Twilight's Last Gleaming

by Hertzen Chimera

  She showed me in graphic detail how she and the man she'd conjured from me by my touch unwoven molecule by molecule, entwined and reknotted at an intimate biological, even genetically sexual level, to produce OUR offspring. The alien gave birth to our second daughter almost immediately. Her hair was not as dark; almost auburn, maybe even gingery.

  “Dje E-aaannnn...” she held the even younger infant up for my fatherly adoration. The six-year-old came for a look.

  “Kha Ur-rehn.” the woman laid a free hand on the older girl's head. The older girl stuck out her long, thin, white tongue and ran away to an observing distance.

  “Dya Gni-pu.” the woman tells me in a dramatically over-disgusted tone.

  Oh, how I long for the multi-lingual C3PO(Mr Whysilage)'s communicational banter right now. But, God, look at me. A daddy. This was too great a day.

  Just to stop me getting too bogged down in the tearful joy fatherhood, the air turned to razors and echoed to the shrill shriek of my first-born daughter as the bunny-goat/Pit Bull porker got hold of her throat and chewed her pretty head clean off in a torrent of lime syrup. I was grabbed from behind by a strong pair of arms. A second pair restrained my legs. The woman, bearer of my children, split down the front and from within her ice-cave interior steps the still-freshly-throat-cut ginger-bearded Glaswegian dwarf in the red tartan suit, shrugging off the extinct life form as if it was a bear skin rug.

  The substantial shell sent a cloud of snow particles in all directions on impact. The bunny-goat/Pit Bull porker trotted loyally over to the suited dwarf, my daughters broken body dangling between its slavering jaws.

  “Bastards!!” I struggled against my restrainers' sweaty grip to get at the shrimp.

  “Easy now, Djin Deniz. Ye fuckin’ dick head.” he spat in his ridiculous ‘Glasgee’ yammer.

  The bunny-goat/Pit Bull porker spied the second of my daughters writhing helplessly beside her dead mother's carcase and set upon it with a ravenous flourish of canines.

  “Down A-WASHINGTON,” the dwarf snapped. Just too late to save her.

  “BASTARDS!! BASTARDS!! BASTARDS!!”

  I summoned spittle from my parched throat but the damned stuff wouldn’t come. The revolting dwarf approached me, looking me up and down with his emerald eyes like I was some sort of fucking exhibit in a museum of idiocy. Cowardly fuck. I found the phlegm and spat the steaming gob right into those fucking piss holes.

  “MURDEROUS BASTARD!” I added so he wasn’t mistaken that the shot was for him.

  Just before I blacked out or was knocked out the arms restraining me tightened their grip to razor wire and the visions my blood-drowning eyes half-witnessed redefined fear in all its vociferous manifestations.

  The Ebony Haired Terrorist sat back from his vinyl black slate of abstract gold figures. Stretched and inhaled deeply; the fatigue induced by his constant formulating had taken a real toll on his reserves of energy. Normally, at this time of day, he would be refreshing himself with a Yoga half hour or a sit in the sauna. He had worked hard all his life in the brewing trade, taken some courses, found his chef d’oeuvre in mathematics and dedicated the rest of his life to study. It was a cushy life, if you managed your time efficiently. You were, in every sense, your own master. You need publish only when you, as a researcher into the higher mathematical functions of organic life, were good and ready. But today, there were many things to rectify. It was mathematical crunch time. And the publisher had been on the phone badgering for constant updates and rewrites to the data he could no longer supply, such was the speed of transfer rate between imagined and lived realities now. It was impossible to keep apace of change and back it up with hard figures.

  “Knackered…” he muttered to himself, rubbing his tired eyes and picking, some remnant of the meagre snack he had a long time ago from his back teeth. He clumsily brushed the slates aside and they topple from the workbench, shattering into oddly symmetrical shapes (you know the types - squares, triangles, circles, pentagrams) on contact with the pinewood floor; a fluttering of magpie quills.

  The Ebony Haired Terrorist seemed unperturbed by this mass destruction of his hard labour as he slumped forward onto his desktop.

  Unconscious as his head crashed into his arms.

  ELEVEN

  The darkness and lack of vibration in his surroundings was as profound here in the depths of the complex underground network of private garages as it was by his great aunt's cemeterial side. Yet - Clive Idaho felt a lonesome presence up ahead. He swam in the direction of its beacon pulse. The throb increases. A spluttering rumble like one of those old London buses struggling to make it out of the depot on an icy winter morning. Or any other banal simile that conveys the idea of some mechanism not firing on all cylinders.

  Clive Idaho pressed his face up out of the concrete floor of the complex as he sensed the automaton inches above him. At first, it was difficult to make out what it was he was seeing. The sensations the image presented were contradictory. There was a fleshiness to the four contacts being made with his concrete surface. But the sounds were meant to be mechanical, as though synthesised by an enthusiastic though not very competent amateur impersonator. He coiled up the concrete column of a nearby garage door to obtain a better viewpoint. And got the fright of his life.

  Lights up ahead. From the left. Clive pulled his face back into the concrete. Heard the unmistakeable ticking of a diesel van pull up outside. The driver’s door opened and slammed closed with the hollow, metallic clang common to all transit vans. Clive Idaho braved another peek. There below him in the halogen glare of the black transit van's headlights was a policeman, unhelmetted. He had his hands on his hips. He was shaking his head from side to side, trying to make sense of the curious construction before him.

  It was pale-pink and red in hue; a squat, low-slung contraption shaped much like some dreamer's thumbnail sketch of an old Corvette kit car. But without the benefit of accurate blueprints, the specifics of the model had been left to the poetic license of pure chance and appeared to be comprised of, if you can believe it, human body parts. The wheels resembled the folded in arms and legs of two small girls akimbo. Their pretty faces and hips the wheel arches. Their slender spines the sills. Imitating the two doors of this sporty replica were the bent and flattened legs of the female slung along the underside like a chassis. Her frozen scream the grill. Her contorted brow the front bumper.

  Splayed insanely over this human accident was a male figure, the only living component. His broad back the roof. His hairy arms and legs the stout supports. An unquenchable fondness for romantic invention had the man’s feet conjoining, toes interlocked across the back of the car to form a merely decorative spoiler. His neck had stretched down to where his head was playing at engine sounds. A-puffing and a-chuntering like a child’s first mechanical Tomy toy.

  The policeman walked, astounded, round the mock-up; head shaking and almost, but not quite, laughing, such was his shock. He hadn’t expected this. A dark humour suddenly seduced him. “Now, that's what I call a family car.” his only verbal response to the insanity preoccupied with the lights of the transit van.

  The policeman drove the van away, once again plunging the dungeon into darkness, to promptly return; red reversing lights first. He opened the back doors, let down a ramp and shepherded the chugging abomination into the back with clicks and whistles like it was some dumb old dog. He pushed the ramp back in and slammed the metal doors closed.

  Before the policeman drove away, Clive Idaho slid down from his vantage point; transferring himself from the cold of the concrete to the warm of the tyre rubber, through the metal lining into the scalding steel heat of the wheel hub, up along the coils of the shock absorbers and into the side panel of the transit van. The chassis creaked and groaned as they got under way.

  Exiting the garage complex into the light, Clive Idaho spied out the side panel of the van, to see whereabouts this cargo was to be taken and stored, just two eye shapes deforming the surface. On through the
backlog of the home-early Friday rush hour traffic they headed back into town, traversing the one-way system running west and up the steep incline.

  Clive Idaho had a nosey on the driver who was happily whistling a tuneless accompaniment to some Bruce Springstien track in the cassette player on the dashboard while the Police Radio chattered idly with incoming static, directed numbers to incidents, hinted at reports of crime and suspect, and called out lists of words like Foxtrot and Victor and Yankee. The policeman signalled right and drove the van up to a large security gate which, after a short while, opened and closed behind them.

  Before the authorities could spot him, Clive Idaho slipped out the blind side of the van and observed the unloading of the Family Car from a distant building corner. Watches it was shepherded in to the station through a set of automatic double doors. Followed at a discreet distance down lifeless corridor after lifeless corridor down into the bowels of the building where there was a set of ten cell doors. The splutter of the engine-head echoed in the Spartan chamber. Wheel-arms cracked as they turned under the combined-body-mass of the vehicle. Into an opened cell this baby was cajoled - the policeman slapped the front of his thighs to get the dog to heal - dangling the proverbial carrot, as it were.

  Clive Idaho slipped through into the cell wall to see what was happening. But the policeman simply left, locking the heavy iron door behind him. The car, eyes headlamps looking madly about it, whined helplessly to itself. Its little engine-head blubbering and sputtering oily sobs. Its back racking with despair.

  “Gotta get away from this sick place.” Clive Idaho grunted, before diving back into the inanimate world of architecture

  The Majority of the remaining cells were empty, except for the last two. The first accommodated a big old fat lady, who was sat hunched over on her bunk, peeling her false nails off one by one. Every now and then she would rise from her bunk and pace the cell, raising her hands up to the high, barred window, before slumping back down with a spring-twanging huff. The girl in the last cell appeared to be asleep. She was curled up into a foetal ball. Her eyes dancing left and right behind the gossamer lids.

  Clive Idaho could watch sleeping women for hours; a passed master. He was reminded of the time when, as a young boy yet to obtain the title Teenager, he sat watching his sister Sukie four nights on the run. Didn't get a wink of sleep. He just sat there on the adjacent bed, curtain half-open, watching her face as she slept soundly, had nightmares, slept again, had passionate teenage sexdreams, or so he gathered from the amount and volume of grunting and Cantonese gasping she did on those occasions. Waited for that inevitable moment during the surveillance when, in her busy sleep, she would kick off her quilt. Her nightdress would be up round her girls' breasts. Their black nipples would be standing tall. Her black cunt hair showing round the side of her camie knickers as she struggled and bucked her dream lover to protracted climax.

  More than anything it was the black he loved. Black as a colour to absorb the problems of the mind; a soothing resonance to wallow in. A silent, undemanding state of being. Black. The predominant colour of this youth. Sleeping below him. Her long, black, shiny hair, much like his sisters would be at night. Her black, leather jacket. Her black, lycra leggings. Her black Doe Martens. Her black fingernails. The overdose of that sublime hue an immense aphrodisiac to the imprisoned Chinese voyeur. If only her could touch her sleeping eye lids. Maybe kiss her black lips. And have her hold him in her black leather embrace.

  He undulated down the concrete wall and into the wooden bunks - it was warm from her proximity. A soothing heat. A real-life-ness in his maelstrom of the dead. He tried to touch her.

  Pain, like plunging his naked hand into a boiling cauldron of witches' broth, shot up Clive Idaho’s intrusive fingers, through his wrist and into his forearm. He pulled back electrified. Christ. he hissed as the pain festered in the imaginary muscle fibre and marrow of his imaginary forearm. You see, he was now only the product of his medium.

  The girl turned over in her sleep. Lay on her back. Then over onto her other side. Hugged the cold cell wall. Scorched by his brutal love lesson, Clive Idaho resigned himself to an all embalming hug of her outer garments into which his essence had become woven, a useful medium having been found. He imagined himself being her knickers and found them soiled with a meat-scented residue. He sniffed at the crotch. Inhaled the aroma of her menstruation deep into his imaginary lungs. Believed it to be a wholesome inspiration. Left him wanting so much more.

  He willed the flexible fabric of her knickers to enter her; choosing the lower of the two holes behind the puffy labia, cajoling the material in up the vagina, up the uterus and into the bloodbath of her swollen and bleeding womb. The delicate walls shedding before his eyes like ice sheets slothing off their outer slabs. Vast cellular sheets of womb-lining fell away. He was unbelievably excited at being a privileged witness to this scene.

  The girl awakened suddenly and quickly bounced to her feet. Caught in the whiplash, Clive Idaho rose with her, momentarily trapped in her clothing a dolphin in tuna nets. The girl was panting with fright.

  “What the fuck?!?!” she gasped.

  Clive Idaho, meanwhile, was losing his grip on the weave and slowly sliding down her clothing to the concrete floor. The girl danced around stamping her feet on the floor as if she was trying to free a ferret from a trouser leg.

  “What the fuck?!?!” she gasped again, frozen breath forming a cloud in front of her nose. She banged, on the cell door with her cold fists

  “Hey! I’m freezing in this shit hole!!”

  “Stop your whining.” the fat lady next door harked.

  “Fuck off! Fat slut!”

  There were sounds of unlocking from up the corridor. Footsteps. Boots and heals. Jenifer Maryland sat back on her chilly bunk. Her cell door unlocked and ground rustily open.

  A fat, round, old woman entered sheepishly, followed by PC Peter Alaska. “You are?...” the woman hesitantly asked.

  “Jenifer Maryland.” she watched the policeman, “Jenifer Maryland.” She said again.

  “You found my husband.”

  “Did I?”

  Jenifer Maryland looked to the PC for help, he smiled and nodded encouragingly, “Oh. Yes. It was me found him. Yes.”

  “I'm very grateful to you.” the woman smiled painfully.

  “Here.” PC Peter Alaska handed back the knife and a large wad of money, The coroner has cleared you of any involvement.

  “You are free to go.” the old woman added.

  Jenifer Maryland took the knife but wouldn't touch the money, “That's not mine.”

  “Take it.” the old woman insisted.

  “I…” Jenifer Maryland was being set up…

  “Take It!”

  “It officially belongs to you.” PC Alaska stated matter-of-factly.

  “I…” Jenifer Maryland was now looking for an easy way out of this sticky situation.

  “Look, if it makes you happy, buy, me a drink one day. Okay?” the old woman chirped.

  Jenifer Maryland thought before saying, “If I'm free to go. How about I buy us both a drink, right now?”

  The old woman checked her spindly gold wristwatch.

  PC Alaska smiled shyly at Jenifer Maryland.

  “That’s a deal.” the old woman announced, having done the math.

  “Will you be wanting to press for charges of assault on your..” PC Peter Alaska nodded, “..neighbour?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You have every right.” the old woman said, indicating the deep scratches down Jenifer Maryland's face.

  “Can we let her stew for a few hours?”

  PC Alaska smiled, “That's the spirit.”

  “And now.” the old woman was ready for the off, “About that drink?”

  “There's a nice place nearby.” PC Peter Alaska told them.

  “You coming for one?” Jenifer Maryland asked him.

  “I'm ... on duty.”

  Her face fell.
/>   “Maybe later, I’ll be off in a couple of hours.”

  Jenifer Maryland smiled as bright as a new button.

  “I can drive the two of you round there, though. If that's alright?”

  “I’d like that.” Jenifer Maryland glimmered.

  “Off we go, then.” the old woman chirped too damned winsomely; then as they were all about to exit, she stopped.

  “No…” Jenifer Maryland exclaimed under her breath, knowing now that she had been stitched up good and proper; giving her back the flick-knife to get a better set of prints on it; getting her to accept the money as proof of her theft….

  Oh, introductions are in order. the old woman remembered, I am Mrs Massachusetts. Penny. she held out a soft, shiny hand. Jenifer Maryland hesitantly took it. The tension was defused. “Off we jolly well go, then.” Penny Massachusetts signalled for Jenifer Maryland to go first.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Jenifer Maryland curtsied before bouncing jauntily out of the dank cell. Shouted, “Bye, sweet cheeks!” to her fat accuser, waving bye-bye at the tiny grille in her cell door.

  SESSION XI

  “Ornamentals?” the ginger-bearded dwarf exclaimed, “Is that what the jerk called us?”

  “Yes,” I said it was.

  The ginger-bearded dwarf laughed demonically; despotically, even.

  “D’you hear, T-ROOSEVELT...” he called to the red tartan suited chap with the white Mohican. “D'you hear that, eh? Polioboy’s bent friend calls us Ornamentals.”

  “Well, he should know, darling.” T-ROOSEVELT gloated, thrusting his hips back and forth.

  The three red tartan suited clowns found this very amusing: their belly laughs just made me want to throw up.

  “Listen to me, my dead friend, if anyone asks who did what we're about to do to you, you tell them it was the dreaded,” his voice raised three octaves, “NOMADIX ... Do you hear me, little crip?”

  He punched me in the face.

  “Like to play at gangsters, do we?” I accused him, red human blood pouring from my busted nose. The bunny-goat/Pit Bull porker padded up to me on its old-witch's club feet and sniffed at my groin with its whiskered anteater snout.