be on the test!
The Creature’s fiancée, a DARK-HAIRED FEMALE of uncommon sense and grace, is hesitant.
DARK-HAIRED FEMALE
Are you sure he’s dead? I think he’s breathing. . . .
She places her hand on the Creature’s chest; the doctor snatches it away.
THE DOCTOR
Crazy, am I? We’ll see whether I’m crazy or not!
He turns to his assistant, a hideous HUMP OF GOO.
THE DOCTOR
Larry! Begin!
The Hump jigs over to an immense iron wheel.
HUMP OF GOO
Yes, Dr. Rand! Yes, yes!
The Hump turns the wheel. The platform rises.
The machinery HUMS. Dials jump.
Copper spheres SHIMMER with current. Voltaic arcs DANCE in a glass apparatus.
The body is lifted to the sky. There is an EXPLOSION OF LIGHT.
The Doctor motions to the Hump. He turns the wheel back.
The platform lowers.
The observers look upon the Doctor’s genius.
The Creature is a burnt, SMOLDERING cinder.
THE DOCTOR
Everybody sit down and open your books to chapter twelve.
j!m woke in a fever chill, his face beaded with liquid.
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Don McLean sang from the orb, his paean to Van Gogh, an artist J!m identified with and hoped to emulate, in particular the dying-penniless-and-insane part. When he was ten, J!m twice cut off his left ear, fruitlessly.
He lay on his back, arms folded across his abdomen, not yet noticing he had wrapped himself in the sheet as he slept, nor that he had been leaking oil, staining the shroud a bluish black, his body in gravure.
vice president reagan was having trouble reconciling his campaign promise to eliminate evil alien influences at home and abroad with the recent report that his wife was an alien, and from all indications an evil one.
“How long have you known,” pressed PLEX correspondent Helen Thomas, “that Mrs. Reagan was a Fùlóng, a race dedicated to the destruction of men?”
“Well, let me tell you,” the vice president replied in the amiable bumble for which he was somewhat beloved. “My wife is a good Republican. She has a coat, and a cloth dog.”
“How could you not know? Look at her.”
“Now, there, Helen. Nancy is a beautiful woman, or whatever she is.”
Miw had known Nancy when she was Si-Tchun, and everyone knew what she was, except poor Ron. She had liked Ron well enough, before he jumped on the aliens-in-Hollywood bandwagon, which had seemed so silly at first. She had known them all: Norma Baker, whom she met at Romanoff’s and had adored until she came sniffing around her husband; Jack Kennedy, who sniffed her when he ran out of human blondes on the West Coast; even the President, a studio mogul at the time, who dated Miw’s sister Sakhmet until her untimely, and unsolved, demise, then put the make on Miw at the funeral.
That was a worl
d ago.
Miw heard rapid footsteps coming down the stairs. She picked up her mending.
J!m, in the black overcoat his father had worn, the coat the boy had slept in on and off until the age of ten, hurried toward the door. His mother interceded.
“I sewed your . . .” She offered up the red jacket, like new and never the same again.
“Need . . . warmer,” transparent, a four-year-old’s first lie. “For the game.”
J!m held one arm tight across the coat, not enough to conceal the bulge. Miw lifted a lapel and out spilled greasy black disgrace.
the sheet was piled on the table between them.
Miw had started and stopped seven times. “There’s no reason to be . . .” Eight. “Every boy . . .” She was so good at this with other men, which J!m was, very nearly, but she was not good at this with him.
“Jim,” his mother came up with, “your body is changing.”
“Yeah,” J!m answered her, a small offering, “from bad to weird.” He would never admit it, but last night his mother had gotten inside him again and he couldn’t keep her out, for the time being.
“Growing up is weird,” his mother agreed. “It doesn’t stop being weird.”
J!m volunteered: “I’m getting these headaches.”
Miw’s measured response was belied by the prick of her ears. “That’s pretty common for a boy your age. I’m sure it’s . . .” she trailed off. She was not sure. Miw had an idea where J!m was going, providing he would mature as his father had, no certainty that. He had his mother’s eyes, her lips, her tail, and his father’s brain, his skin, his finger, and who knew whose what inside.
“Maybe you should talk to Dr. Rand,” she offered. “He’s a man,” hedging, “and he’s studied you.”
“Maybe he’ll submerge me in ice water again, or cut off my toes to see if they grow back.”
“They did grow back,” in tepid defense, and moving on. “Dance is tonight. You talk to Marie?”