Twilight's Last Gleaming

by Hertzen Chimera

  I tried a smile; not too bad, bit of an ache in this stranger's jaw muscles but 'chaff with wheat'. “Hello.” I croaked, my new throat raw and probably still bleeding if the amounts of thick fluid I was constantly swallowing was anything to go by.

  “Relax.” she stroked my new forehead, her touch like spinifex; calloused by years of manual labour, I imagined.

  “Don't try to move just yet, my husband.” she implored, “Don't try to fight the body. Let it wear itself in. In its own time...” she droned, “Mustn’t rush the work of a ChainDancer. Just lie there; close your eyes. Let the new body adopt its senses. Collect its thoughts. Sleep, the mender of souls. Let sleep be your soft healer.”

  FOURTEEN

  The cafe was jam-packed with greasy shit-arsed vintage bikers. A rowdy-looking but basically non-hostile bunch, just a lot of blokes keyed up for any imminent party. The latest rally had been a rollicking success. Ace girls. Rough bikes. Barrels of beer. What aging greebo biker worth his weight in dogpile could ask for more? Greg scratched his nob like a dog with fleas; damned groupies always give him a dose. Crabs usually, but it was a small price to pay. His fucked up road mates were chuckling at his pant antics.

  “Up your slack arses.” Greg jeered at them. A motorbike pulled up outside, drum brakes bellowing; revved like some mad bastard. Greg was, wasn’t he always, eyeing up the fair-doggish waitress. Ogle anything with a good pair of wobbly tits, the sick fuck. The dumpy sorta slag of a waitress bent over to pick up something from the floor and Greg got a right eyeful.

  “She’s got no fucking knickers on.” Greg gasped to himself as a short, dumpy, red monster made of leather with a big round head waddled in resembling a squashed-down resprayed Night Rider. Greg and his mates watched the red peril approach them. The big fat round red thing reached their table, leant over and grabbed Greg by the knackers. Tightened its grip on the two-pairs-of-rotting-jeans' crotch.

  Greg’s eyes stood out on crab stalks. His mates were like gob smacked - a low cheer droned.

  “Fuck me…” Greg blurted as his nob dripped a bead of come into his kecks before forming a nice hard discomfort behind his busted zip. Greg just can’t stop these slags from chasing him up, tracking him down, but none of the ugly twats had ever been so ... demonstrative. He grabbed the chubby red leather arm. Pulled up the visor.

  Now, as soon as the fat red dumpy thing with the turned up arms & legs had made its eye-popping entrance, Greg had suspected it was female. Indeed, the face that greeted the unmasking could definitely be termed female, i.e. of a woman. The gaudily rouged cheeks, cherrybomb lips and thick black lashes, however did little to hide the wrinkled haggard face of a pensioner.

  “What the fat fuck!?!?” Greg growled at the pleasantly smiling face as ploughed remnants of her barely female lips parted to connect with muck, grease, moustache, nicotine-stained teeth, bad gums = bad breath. A striking, cannibalistic display of the Art of The Big Wet One ensued. Though he initially appeared not at all happy, Greg found himself responding warmly, pressing his mouth to hers, getting deeper into the old granny. Shoving his thick tongue in. Feeling her dentures sheering from the gums; gliding loose of their moorings. The orange tang of her impromptu burp. Greg’s nob leapt in his jeans, pulsed with pure orgasmic power, felt his crotch dampen again with a sudden spunky spillage. Penny Massachusetts tossed the guy’s face away, turned and left the cafe. Greg looked astonished at his speechless mates. No one had anything smart to say. He jerked his head as if he’d just taken a punch in the eye. Then chased out the cafe after the red enigma.

  There she was, perched in the bike-littered car park, on the biggest, meanest machine he'd seen since his trucker mate Dave Pryce had given him a lift to Donnington for the UK Motorbike Finals. Really fucking wild racers taking the skin off their metal knees. Leaning into hairpin bends at ridiculous angles. Popping insane straight-length wheelies as they screamed past the chequered flag to victory. Really fucking wild bastards each and every one of them.

  Penny Massachusetts impatiently revved the bike; her black visor watching him. Penetrating him.

  Greg cautiously approached her and cocked his leg over the pillion. Penny Massachusetts let out the clutch, shooting the Norton five or six feet forward. Greg landed on his arse in the gravel.

  “Clumsy.” Penny Massachusetts mocked in her best Sunday voice, “Up you get, silly man.”

  Greg clambered to his feet and again mounted the bike behind her, Penny Massachusetts once again popping the clutch so that he had to leap on, getting a good hold of her well-packed-in thighs.

  “Tighter!” Penny Massachusetts ordered, “I’m not made of China. I won’t break like these skinny cunts you wankers hang out with. Aye, they don't make 'em like they used to.”

  Greg buried his hands inside her thighs, thumbs tucked into her padded cunt pouch. Rubbing against the red leather seam. She sat back on him with all her weight, stuffing her fat arse onto his damp bollocks.

  “Nice that?” she asked.

  “Wonderful.” he gasped at the sheer break-neck speed of acceleration as she pulled away almost casting him from the bike. His legs kicking the back of hers. At the door and window of the café, Greg’s greebo mates were cheering him on and not sure why.

  The indoor shopping precinct was packed, as always on a Saturday. Penny Massachusetts poured on the power as they neared the entrance. Greg’s head throbbing with excitement, teeth itching with the thrill of danger. The glass double-doors leapt into existence before them. Third. Fourth. Fifth ... into the lethal glass wall. The seat throbbing beneath her hot cunt.

  The bike sped through the glass with a solid thump, showering shoppers with chunks of safety glass as they raced for cover. A small boy got in the way and was smashed aside, sent sailing through a sports shop window. The foot-long glass triangles ploughing his soft skin to sunset shreds. Penny Massachusetts skidded to a halt, watching the dying boy as his shredded life slipped screaming from his tender grasp, a faint white hand lifted up out of the carnage, eyes fading.

  “Beautiful red…”

  She hauled the bike round, leaving an acrid burnt-rubber cloud among the mourners like incense at a funeral. Dogs and baby’s prams left in the way were run over or trapped beneath the terrorising wheels. Greg, a mess of shakes and a look on his face like that of a drowned man, hung on for dear life, his gangly legs all over the place.

  Dismounting the bike outside an Off-license, she skipped out after much shouting and smashing of glass holding two big bottles of Whiskey in her hands, “Don't say I never give you anything.” she thrust the bottles at Greg. They tore off through the precinct like Moses parting of the Red Sea.

  Down Parson's Walk Lily Veyne was striding out, hands buried deep in the pockets of her long violet-velvet overcoat trying to control the garment as it lashes about her caught in the aftertow of a huge, red motorbike being driven by a fat dwarf at a hundred miles an hour, her long-haired pillion passenger scared shitless. Headed out Billinge way.

  Lily Veyne turned into the gateless, unkempt garden of a terraced house in the row. Nothing special about this place. Maybe it was about time the council repainted the window frames and doors; replaced a few missing tiles; fixed the draining pipe, sheared off half way down so that a green trail ran down the wall to the grid, a repoint of the whole facade wouldn't hurt either. But you could say the same about the majority of terraced houses in this street that hadn't been bought up by the influx of yuppies, out-of-towners who used this hovel as a cheap homebase for their jobs in the city of Manchester less than twenty easy commuters minutes to the cast.

  Lily Veyne knocked the brass-plated evil devil knocker three times then once more; a code.

  There was no immediate answer. She drew back the knocker about to repeat the combination when there was a strained shout of, “BARRY!” from the bedroom above. Again the grating summons, “BARRY!” rang out.

  “Alright.” came a muffled reply as heavy footsteps approach the front door. Mister Rhisland
opened the door, his hands caked with flour. He stank of some foreign, choking odour. “Hello. Everything's okay, Isn't it? I mean, that thing in the garage ... it was safely retrieved?”

  “It's rude to keep, a guest on the doorstep, Barry.” she looked about the street to see who was eyeing her.

  “Sorry.” he blustered, “Yes. Indeed. Sorry, Lily Veyne. Didn't think to ask. I’m so busy getting mum's tea ready..”

  Lily Veyne barged in.

  “..come in.” Barry finally got round to the courtesy.

  “What's her ladyship having tonight?”

  Barry gleamed mischievously, “Baby Lasagne.”

  “Baby Lasagne? You mean like small as in baby carrots?”

  “Come this way into the kitchen. I’ll show you.”

  Lily Veyne followed the creepy man.

  The kitchen was a right state. Dirty dishes everywhere. Everywhere filthy. The large chopping table hogging centre stage was a health visitor's wet dream. Total abuse of all standard hygiene practices. Upon it lay a naked baby, face down in its own blood that dripped onto the greasy, dust-and-rat-poison strewn floor boards. The infant's buttocks had been inexpertly sliced off.

  “She loves it.” Mister Rhisland gleamed as he stirred a large stained metal pan on the stove. “Hubble Bubble.” he whispered naughtily, “Saves wasting money on cow or pig flesh, too.”

  “How very versatile we are.” Lily Veyne praised his efficiency, “Now. About this fucking formula of yours.”

  “I’ll get to that later. Just got to sort out these blessed pasta sheets. These..” he shows her the packet, “..are much better than the last ones I had.” he sniggered, Put the cheese and the sauce on. Pop it in the oven at gas mark 9 for an hour and I’ll be all yours. He flapped about, unwrapping the pasta from its crinkle wrapping and pressing even more garlic into the bubbling, scum-headed slurry.

  “Barry.” Lily Veyne grunted...

  “It can wait.” Mister Rhisland dropped everything, stood to attention while he gathered his thoughts. Began his well-rehearsed report. “Come. This way. I have it all set up in the cellar. Keeps the specimens fresher down there in the chill, you know.”

  “You don't say.” Lily Veyne followed the beast down the creaking staircase into the gulping abyss below; the eerie gargle of a mini generator burped fermentation. Mister Rhisland flicked on a light at the foot of the stairs that illuminated a Hammer House of Horror laboratory that would be nought but very funny were it not that the stench coming from it was testimony to its functional authenticity.

  “Hey!” Lily Veyne exclaimed, surveying tables of interconnecting glass and plastic tubing conveying different colours of an oily liquid. The emulsification swirling rainbow vortices at the many crisscrossing junctions, a continual distillation.

  All along the wall to, the right hung by one foot from butcher's hooks were thirty four infants of either sex; no gender preference seems to have biased the acquisition of these tots.

  “Where d’you get them all?” Lily Veyne asks. “The babies?”

  “Yes. You wouldn't believe how careless parents can be.” Mister Rhisland shrugged. At the far end of the tube laden tables a small baby girl lay foetal on its side. A steel tube had been hammered into her wispy-haired cranium and the tubing connected up so that the brain matter inside could be sucked out, siphoned off.

  “I tried fermenting animal brains first off but the results were very haphazard.”

  Lily Veyne followed Mister Rhisland to the back of the cellar where a thick, wooden door was built into the bare brick. As instructed, Lily Veyne peered through the crude spy hole.

  Among the pile of corpses...

  “Got most of them from the zoo.” Mister Rhisland remarked, “You know, the security is atrocious. Hope the kiddies don't miss them.”

  ... something moved.

  A snout broke the surface of the offal. The nostrils twitching; sensing life. There was a low, guttural sound then a beast scrambles from beneath the cadavers. Hurled itself at the door. Lily Veyne jolted back, gulping shrieks.

  “Don't even ask me what that is.” Mister Rhisland held up his hands, “Brought some schoolkid back, you know, to show him about ... all the nice scientific equipment.” his fingertips twinkled like stars, ”Well, he didn't like the taste of my concoction at all. Then he went berserk. Nearly lost all of this.. My life’s work. Ended up locking the little brat in there with that lot. Don't care what he's become. Just hate that sound he makes last thing at night. Like soft weeping sounds. In-human. Gives me nightmares. Then what happened to Stanley ... it was revolting. His family. Just swallowed him up. Suffocated him.”

  “Certainly did. Metaphorically speaking.” Lily Veyne tried to lighten the tone.

  “Sorry?”

  “His family swallowing him up. Very metaphorical, that. Seems people here are bound by metaphors in there waking and sleeping lives. Statements become realities. Truths have substance, muscle and bone. Most promising. How soon before I can have a testable batch of this?”

  “Well, I think I’ll have ironed out the kinks, cleared out some of the radicals with the next distillation there. Just a case of waiting for the distilling process to churn over. How soon? A week? Ten days at the most.”

  “Things are getting close to the wire, Barry. I don't want to lose what we've built up here. Wouldn't want you to lose your stake in this honourable endeavour, would we?”

  “No.” Barry looked down at his feet like a scolded child, “We wouldn't.”

  “I’ll give you two days.”

  “What?”

  Lily Veyne shrugged, “That's all the time we have left. Two days. Max... My people are getting jittery, Barry. I’ll send details of where and when. You do your best, get me as much of the catalyst as you can by then. It'll have to do. We don't have time to waste on extravagances like testing.”

  “I understand.” Mister Rhisland sighed. And got his thinning hair ruffled for it.

  SESSION XIV

  “Well, they didn't leave much for me to fix to be quite honest.”

  My saviour was explaining what had happened to me as she redressed my innumerable wounds. There was an electrostatic charge about me; the smell of an old electric fire that has been used so infrequently that when it is eventually turned on the first thing you sense before the heat glow is the stench of the dust layer the element had accrued burning up. I watched this grey woman (soft-focus black & white cine 8) go about her task with a mature sense of purpose - a born nurse's sincerity; good, strong posture. Her rough palms a welcome alternative to the monotonous drone of my pain-submerged new body.

  Her pure white hair, wiry with neglect, scrambled down her wrinkled neck, half-strangling her. The translucent soft-pink chiffon gown she was attired in barely concealing her nudity; the old old flesh hanging wearily from her old old bones. She tucked in a crepe bandage at the back of my left leg. I appeared to be suspended at, at least, her chest height.

  “I think we can both be very proud of the job I've made of you, my husband. I could win an award with your body.” she chuckled and, turning to an illuminated console to her right, inserts her left palm into a spherical ball of amber light. Made a twisting gesture.

  I could feel myself being lowered., my new body's hairs standing prickly on their ends at the sudden surge of translational energy.

  “Have you anything you'd like to ask?” she put her hands on her broad hips; the chiffon gown accentuating her mature topography; the obvious signs of a life well spent; sloppy breasts, suckle-hardened nipples; child-birth-widened hips, water-retention tummy bulge and customary genital fuzz; all highlighted by this impatient act. I couldn't help but look; after all, I'm only human. I hope. The heavy bandaging about me doesn't contradict or affirm my paranoia.

  “Think I'm wearing rather well for a woman of my years?” she asked.

  I blushed.

  “There's no one ChainDancer on the whole of Randal looks so good for her age, let me tell you. You could have been pi
cked up by a right hag.” she pouted with her thin, heavily lined lips; an adolescent memory of the gesture more than an intentional seduction.

  Strange, the walls here are just ... WALLS. The ceiling ... plain white; no, I tell a lie, maybe there is a touch of Artexing to break up the uniformity of colour but nothing as flamboyant as the overhead view I was treated to on my initial reactivation.

  “What do you see?” she registered my fascination with the decor.

  I coughed loose a gob of some ugly-tasting thing from the back of my throat, “It’s not what I see, it’s…” I looked up again just to cheek that nothing had changed while my eyes were averted.

  “I saw stars. Lots and lots and lots and lots of stars. All over the ceiling. There were reptiles or something crawling up the walls and scampering over the rim at the top. It sounds ridiculous, I know.” I apologise.

  The woman's face had sunk; yes, even further.

  “How could you have seen? You haven't moved from here.” she muttered half to herself. “Stars?” she asked me, “You sure it was stars?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged: what an odd sensation, a horizontal shoulder-shrug. Never done that before.

  “Do you have any idea of how you got in such a state?” she grilled.

  “I was in hospital.” I began, “Talking to Lily…” Realised what I've just said.

  “Yes? Lily?” she recapped for me

  “No, that’s wrong.” I caught myself in mid-titter. Christ, I am going mad? I checked the walls and ceiling again. The woman stood beside me, a heavy scowl disfiguring her sinewy features. This was no hospital.

  “Ornamentals…” I blurted the word before I had any control; the word might not be legal tender in all places on the dream plane.

  The woman turned away, a shimmer of tears in her grey eyes.

  “What did I say?” I hadn’t meant to offend her.

  “Who told you about me?” she was defiant now, “Is this a set-up? You're a double agent, aren't you? I should never have brought you here. I’m jeopardizing the whole project.” she babbled neurotically.