Red Herring

by Damon L. Wakes

  “So you...” he stammered. “You’re really...”

  “That’s right! For I...” he whipped off his cape. “I am the real Count Dragula!”

  Everyone stared in surprise. It was impossible to look away. The dress. The sequins. The gloves. It was everything Ben had done, but...more.

  “Mmm-hmm.” He waggled a nail-polished finger at the room as a whole. “Oh, yeah. I’m the real transvestite from Transylvania.” He turned to Ben. “I’m more vamp than you can handle!” And with that, Count Dragula made his high-heeled exit from the room.

  Ben took the lampshade off his head and slumped down onto the sofa. The awkward silence continued.

  “Well,” said Richard at last. “I don’t think any of us expected him to say that.”

  8

  Tales of the Unexpected

  Challenge #4: Write a Drabble—a story of exactly 100 words. The term “Drabble” originates from Monty Python’s Big Red Book.

  A tense scene unfolds today as families who were expecting a pleasant day at the zoo are, in fact, confronted by something completely different. Local man Brian has been taken hostage by “Monty” the Burmese Python. His mother had this to say:

  “He’s not a hostage, he’s a very naughty boy!”

  We’ll be keeping you up to date with all events as they...oh! It seems Monty has released a list of demands. He wants...a shrubbery. A top negotiator has already been flown in from Spain. Sir, what are your thoughts on this turn of events?

  “NOBODY EXPECTS THE SERPENT’S IMPOSITION!!!”

  9

  The Revolution Kids

  This story was inspired by the sculptures of Yinka Shonibare MBE.

  Jeff knew it had been a bad idea to buy those pills. Not because he thought anything bad would happen—quite the opposite. He’d been suckered in by some vague mumbo-jumbo. “They’re new,” the guy at the stall had said. But then he’d got them home and read the little leaflet—as he always did—and there it was: “homeopathic.” He’d just spent thirty quid on sugar pills. Chucked them out the window.

  ***

  It was eleven thirty when he noticed the fox out on the patio, crunching the pills with its mean little teeth and licking up the crumbs. Jeff had thought it was funny at first—at least someone was getting something out of them—but then he wondered if it might not be good for the fox. What if they made its stomach swell up? Or something? He opened the door, and the fox bolted. He swept up all the little white pills with his hands and dumped them in the bin in a plastic tub.

  ***

  The fox was there again the next day, licking the patio stones. Jeff tried to watch it, the lights in the room switched off, but the fox saw him anyway. It didn’t bolt, though. It pressed its paws up on the glass.

  “More.” It said, throat straining to produce the noise. “Please...more.”

  Jeff was fascinated. What else could he do? He opened the back door a crack and chucked a handful of the pills, salvaged from the bin. He went back to the market in the morning. Sure enough, the conman had moved on. Jeff wondered if he knew what he was selling. Probably not. Jeff had a feeling it was worth more than thirty quid.

  ***

  When the fox came the third time, it was wrapped in a black bin liner. Wore it like a cloak, clutching the plastic with its front paws. That was the other thing: it walked on two legs now. “Please...” it said. “Please...” It held a tiny paw out like a hand.

  Jeff scooped half a dozen pills out of the plastic tub and dropped them in front of it. Almost before they hit the floor, it was on all fours again, crunching them up.

  “I...” Jeff stammered. “I...uh...” He couldn’t talk to it. The thing was hideous, somehow. Not quite human, not even animal.

  It licked the last few fragments from the grimy patio. “Thank you,” it said, squeezing backwards through the fence, its eyes always on him. “Thank you.”

  ***

  Two days later, the fox was gone. Jeff wondered if it knew he was running out of pills. He hadn’t liked to let on, in case it left. The fox was valuable. He’d been keeping a big canvas laundry bag just inside his back door, but it seemed he’d missed his chance. Still had some pills, though—somebody would pay handsomely for those. If he could only work out who...

  But two more days and the fox was back. It had clothes this time. Garish, catwalk stuff. The sort of thing a particularly eccentric aristocrat might have worn two centuries ago. It knocked on the window.

  Jeff opened the back door a crack and peered through.

  “Hello.” The fox looked up sheepishly. “I do hope I didn’t embarrass myself earlier.” It stood neatly on two legs, one arm curled primly behind its back.

  “Oh, no...” Jeff managed to mumble. “Not at all...no.” He ducked back inside and, without thinking, carried the whole tub of pills through. There were only about five left.

  The fox gazed at him blankly.

  “I’ll get you more!” he said, hurriedly. “Just got to find some, then...”

  The fox waved a hand. “I don’t need anything from you anymore. You see, I came here to offer my thanks. To invite you to witness something...quite wonderful. But you’ll have to drive.” It looked down at its feet. “You understand.”

  “No, I get it...sure.” Jeff fumbled for his keys.

  ***

  “Just here, please.”

  It was a patch of woodland without even a real road leading into it: the last half mile had been mud. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “The birth of a new world. I have big plans, you see.” The fox reached over and removed the keys from the ignition.

  “Hey!” Jeff made to snatch them back, but thought better of it. He didn’t want to scare the fox. Silently, it opened the door and slipped out onto the ground.

  “This way, please.” The fox followed the headlights away from the road, and Jeff could do nothing but trail behind. Thankfully, he’d had the sense to bring a torch. His peculiar companion didn’t seem to need one.

  “Just here.”

  Jeff shone the torch in the direction the fox indicated, and nearly threw up. It was the conman, obviously dead and hard even to look at.

  “Once I found him, I...well...couldn’t risk him finding out what he had. You understand.”

  “Give me my keys.” The fox was barely waist high. It was like arguing with a child. Still, Jeff’s voice trembled.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, old chum.”

  “Give...”

  There was a flash of gilded metal in the torchlight as the fox drew and cocked a pistol. “You’ll find a shovel down there. Get digging.”

  Jeff began.

  “There’s a good chap.”

  ***

  As Jeff worked, the fox began tapping something into a mobile phone. The light from the screen made its eyes shine blue, the hair on its face standing out luridly.

  “Alright.” It pocketed the phone once more. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “Then...can I have my keys back?”

  “No. You know too much, as they say. But don’t worry: I’ll give you a sporting chance. I’m a stickler for tradition, don’t you know?”

  “What?” Just then, Jeff became aware of noises in the distance. There was baying in the night, and it was accompanied by a bugle.

  “Chop chop.” The fox clapped crisply, gun still in hand. “The dogs are coming.”

  10

  The Race Card

  Challenge #5: Write a Science Fiction story. It must feature the phrase “Puny Earthling”.

  The pod was twenty metres high, every inch of it gleaming with heat-burnished chrome. It made a peculiar ticking noise as the metal cooled and contracted, loud enough to be heard over the rumbling of tanks hurtling down the street towards it. Helicopters dropped marksmen on rooftops, and foot soldiers poured from armoured vans. Three miles away, a battery of mobile artillery was just setting itself into place.

  The pod itself made no particular prepar
ations. It simply sat there, cooling serenely, protruding from the concrete of the square. Then, all of a sudden, cracks appeared in its surface. Panels popped outward as four crab-like legs separated from its flawless frame. And all of a sudden, the topmost part of that ovoid body disappeared...only it hadn’t disappeared. The sun passed through that space with a peculiar shimmer, suggesting that the material was still there: it had merely become permeable to light. A figure stood silhouetted in that great transparent dome.

  “People of Earth,” it began. “This is not a mission of peace. This is a mission of conquest! Surrender your iridium to Khzalg the Almighty!”

  The soldiers held their fire. Even a round from one of the tanks was unlikely to so much as dent the pod. Use of force would only anger the invader, and—worse—it would mean more paperwork to fill out at the end of the day. Instead, they waited, as protocol demanded.

  A hatch opened in the turret of one of the tanks, and a man with a megaphone lifted himself out. “Attention Khzalg the Almighty! We hear your request and would like to enter into a dialogue. We hope we can come to a peaceful arrangement, benefitting all involved.”

  “Khzalg the Almighty does not negotiate! Tremble, puny Earthling, and...”

  There was a very loud and extremely discontented murmur from the streets. Even with the pod’s deafening synthetic voicebox, Khzalg found he had to wait for it to die down a little.

  “What?” he asked. “What? What’s...”

  “That’s racist!” said the man with the megaphone.

  “Wha?” Khzalg looked around the crowd from within his armoured battle-dome. “No... Of course it’s...no...”

  “It is!” said the man with the megaphone. “That’s an offensive stereotype. Not all humans are puny!”

  “Well,” said Khzalg, “with respect...you are quite puny.”

  “There!” shouted one of the marksmen. “He did it again!”

  Khzalg shuffled uneasily inside his dome. “I’m just saying...there are definite physiological differences we need to acknowledge. I think we can agree that your primitive battle-vehicles are puny in comparison to my mighty quadpod.”

  “That’s not because we’re human,” said the man with the megaphone. “That’s because our technology developed on a planet with a combination of geopolitical and socioeconomic pressures not conducive to the fabrication of interstellar war machines. You don’t know what sort of things we might have achieved if your colonialist ancestors hadn’t exploited us to build the pyramids and Stonehenge and Atlantis. You’re so culturally insensitive.”

  “You’re just a great big racist!”

  “Look, I...” Khzalg the Almighty nervously tried to right a streetlamp with one of his pod’s enormous legs. “I feel like we might have got off on the wrong foot here. Why don’t I buy you all a drink? I know this great place just beside Zeta Persei...”

  11

  It’s a Wonderful Spoof

  “Goodbye, cruel world!” Greg prepared to take a long jump off edge of the bridge—he didn’t want to bump into the side on the way down.

  Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light. Barely managing to stop himself falling off in surprise, Greg looked to his right. A glowing, winged figure was perched on the railing. “No, stop, don’t do it,” he said, not particularly enthusiastically. He took his cigarette out of his mouth for a moment to have a swig from a three-litre bottle of cheap cider.

  “Who are you!?”

  “I’m your guardian angel.”

  Greg just stared.

  “I’m not being sarcastic. I literally am.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth, freeing up a hand to offer to Greg. “The name’s Lawrence.”

  Greg shook his hand. “Greg.”

  Lawrence screwed his face up, as if talking to an idiot. “Yeah, mate. I think I picked that up at some point over the last forty or fifty years. Now, I can have a pretty good guess about this, but...why are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “Well, my wife left me. I’ve got no home, no car, no money. No self esteem. Things are just getting harder, you know?”

  Lawrence took a swig of his cider. “Yeah, well it’s not exactly made for fun viewing, just so you know.”

  “I just feel sometimes like...maybe it would have been better if I’d never been b...”

  “Don’t say that!” Lawrence threw his cider bottle off the bridge, enraged.

  For the first time, Greg wondered if it really might be worth going on living. If this angel—this agent of God Himself—showed such conviction, who was he to argue?

  Lawrence continued. “Just...don’t! Don’t you even finish that sentence! Every. Freaking. Time! You say: ‘Oooh, Lawrence, I wish I’d never been born’ and then I’ve got to take you to some awful alternate dimension where...I don’t know...Hitler beats orphans to death with starving puppies because you were never there to do yadah-yadah-yadah. Then it’s all: ‘I want to live, Lawrence! I want to live!’ and I’ve got to send you back here again. Well I’m not doing it!” He swung his arms out in a forceful gesture. “I’m done, man! I’m freaking done!”

  Greg stared in surprise. Lawrence just sat there, smoking furiously.

  “Just...” he waved at the river down below. “Go on. They don’t pay me enough for this.”

  “I thought...aren’t the streets in Heaven paved with gold or something?”

  “Yep. They are. Not a scrap left for poor old Lawrence.”

  Greg continued to stare, and Lawrence continued to smoke.

  “Can I...I don’t know...pick something else, then?”

  “Like what? I do serious work, you know. I’m not just going to send you on holiday to some magical land of candy floss unicorns.” He took another drag, squinting into the middle distance. “Never again.”

  “Hey. I don’t think things could get much worse—I’d take anything.”

  “Wait...so, like...you’d wish everything was the opposite of the way it is now?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Lawrence nodded thoughtfully, blowing out smoke. “I could go for that.”

  There was a pop, and another blinding flash of light.

  Greg looked around. “We’re uh...we’re still here.”

  “Oh, are we?”

  “Yeah. Except you’re holding a big pile of gold bullion.”

  “Which is quite clearly the opposite of not having any money.”

  “Where’s mine, then?”

  “Huh. I guess the opposite thing doesn’t work on you. Because...” he traced his finger in the air, working something out. “Yeah, opposite-you wouldn’t have a guardian angel, so none of this would work to begin with. Yeah, that sort of makes sense, now I think about it...”

  “Great. So you get everything you wanted and I’m still the same as ever.”

  “It seems so, yeah.”

  “Goodbye, Lawrence.” Greg threw himself off the edge of the bridge. Several seconds later, he hit the water with a thud.

  “Yikes, man!” Lawrence fluttered down. “You okay?”

  “Yeah! I actually feel better than before. And my cold sore’s gone!”

  “Oh, yeah. You jumped off a bridge. In this world, that’s like some kind of crazy miracle cure or something.”

  “Wow. This is actually kind of cool!”

  “It certainly beats the usual.”

  “Hang on. Let’s try something else.”

  Greg swam to the side of the river and hurried up the bank into town. Lawrence followed just overhead.

  “Can I borrow one of those gold bricks?”

  “Sure.”

  Taking the weighty lump of metal, Greg hurled it at a police officer, catching him square in the back of the head. The officer crumpled to the ground.

  “Oh no...” Greg looked on in horror as the policeman just lay there, not moving. “How could you let me do that!?” he screamed at Lawrence.

  “Just wait.”

  Finally, the policeman got up. “My headache’s gone!” he cried. “
And you just assaulted an officer of the law.” He strode over. “Here’s a minus ten-thousand pound fine...” he wrote out a cheque, “and a coupon for twenty-five years off your next prison sentence. It’s good until Twenty-eighteen.”

  “Wow. Thanks!”

  “Just doing my job, sir.”

  Greg turned to Lawrence. “I was right! This place is fantastic! Can I just stay here forever?”

  “I’d probably have to pull some strings, but I can’t imagine why not. What do you want to do next?”

  “I dunno. I sort of want to see what’s on TV in opposite world. But first there’s uh...there’s something I’ve got to do.”

  Lawrence waited while Greg hurried over through a nearby door, but he came back again pretty much immediately.

  “Sorry. I thought there was a toilet in there, but it’s just some creepy butler with a funnel.”

  Realisation dawned.

  “I want to live, Lawrence. I want to live.”

  12

  Loose Canon

  *Challenge #6: Include the names of at least 15 books of the Bible (one must be Genesis). Include at least 15 recognizable, well-known foreign language words or phrases (one must be “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”—“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Include at least 15 words that are colours (one must be periwinkle).

  “Monsieurs...monsieurs!” The chairman spread his arms, trying to ignore the stuffy heat of the interstellar conference room. “We would be better without all these ad hominem attacks, non?”

  “...and that’s another thing!” cried the representative of the Church of the Third Moon of Tobit. “Stop switching between French and Latin! It’s doing my head in!”

  “Both zese languahges are acceptable undere ze Scarlet convention.”

  “Then jolly well pick one!”

  “Yes,” droned the arch robo-deacon of Nehemiah IV. “It is illogical for the chairman to speak BASIC when the committee speaks C++.” His processor whined. “ANNOYANCE LEVEL GREEN!”

  The chairman sighed. The same arguments had been used again and again ad infinitum. Ad nauseam, even. “Ah simply think we should get backe to ze real issue. Ouat coloure should oure hats be?”