I was just wondering what kind of bridal trousseau a “final form” might be, and how I could escape from a cabin as small as this one without being noticed, when she turned and I saw her final form. It was not quite what I had expected.
The skin and face and legs and complexion I had admired—in fact, pretty much everything that had pleased the Booster eye, and doubtless the Scallop eye before me—now were revealed to be mere window-dressing, on the order of an insect’s chrysalis. (Or is that some kind of fancy American hover car? Let’s say “cocoon” instead.) In any case, the aforementioned lovely skin cracked and peeled away in broad sheets before tumbling to the stateroom floor, discarded like a losing ticket at Epsom Downs, as Krellita Du Palp unveiled her true self in all its...well, dash it, in all its something. Something bad, is what I want to say, like a giant sticky spider-centipede sort of thing.
As I stared in dismay, she lifted me up as though I were a kitten— and not one of your manlier kittens either—and flung me to the floor, then stood over me on her jointed legs, dripping long ropy strings of something awful onto my face and chest.
“Oh, Wernie, to think that you, the one to warn me of Budgie’s unfitness, should turn out to be my true love after all!” Krellita’s compound eyes glittered with affection for Yours Truly. I was looking around for a house slipper to hit her with, but since it would have taken a slipper the size of a mail van, my search proved fruitless. “And you, Wernie, healthy, strong you, after I lay my eggs inside you, you’ll provide such fine nourishment for our young when they begin to grow!” A large tubelike object rose from her abdomen, a sort of garden hosepipe made of jointed plates. The hole on the end of it coming toward me was surrounded by spiky, toothy objects that looked meant to do some kind of serious harm, and I was fairly certain that Your Humble Narrator was the intended victim.
“Here now!” I said, indignation struggling with mortal terror. “No ovipositors, please! I’m British!”
“Darling! Love me!” she cried—I think that’s what she said, but her clicking, drooling mouth-parts slightly impaired her speech—and then she clutched me with all her legs. I felt the tube beginning to nudge my stomach like a pickpocket searching for Grandfather’s gold watch.
“Help!” I said, quite loudly. “Help, help, help, help, dash it all, somebody help!” In fact, I said over and over (and over and over) but nobody came. The clicking and drooling increased in intensity, and the toothy probe nibbled exploringly at my tum-tum. Things looked very bad for Your Humble Etc.
“Yoo hoo!” called a strange voice from the open door of my stateroom.
The most horrible thing I had ever seen was already squatting on top of me, preparing to introduce me to the joys of involuntary fatherhood, but the weird, blobby shape in the doorway was a close second. It was lumpy and misshapen, had glowing red eyes, and was waving its limbs around in a manner only slightly less frenzied than Miss du Palp, who had the advantage of having more of them to wave.
“Hey, sweet-cheeks,” the strange apparition said in a curiously metallic voice. “Why don’t you lose that gink and get with a real man?”
“Who are you?” demanded Krellita. While she was distracted, I took the opportunity of buttoning my hired tuxedo over my exposed underpinnings.
“Just the man of your dreams, that’s all.” The thing in the doorway wiggled from side to side like a worm impaled on a dull fishhook. “Healthy, fat, full of protein, and anxious to settle down and raise a whole brood of larvae.”
For a moment, Krellita hesitated, but then she rose off me, the joints of her legs creaking like an ancient dumbwaiter. “You do...smell good,” she said. “Fatty. Meaty.”
“Kiss me, you fool,” said the lumpy, red-eyed thing. “We were meant for each other! Leave that pale, scrawny, inbred weasel and come to me, my exoskeletal sweetheart. Let me spirit you away to a place where our love will not be disturbed by search parties or worried relatives—somewhere we can raise our young to crawl proudly toward the future!”
That did it. With a sound that was halfway between the joyous whoop of a Red Indian and the slurping noise of a toothless man finishing his soup, Krellita Du Palp leaped across the room and fastened herself to the stranger, drool flying like confetti. As the two of them fell to the passage floor outside, the door of my stateroom clicked shut and I was alone again.
Nearly half an hour later, somebody knocked on my cabin door. I didn’t answer, since I had folded up the bed and was sharing the alcove in the wall with it, hoping to remain there until the Chinless docked, but I heard the door open and close.
“Master Wernie?” someone called.
To my great joy, I recognized the tinny tones. “Omnitron?” I managed to get the bed-cupboard open and tumbled out onto the floor. “What are you doing here? Did you see what happened? That woman was...well, she was a creature, Omnitron! A hideous, man-destroying creature.”
“Yes, sir. The fairer sex can be difficult at the best of times.”
“What do you mean, ‘difficult’? She was going to scoop out my insides and fill them with some kind of caviar—and not the nice yummy kind, I daresay. I was going to be baby food for a very unwanted group of offspring!”
“I know, sir, which was why I took the liberty of luring Miss Du Palp away from you.”
I gasped. “That was you in the doorway, then? That red-eyed thing?”
“Not exactly, sir.” Omnitron had a look of great complacency on its face. At least that’s what I assume it was—it’s hard to tell with robots. “You see, I knew that a young woman like that would not give up a prospect like you for a lifeless array of metal components like myself. So I took the liberty of knocking the ship’s purser on the head. He was sneaking around in the hallway outside trying to catch you with Miss Du Palp in your room. Then I manipulated his limbs and spoke as though I were him, to draw her away.”
“You coshed the purser? Thumped him on the dome and knocked him out cold? Good lord, Omnitron, you are a hardened villain.”
“I am an omnitronic butler, sir. I am programmed to respond usefully in most situations.”
“Well, that explains the red eyes—those horrid, superior glowing peepers of his will haunt my dreams. Although not quite to the degree that Miss Du Palp will.” I shuddered. “But the shape I saw in the doorway was quite stout, Omnitron. I recall that purser as being rather slender.”
“After I had rendered him senseless, sir, I stuffed his clothing with leftover ham from your breakfast. You really took quite a bit, sir, I must say. There was enough remaining to nearly double his weight, which made him appear to be exactly the sort of mate Miss Du Palp was seeking.”
“Omnitron, you are a pearl among machines. But what about when the arachnid lady finds out her liaison was begun on false if still quite meaty pretenses? What then?”
“I took an additional liberty, sir, of flushing them both out the airlock while they were engaged in their...romantic conversation. The erstwhile couple are frozen now, floating in airless space.”
“Good God! Well, I can’t say she didn’t have it coming, but what about the purser? He was a nasty bit of work, true, but he was just doing his job—in an unpleasant sort of way.”
“I dare say, sir, that he would prefer being frozen to the kind of fatherhood that was planned for him. I understand the young of Cunabulum are slow eaters, and it takes their victims many months to die.”
“You know about those creatures?”
“I have run across references to them in my light reading, sir.” Omnitron helped me to my feet and began straightening the stateroom. “I believe there was a pictorial in the Sunday Times. The Du Palps are an old and well-known Cunabulumian family. As soon as you told me her name, I knew you were in danger.”
“Huh.” I thought about it for a moment. “Well, I have definitely had a near brush today with jolly old extinction, Omnitron, and I learned two very important lessons as well.”
“Yes? What are those, sir?”
??
?First, that matrimony is for suckers. Second, that one should always have a faithful robotic servant handy on an interplanetary trip, because in space, nobody can hear you scream.”
“Oh, I rather think everybody on the ship could hear you scream, sir.” Omnitron tugged loose the tiny coverlet I was still clutching in fear-cramped fingers and laid it out on the bed. “In fact, you were shrieking like a little girl. Quite piercing.”
“Then, dash it, why didn’t anybody help me?”
“Well, sir, after all—this is Third Class.”
“I must say, Werner,” said Aunt Jabbatha, “I am surprised—no, ‘shocked’ would be more accurate—to discover you didn’t utterly botch this affair. In fact, you have almost done well. Your cousin Budgerigar is saved from a most unpleasant marriage, and you have scarcely broken anything I will have to pay for. There is the matter of several thousand credits worth of expensive Betelgeusian ham you filched, of course, which will come out of your allowance.”
“Of course,” I said glumly. The thing with aunts is, one does not argue if one wants to keep receiving one’s allowance, even the tiny remaining fragment thereof. “Whatever you say, Auntie.”
“And I think I shall leave Omnitron with you to keep you out of trouble.”
Now that was a bit better. I could get used to being waited on by a stout machine like Omnitron, especially if it was going to prove useful in scraps like the one on the Chinless. “As you say, Auntie.”
“He will in fact keep you company on your trip tomorrow to the spa on Indignation Nine.”
“Beg your pardon?” Aunts have the habit of saying things that quite sneak past one’s ears sometimes and don’t reveal themselves in their true horror until they reach the old brainbox. “Spa? Is that meant to be a reward?” It didn’t seem like my idea of the thing at all, which would have been an increase in allowance, or at least Aunt Jabbatha breaking out my late uncle’s quite good brandy and offering me a snifter. “Is it at least one of those sun-and-tennis places?”
“No, you young idiot, it’s a place to dry out. You’re going to Indignation Nine for the cure. You drink too much, and you are endangering your liver and kidneys. I intend to use them one day.”
“Beg pardon? Did you say...use them?”
“Goodness, yes. You don’t think I keep a blithering fool like you around because I like your conversation, do you? Someday I will harvest your organs and use them for myself.” She frowned at the vat that contained her. “A person can grow tired of living in a jar, you know. I haven’t been able to beat a servant properly in centuries. And I want to go dancing again!”
I left Aunt Jabbatha’s house, accompanied by Omnitron. I was pensive with the awful twin visions of bits of the Inner Booster being removed and of my aunt cutting a rug at the Duke of Buckingham’s spring do.
“Well, I can’t say I’m very happy about any of this,” I said. “Indignation Nine is supposed to be a famously dreadful place. They give you mineral water and rye toast and nothing more, then laugh at one’s distress. I’ve even heard ugly rumors of...”—I lowered my voice—“...jumping jacks, Omnitron. Sit-ups! Calisthenics!”
“Buck up, sir.” Omnitron leaned over and plucked a piece of lint from my lapel with one of his metal claspers. “At least you now have learned the falseness of your aunt’s longtime allegations against you. That should be some comfort.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, sir, she has just made it very clear that, at least in the case of your kidneys and liver, she doesn’t think you’re a waste of human tissue after all.”
I considered that for a moment. “By Jove, Omnitron,” I said, “you’re right.”
“Of course, sir.”
Black Sunshine
FADE IN:
EXT.—PIERSON HOUSE, 1976—NIGHT
From blackness to shadowy trees—a tangled orchard in moonlight. We move through them toward a three-story turn-of-the-century house with lights in the windows. As we track in, we hear Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” playing distantly on a stereo.
CUT TO:
ERIC’S DREAM POV—Micro close-up on a carpet—it’s ALIVE, squirming with intricate patterns. “Iron Man” is ear-splitting now.
YOUNG JANICE
Eric! Eric, talk to me!
YOUNG ERIC’S POV swivels up from the carpet—things are dreamlike, compressed, distorted—it’s an acid trip. YOUNG JANICE is so close that her face is distorted. We dimly see she is fifteen, maybe sixteen, wearing ’70s clothes.
YOUNG JANICE
Eric, I want to get out of here...!
YOUNG BRENT lurches into view, looming above JANICE. He’s chunky, teenage, clutching his hands against his stomach, panicky but trying to stay calm.
YOUNG BRENT
Shit, it’s bad—Topher’s freaking out for real up there.
YOUNG JANICE
What’s going on, Brent? Where’s Kimmy?
YOUNG BRENT
I don’t know! I can’t find her. I think...I think something bad happened! I tried to help Topher, and I...
Just now realizing, BRENT lifts his hands away from his body and stares at them. They are smeared with blood. His eyes bug out.
YOUNG JANICE
Oh my God!
Something is THUMPING on the ceiling above—something heavy thrashing around upstairs. As the POV looks upward, the ceiling suddenly becomes TRANSPARENT, a spreading puddle of translucency as though the ceiling were turning to smeared glass. A dark human shape (YOUNG TOPHER) is lying on the floor of the room above, face pressed against the transparent ceiling as though it were a picture window, looking down on them. All we can make out of him is a huddled shape, distorted face, and a single staring eye.R
YOUNG TOPHER
Hey, Pierson—I seeeeee you...!
YOUNG JANICE
(screaming)
Eric!
FADE with JANICE’s cry still echoing, as we
CUT TO:
INT.—ERIC’S MOTEL—NIGHT
ADULT ERIC as he sits bolt upright in a motel bed, sweating.
YOUNG JANICE
(very faint now)
Eric!
ERIC PIERSON is sweaty, trembling. He’s in his early forties, nice-looking, slender, but at this moment he could be twenty years older. He fumbles for a cigarette and sits smoking in the dark, as we
ROLL CREDITS
EXT.—THE PIERSON HOUSE, NOW—MORNING
ADULT ERIC drives down a long, dirt driveway. From atop a rise we see the house—the same house, but now sitting in a wide, empty DIRT FIELD several acres across: the orchard has been cut down. The house looks grim—peeling paint, screen door hanging halfway off. Hesitantly, he moves up the front steps and through the front door.
INT.—HOUSE
There’s nothing Gothic or creepy about the place, it’s just stripped and empty—carpets removed, no furniture, wallpaper peeling. ERIC hesitates again, then moves toward the dark stairwell. He flicks the switch—no light. He looks up the stairs, but a noise outside distracts him. A car with “Red Letter Realty” has pulled up beside his and someone is getting out.
EXT.—HOUSE
ERIC has returned to the dry front lawn, and stands with his back to the drive, looking up at the house. As an attractive, dark-haired woman in her late thirties approaches, he talks over his shoulder to her.
ERIC
Things seem smaller when you see them after a long time. I remembered this place as being so huge...
JANICE
That’s funny, because I remembered you as being much shorter.
ERIC turns, startled.
ERIC
Janice? Janice? Oh, my God, what are you doing...
(looks at car)
Jesus. Are you the...
JANICE
The real-estate agent? Well, someone else in the office is actually handling it, but when I heard you were coming back to town to sign the sale papers, I said...
(shrugs)
Well, i
t seemed to make sense.
ERIC is still staring at her.
ERIC
You look...you look great.
JANICE
I look old. But thanks. You look okay yourself. I was sorry to hear about your grandmother.
ERIC
Well, ninety-two. We should all last so long. I thought she’d sold this years ago.
JANICE
She wasn’t stupid, Eric. She was making the developers bid up the price—you can see this was the last property here. She did you a good turn.
ERIC
(turns back to the house)
It’s hard to believe, huh? Those days seem like... like a dream.
JANICE
Not to me. I live around here, remember?
ERIC turns at the harshness in her voice.
ERIC
Is that bad?
JANICE
You didn’t want to stay much. No, I guess it’s all right. Not as exciting as Los Angeles, I’m sure.
(she frowns, then tries to smile)
But it’s nice to send the kids off to school without firearms training.
ERIC
You...have kids?
JANICE
Callie and Jack—eight and six. But no, not at the moment. They’re with their dad for the summer. We’re divorced.
ERIC is staring at the house again.
ERIC
I was just going to visit Topher, then drive back, but...hey, would you like to have dinner? It’d be nice to catch up.
JANICE
You’re...going to visit Topher?
ERIC
Thought I should. You want to come along?
JANICE
(shakes her head; then:)
You haven’t seen him lately. It’s bad.
ERIC
(shrugs)
Yeah, that’s what they told me. So, dinner. What do you say?
JANICE
I don’t think it’s a good idea, Eric.
ERIC
Just talk. Catch up. I...really feel like I need to.
JANICE
You don’t want to catch up, Eric. It’s better to leave things alone.