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CASSIUS CROON HAD BEEN GOING
THROUGH A SAMUEL L JACKSON PHASE LATELY, and that explained his kangol cap
and zebra skins and his sudden love of vodka. It also justified his
current choice of girlfriend - a Cockney chick named Jas. She was dressed
just like Surfer Girl out of Quentin Tarantino's Jacky Brown, and
like that infamous character, she could suck head just as deep!
<<You ought to give that shit up>> Croon said. It was the night of the Catheter visitation, and Croon was looking for any excuse to drop her. <<You know it fucks with your motivation.>> <<Speak!>> She sidled on to his lap, wrapped a milky thigh around the back of his chair. <<You'd hook yourself to a ventilator if you thought it would save your lungs some work.>> Croon took a long draught from her bong. <<Baby, I'm conserving.>> <<No baby, you're preserving. Sometimes I'm convinced you're really dead, and all that alcohol you drink is really just formaldehyde.>> <<Screw you.>> He pushed her from his lap. She landed bum-first on the floor, breaking into stonie giggles. <<I'll kill you>> Croon said. Just then there was a knock at the door, and Jasmin ran off to answer it (how very un-Surfer Girl of her!) <<Dice, Strife>> Croon said, welcoming his old mates. <<Well, it seems our party is complete. Let's cut to the chase, and bottomline it.>>
Tough talk, Croon thought... he heard the same every summer. But he was feeling jaded at the age of 33, and he figured he could do with something new. Him and half of Britain, it seemed. There were 5000 people waiting in a rough queue at the mine shaft, and what a festival of sleaze! There were Reptilian junglists, NuDruids, Splice Girls, disgruntled Miragist clones; there were pseudo-Rastamen, identifiable by their preference for crack cocaine. New School football hooligans were brawling with the straight-out satanists (and that was just the blokes!) There were Austin Powers, numerous Incredible Bionic Men, a few John Merritt impersonators and a shimmering in the air which could only have been Wells' Invisible Man. There were also a sprinkling of Samuel L Jackson's mingling themselves through the crowd, representing different stages of his career... most focused on the cyborg cop phase of the early 00s. <<Maybe you should change your look>> Jasmin said. <<They say villains are out of style, and superheroes are coming in.>> <<Well then, here goes my superproton plasma pill>> Croon said. He popped an LSD tab into his mouth, grabbed Jasmin by the hand, squeezed tightly, and the four of them plunged into the queue.
Croon pointed to a line of small arrows running through the dust and gloom to, some 20 metres distant, a low-lit staircase. Steps spiralled down into the darkness. <<This place reeks>> said Jasmin, who thought herself too old for motorway parties. <<I can hardly breathe from the dust.>> Dice dropped a match down the passage - it twirled around for at least a minute before going out. <<We've been duped.>> <<Wait.>> They all stopped talking and listened hard. Faint steps and laughter could be heard, echoing up the stairway. Beneath that, the four could discern the dull rumble of an Armageddon bassline. That and an ominous, sometimes fading drum-beat: doom-doom, doom-doom. <<Me first!>> Strife said, diving into the unknown.
Finally, after what must have been a thousand stairs, there was a pool of smoke and dull light, and before they knew it the group were walking through the outskirts of a massive dancefloor. Loudspeakers the size of houses started looming out of the fog, their combined amperage echoing through the tunnels to produce acoustics which could only be called sublime. Tree-high torches lined the perimeters of the dancefloor, lasers scanned the dusty air above. There was also a bit of hologram activity in one distant corner, prototype guns bursting from walls, firing green bullets into the crowds of unhappy nutters. <<Down, down>> the MC said. <<This is the way to go down!>> Well, they were already a long way down. Looking up, Croon noticed a wide shaft high in the further eastern wall; it slanted upwards and, far above, a small square patch of blue sky could be seen. The light of the shaft fell directly on the DJ's stage: a simple oblong block, about two metres high, upon which was laid a great slab of white stone. It was covered with a series of what looked like Nordic runes. Cassius Croon can speak 14 languages including Afrikaaner and Bahasa Indonesia. Unfortunately, he does not know one word of Nordic rune.
He started dancing with a couple of girls dressed in full Amazonian battlewear. This had the predictable effect of strafing Jasmin, and she stormed off to the chill-out cave. <<Ah, stuff it - I'll go talk to her>> Dice said. <<Fine, I'll just stay here>> said Croon, who was now fairly fucked from the LSD. He didn't see either of them until the end of the show. Shuddering basslines and frenetic snares, interspersed with eerie synthe riffs, carried him through the hours. It might have been the drug talking, but the music reminded Croon of an industrial bore, tunnelling relentlessly into ever darker and more plutonic states of mind. The bass was the roar of the generator, the drums were the rotating drill, and the eerie synthe bits were exposed faultlines. There were plenty of samples too, rare jewels from innumerable black exploitation movies (Pulp Fiction included). The music stopped, the Terminator 2 line was dropped in: Asta la vista, it said, baby. Then the burst of an Uzi machine gun tore the fucking place apart! <<It's him!>> the Amazons said. <<The Dark Stranger! He's starting his set.>> They had hardly spoken these words when there came a great noise: a rolling Boom that seemed to come from the ground beneath, and to tremble in the rocks at their feet. Doom, doom it rolled again, as if huge hands were turning the very caverns of Yorkshire into a vast drum. Then there came an echoing blast: a great horn was blown in the hall, and answering horns and harsh cries were heard further off. There was a hurrying sound of many feet... Croon found himself being carried towards the DJ's stage. He was deposited a sheer ten metres from the tomblike stage. The Dark Stranger was lurking in the shadows dressed in a boxer's gown, head obscured, nothing to be seen of his eyes. The multitudes hushed, real ominous. Croon was expecting a new tune to kick in, loud and menacing. Instead, from the far end of the nave, a roll of acoustic drums was heard, and the shrill notes of some flutes. And then 20,000 people started dancing as one. The music grew ghostly, dissonant; the drumbeats lost their steady rhythm; the crowd, who had already begun swaying back and forth, right and left, threw off their sobriety, and held out their arms wide, rigid, as if they were about to take flight. A moment of immobility, and they began to spin in place, using the left foot as a pivot, faces upraised, concentrated, vacant, and their clothes belled out as they pirouetted, making them look like flowers caught in a hurricane. Croon looked back to see how the Stranger was going. He was surprised to see him not dancing or lining up the next track but poised on the slab with his arms outstretched, jerking as if he was possessed. He seemed to be breathing hoarsely, his body clenched, as if he was straining, unsuccessfully, to defecate. The lasers went out. The smart lamps went out. The only light was the feeble glow from the roof. Suddenly, the miracle occurred. A whitish foam trickled from the Dark Stranger's lips, slowly thickened. A similar substance issued from select members of the audience. Then a record kicked in, loud and menacing: Pterodactyl, a torrent of Jurassic yelps and soaring bass. <<Come, brothers>> the DJ murmured, coaxed, <<come, come. That's right, yes...>> The 20,000 sang brokenly, hysterically, they shook and bobbed their heads, they shouted, then made convulsive noise, like death rattles. The stuff emitted by the mediums took on body, grew more substantial; it was like a lava of albumin, which slowly expanded and descended, slid over their shoulders, their chests, their legs with the sinuous movement of a reptile. Croon could not tell if it came from the pores of their skin or their mouths, ears, and eyes. The crowd pressed forward, as in a fervour. Dazzled by the phenomenon, Croon lost all fear: he climbed on to the slab, gazed transfixed at the broiling dancefloor. The foam had begun to detach itself from various devotees and assume ameboid shape. From the mass around the Dark Stranger a tip broke free, turned, and moved up along his body, like an animal that intended to strike him with its beak. At the end of it, two mobile knobs formed, like the horns of a giant snail. The dancers, eyes closed, mouths frothing, did not cease their spinning, and they began to revolve, as much as the space allowed, around the central stage. Whirling faster and faster, they flung off loose clothing, women let their hair stream out, and it seemed their heads were flying from their necks. They shouted houu houu houuuuu... Croon could see (or were they only holograms?) various entities acquiring definition. One of them grew vaguely human in appearance, another went from phallus to ampule to alembic, and another was clearly taking on the aspect of a bird, an owl with great eyeglasses and erect ears, the hooked beak of an old schoolmistress, a teacher of natural sciences. Meanwhile, the Dark Stranger was MC'ing. He said, and his voice was manic Cockney: <<Like me, this place is call'd by many names. Earth, the Earth... the lowest element of them all. When thrice ye have turned this Wheele about... thus my greate Secret I have revealed...>> Suddenly, the miracle occurred. The amenoid reared up, assumed snake form - a hideous, drooling, 20 metre high cobra. The crowd cowered, women screaming, men discharging rounds. Croon didn't try to duck or dive back into the crowd, but stood frozen, as if he was paralysed. Then the snake roared, and its voice was classic Cockney: <<Brothers, sisters, come to me. Yes, come back to me...>> CASSIUS CROON and other characters
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