Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #349: Change and Decay
Previously: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #348: The Core, or Deepest Down
***
Sir Mumphrey Wilton awoke with a splitting headache to the chiming of his pocketwatch. He roused from sleep slowly as the aches and pains from his limbs and torso reported in: scratches and pulled muscles.
“Lisa?” he asked reflexively.
The woman in bed with him was curled in most of the blankets with her back to him. Her blonde hair was sprayed out over his chest.
“A gentleman’s first duty is to remember the lady he took to bed with him the night before, leibschen,” his bedmate scolded.
“Of course,” the eccentric Englishman agreed. “Deuced bad form. Terribly sorry.”
She paused to allow him to recall who she was. Mumph raced through a selection of possibilities. What had he been doing yesterday? The last thing he remembered was supper with…
“My wife?” he gasped.
“Correct. You may live.”
That begged the follow-up question: who was his wife?
“This sort of thing only happens to Nats,” Mumphrey complained. He did seem to have a hangover but it seemed unlikely that he had accidentally got married.
He took a deep breath and asked, “May I enquire as to whom you are, madam? You’re certainly not Madge, and I confess to having no memory of a second wife.”
The lady turned over, regarding him sceptically through bed-tousled tresses. “Really? So eight years of marital bliss have entirely slipped your attention, kuchen?”
Mumphrey toppled out of bed, looking around for his service revolver. “Baroness!” he hissed. “Elizabeth Sweetwater Dewdrop Zemo von Saxe-Lurkburg-Schreckhausen!”
“Her Excellency Baroness Elizabeth Sweetwater Dewdrop Zemo von Saxe-Lurkburg-Schreckhausen Wilton!” his bedmate corrected him. “There was a cathedral, a dear choir of little children singing anthems, an overabundance of irritating superheroes? The traditional attack from some desperate adversary without the wit to realise that assaulting an entire church full of people with metahuman powers was insanely suicidal?”
“Not ringing a bell,” Sir Mumphrey warned; except that now she mentioned it… it did.
“We met shortly after you put down my uncle for the mad dog he was? You said I was…” The Baroness paused in irritation and snapped, “Would you please quieten that wretched timepiece while I’m deciding whether to kill you?”
The eccentric Englishman looked again at the chiming pocketwatch. The tone was an ominous discord. The illuminated face of the Chronometer of Infinity that he held was glowing a lurid warning red.
“Ahhh,” he sighed, relaxing. “That’s it then. A retcon attack.”
“A what?” His wife was grumpy in the mornings until she’d had he first coffee and cake.
Mumphrey indicated the whirring sub-dials on the face of his complicated pocketwatch. “This is set to detect any changes made to my timeline – to prevent them usually. Some event in the past has altered that has affected me anyhow, and that’s why the alarm is pinging.”
“Make it ping quieter, Mumphrey,” the Baroness ordered. “Silent would be better. Doesn’t that thing have a vibrate function?”
Mumphrey cancelled the alarm while initiating a detailed diagnostic. “Looks like a classic burst of retrospective continuity. From him.”
“Winkelweald, the Hooded Hood?” Elizabeth Wilton snarled. “Looks like today’s vendetta is all sorted out then.”
“He’s used his retcon powers to make some major change somewhere and it has led to us being… like this.”
The Baroness pouted. “Liebschen, I thought we were very happy together. You get a little grumpy when I beat the servants, I get a bit territorial when you do your team-ups with all those strumpets in spandex, but generally we have a solid foundation for a marriage that can rule the planet.”
Mumphrey pulled on his trousers and found a shirt and collar. He intended to be properly dressed to contact the greater Office Holders.
The Baroness was surprised when one wall of her bedroom melted away to reveal a small alcove containing three old-fashioned cradle telephones. Then she remembered that she had known about the hidden space for the last eight years. Mumphrey occupied the minor office of Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, holding the countdown clock to the end of the universe. The phones were hotlines to the three senior Cosmic Offices whose remit and power were considerably wider.
The middle phone was jet black, so dark that it seemed almost pressed out of shadow. Mumphrey lifted the handset and cranked the handle at the side of the base unit. Then he did it again.
“Line’s dead,” he warned with a frown. “That’s a first. Bad news.”
“Perhaps the Chronicler of Stories is in the lavatory?” Elizabeth speculated. “Persistent bowel problems would certainly explain a few plotlines and characters we’ve had to deal with.”
Mumphrey tried the white phone to the Shaper of Worlds, whose domain was beginnings. “No reply here either. Hmph!”
The Baroness pointed to the last phone, a leopard-spotted device trimmed with leather and lace. “Try the floozy, then,” she conceded. “It’s not like you haven’t before. Like everybody hasn’t.”
The eccentric Englishman tried calling Lisa, the current Destroyer of Tales, responsible for narrative conclusions in the Parodyverse. The line was as dead as the others.
“Troubling,” Mumphrey snorted. “Anything that can cut the channels to the Triumvirate is very powerful. Haven’t seen anything like that since the Parody War.”
“It’s possible the Greater Office Holders might all be dead,” the Baroness considered. “There may be promotion opportunities.”
Mumphrey glanced over at the zaftig woman in the four-poster. “You may want to put some clothes on.”
“When there are promotion opportunities?” Elizabeth recognised that she was seriously degrading her husband’s ability to resolve whatever was happening and reached for her corset. “You’re serious about the retcon? All these years I can remember of us together didn’t happen?”
“Well, they did right now,” the keeper of the Chronometer advised. “That’s the whole dashed point of a retcon. It changes the backstory as if it had always been like that. But I’m still somewhat protected from temporal shifts by virtue of my office and a good wedge of experience in it. I can still remember a bit of what the old reality was like. You were not a very nice person, Elizabeth.”
“I’m still not a nice person, Mumphrey. When I get hold of the Hooded Hood I’ll show you what I mean.”
Mumphrey frowned. “Not like the Hood to be so blatant with his changes,” he judged. “Something’s going on. There’s a bigger picture.”
“He never does anything for just one reason. He’s efficient like that. I’ll miss him after I’ve killed him.”
“We need more information. Can’t sort the bally problem grappling in the dark.” That phrase triggered another bunch of retconned memories of Elizabeth Wilton that he had to quickly shrug off. He reached into his waistcoat and pulled out his credit-card sized Lair Legion comm-card. “Wilton calling in. Anyone still at home there?”
The card fuzzed for a fraction of a second before resolving into the image of a green-fleshed young woman with an intelligent stare. “Good morning, Sir Mumphrey,” greeted Hallie. The Legion’s resident artificial intelligence automatically compensated for the five-hour time difference between the Lair Mansion in Paradopolis and Sir Mumphrey’s Shropshire estate. She also ran background voice stress pattern analyses. “What’s the matter?”
“My Chronometer’s registering a retcon. We have a Code Grey.”
“Eep! I’ll check my shielded backup databanks right away, but chances are that if it slipped past your defences it will have breached Al B.’s quantum buffer fields. Is there any indicator I can check for?”
“What’s my marital status?”
Hallie compared her present and back-up databases. “Still married despite the advice of friends?” she offered.
“The retcon got you,” Mumph confirmed. “So, let’s see who and what else it got. Fill me in on the Legion.”
“Well, we’re still breaking in the new members. Hatty’s taken the new guys on a training trip into the Hole Man’s subterranean tunnels. They’re on their way back now. Sounds like it might have been exciting. Donar, Yuki, CSFB!, Al B. and the Shoggoth are working a lead in New Orleans. Vizh is sitting quietly in his office hugging himself and whimpering occasionally. Business as usual.”
“Well, go do whatever it is you do with Visionary these days that gets him leading the team and start up an investigation about what might have prompted the Hood to rattle our cages. I’ll see about Winkelweald himself.”
“We,” the Baroness corrected him. “We shall see about Winkelweald. The Wiltons.”
“Meanwhile, check again on what the team are up to in the field. It might be related to the disappearance of the Triumvirate and my sudden affinity with Nats.”
“On it, Sir Mumphrey,” Hallie promised. “I’ll get the boss up and running. It’ll be my pleasure.”
***
The last day of Cantrelle, Louisiana began with a bang. Citizens who weren’t up by 6.55am were awoken by a great thunderclap out over the Atlantic that shook the timber-framed houses and set the fishing skiffs bobbing at their moorings. It was the all the talk in Fryer’s General Supplies store as the work of the day began.
“Ah blame BP,” argued Cooter Wallace, stacking crates of Diet Cola beside his pickup. Cooter ran the concessions stand down at Little Cocodne Bayou where business had been seriously threatened by the recent oil spill. Right now BP and the President were the top two causes of everything from the unseasonable fly swarms to the poor TV reception.
“T’went no thunder neither,” Joanie Bigger corrected the old man. “Everyone knows as the Navy’s out there conducting experiments with their submarines. Look at what became of Jemiah’s catch-nets. Ain’t no fish this side’a Behemoth could tear a hole like that.”
Sharkjaw Smith just kept on stacking the shelves. He’d heard the bitching lots before. “It’s just weird weather is all. I’d’a rung those science boys at the weather station over at Bay Lucien but the damn phone line’s out again.”
Cooter hauled the crates onto his truck. “Well, ah hope we don’t get no more storms this season. Ah blames all that oil fer the weird weather.”
Daily life went on at Cantrelle, Louisiana for the last time.
Down in the bayou the dead walked across the muddy lake bottoms.
***
The LairJet lined up for landing pattern alpha, a straight descent to the runway beside the Parody Island aircraft hanger.
“Lair Mansion, we are good to land,” Ham-Boy said nervously over the head-mike clipped over him ham-cowl. “Approach is good. Seeking permission for final touchdown.”
Hatman sat in the co-pilot’s chair in his airman’s cap and nodded encouragingly.
“LairJet Four you have clearance to land on runway Alpha One,” said Hallie, the Lair Legion’s resident A.I. “Welcome home, guys. Flapjack’s getting the coffee on.”
Ham-Boy remembered his training and carefully guided the LairJet down towards the landing strip.
Then the vessel rocked as if hit by a missile. Every control gauge on the dashboard shattered. The cabin was filled with a devastating screeching sound that clawed at the minds and souls of the occupants.
The aircraft nose tipped down towards the ground.
Liu Xi vomited, then forced a gust of air to lift the falling LairJet for a moment.
Silicone Sally swelled her flexible form to surround as many of her team-mates as possible in a rubbery crash cushion.
Vinnie de Soth yelled something in Latin and the shrieking stopped for a moment.
Hatman grabbed the LairJet steering yoke and pulled the vehicle up for a rough horizontal landing.
The entire aircraft skidded sideways across the runway towards the radar tower but stopped short as it embedded in a massive wad of Manga Shoggoth.
“Hello,” said the loathsome elder being.
Ham-Boy rubbed his forehead, “What was that?” he gasped. “Some kind of sonic attack?”
Goldeneyed pulled off his mask to check that his ears weren’t bleeding. “That was a banshee wail,” he recognised. “Usually the banshee in my bathroom only does that when someone’s dying.”
“Someone nearly did,” objected Silicone Sally. “Ouch.” She retracted herself from around the others in the cabin and rubbed the cold-burns where she had enveloped Citizen Z. The enigmatic night-avenger was immobile in her seat.
Vinnie pointed to the remanifesting form of Marie Murcheson, Parody Island’s Celestian-empowered guardian spirit. His emergency exorcism hadn’t held very long. “Um, maybe someone should ask her what the story is?”
“What’s the story, Marie?” Hatman asked of the insubstantial Victorian girl hovering in the LairJet aisle. “Why the attack?”
Marie was shaking with rage. She pointed an accusing finger. “Her!” she hissed. “You tried to bring her past me perimeter? You bought that here?”
She pointed right at the unmoving form of Citizen Z.
***
Leveau M’Tumbe woke up naked under a pile of beheaded chickens. Again.
“Grandma!” she complained.
A wrinkled old black woman in a bright flowered shawl glared down at her. “Don’ you go be grandma-ing me, missy! How many times you t’ink I’m gonna be able to bring you back ‘fore the spirits decide to keep you fo’ good? You gotta stop running wit’ those bad men and getting killed all de time!”
Leveau pushed aside the sacrifices that had reanimated her life force. There were also a dozen or so bargain buckets from KFC. Grandma M’Tumbe got peckish while she worked. “Listen, grandma, I don’t need you running after me no more! I got my own arrangements in case I happen to get killed. I’m the Voodoo Vicaress now and I have to stand on my own two feet.”
“Not been doin’ a whole lot of standing from what I hear of your shameful goin’s on with those Purveyors of Peril,” Grandma scolded. “Just laying back with yo’ legs…”
“I made arrangements,” Voodoo Vicaress insisted. “You know how much showering it’s gonna take to get this smell of chicken out of my hair? The Hooded Hood brings his people back. There’s an employment clause.”
Grandma put down her fetishes. “And are you back now, girl? Then that Hooded Hood done kept his side o’ th’ bargain, hasn’t he?”
“But I never meant…”
“Never-meants don’t count for nothing, Leveau. Now git yo’self some clothes on ‘cause I expect we’ll be having some visitors breaking the door down pretty soon.”
“Visitors? What visitors?” Leveau looked around the cluttered shack on the edge of the swamp. Grandma’s curse markers were still intact. The little gods she’d made and hung around the rafters were all still there. “What you mean, visitors?”
There was a crack of thunder and the door flew across the room and splintered on the back wall.
“Ho, foul hags!” shouted Donar Oldmanson, leaping into the room. “Cease thy demonic magics ere I smite thee to Miserablegitheim!”
“And also put some panties on,” Yuki added, pointing at Leveau. “We have CrazySugarFreakBoy! with us you know, and we don’t really want him to explode.”
Al B. checked his sensors. “Yep, she’s naked alright,” he confirmed.
“Donar?” Voodoo Vicaress panicked. “The Lair Legion are here?” She looked up at the twisted puppet gods on the roof beams. They all appeared to have gone into hiding.
Something gelid and translucent bubbled up through the floorboards. It slowly formed up into a roughly man-shaped blob of quivering mucous. “Hello,” said the Manga Shoggoth.
“I just polished that floor,” sniffed Grandma M’Tumbe.
CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounced past with an alligator in each hand, whooping happily.
“You dare attack me in my place of power?” demanded Voodoo Vicaress. Then, catching her grandmother’s eye she added, “Um, in my grandma’s place of power?”
“We fear neither crone nor thy skycladness,” warned Donar. “Verily, I art a married man.” He looked around suddenly. “And if mine Queen Annj art perchance watching this in the scrying pool of all-noseying then I hadst not even noticed any kinds of pertness nor bounciness. Verily. Er, I think I wilt guard yon outside now.”
CrazySugarFreakBoy caromed in through one window and out through the other, balancing an alligator on each palm. “These are loads better than the usual guard goons,” he approved. “Back soon.”
He briefly bounced back. “By the way, love the new costume, VV!”
Yuki took control. “Yes, we’re the Lair Legion. Yes, we tracked you despite your mystical defences. Some new kind of app that Al B. wanted me to try out, homes on necromantic emanations.”
“It’s based upon some readings we got when Lara was teleported to the former Shee-yar Imperium,” Al B. Harper began to explain. “It occurred to me that if there was a bio-ectoplasmic residue on the quantum timespace membrane…”
“ Also CSFB! asked the postman,” added Yuki. “And yes, we’ve come here seeking answers.”
Voodoo Vicaress looked round for her sigils and talismans. The Shoggoth was sitting on them. “You fools know not what you meddle in!” she warned them.
“I do,” the Shoggoth promised. “Would you like me to explain it to you? With diagrams? And possibly glove puppets?”
“No we wouldn’t,” snapped Grandma. “Now stop all this damnfool damnfoolery and tell me why you’ve come disturbing my peace. I’m an old woman and resurrecting my granddaughter takes a lot out of me. And my chickens. So say what you done come to say.”
There was a crack like thunder across the bayou, setting a flock of startled herons into flight.
“That wast not one of mine,” frowned Donar.
“Zombies,” Yuki told Grandma. “Three tourists in the Wookiegetlucky Swamp barely escaped with their lives. A schoolbus got attacked on the other side of the bayou. A pair of shambling corpses tried to eat a Wendy’s in Marionville.” She glared at Leveau. “That’s the sort of thing that gets our attention.”
Voodoo Vicaress sniffed. “Well, they weren’t mine,” she told the cyborg P.I. “On account of I happened to be a little bit dead at the time. I have chicken hair to prove it.”
“That weren’t no regular zombies anyhow,” Grandma told them. “These things jus’ felt all wrong. I put ‘em quietly to sleep soon as I heard ‘bout them.”
“You put them to sleep?” Al B. repeated.
“For sure. Who needs the competition? ‘Sides, if’n I hadn’t, I don’t doubt but that Darkness hag woulda come down here a-sniffing and a-sticking her nose in and looking all superior-like. As if I was gonna let that happen.”
Leveau frowned. “There’s somebody else raising zombies on our patch? The Necromancer General? Baroness Morbo? Morgosa le Fay?”
“You art claiming it wast not thee?” Donar asked, studiously not looking at Voodoo Vicaress.
“It wasn’t these two,” the Shoggoth bubbled. “I’ve tasted their magics now. They’re not the same as whatever animated those other things. That was more tinny with a hint of absinthe.” He absent-mindedly ate a KFC carton; after laying the chicken pieces aside, naturally.
“Did you happen to, er, keep the bits when you’d… rested those unfamiliar zombies?” Al B. asked Grandma.
“No point,” the old woman replied. She gave her gumbo pot a stir then went on. “Whatever animated them drained all the lifeforce clean outta those poor things. Weren’t nothing left but crumbling rotted dust when I snapped the bindings on ‘em.”
“It might have been useful to be able to analyse them in more detail,” Yuki argued.
Grandma shrugged. “Why bother?” she asked. “Since you got yourselves a fresh crop of ‘em rising up right now outta the swamp there to attack us.”
“There’s what?” yelped Leveau.
“Guys!” yelled CSFB! happily. “It’s Dawn of the Dead out here! You’ve gotta come and help me do the Monster Mash!”
***
Citizen Z lay on a medibed in the Lair Infirmary. The monitors attached to her showed no brain activity.
“Okay, tell me the stuff that’s going to ruin my day,” Visionary asked Dr Whitwell, senior consultant at the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital. He remembered Sir Mumphrey’s call. “Well, ruin my day more.”
The physician scratched his chin and sighed. “It’d be a lot easier to give a diagnosis if I was allowed to take her costume off,” he noted. “At least her mask so I can see her pupil responses.”
“That’s against the LL charter,” Hatman pointed out. “Citizen Z has lodged a living will about her wishes in a case like this. We offer anonymity.”
“Even if she’s dying?” objected Liu Xi. “I mean, come on, she’s hardly breathing. Is this really the time to go by the rulebook?”
“Secret identities are important though,” argued Ham-Boy, who maintained one. “What is somebody came against our loved ones?”
“There was that whole Special Resolution 1066 thing, I guess,” Silicone Sally remembered. “Secret IDs were pretty useful there. For those of us who weren’t transformed into Obedience Branded puppets, that is.”
“Is that why you murdered Lisette and helped the Baroness turn Beth Shellett into a killer?” G-Eyed accused. The recent trip to the Centre of the Earth had resulted in a number of revelations.
“I was being controlled again, by the Baroness’ nanotech,” Sally objected. “Besides, there was an amnesty.”
“So the murder is okay now? We can all forget about it?”
“I didn’t say that!” Sally turned away and retreated to the window, where she stared out at the bleak ocean horizon.
“Guys, this isn’t helping,” Hatman intervened. “We’re a team. We pull together, not apart. We learned on our last mission that we’re stronger when we’re united.”
Liu Xi shrugged. “I learned that the necromancer Slithis has somehow attached a lien on my soul to collect it when I die. And that’s all that’s stopping an extraplanar entity called the Void Spectre from breaking into the Parodyverse. That’s my take-away from the trip.”
Vinnie rubbed his forehead. “Yeah, we’ll need to get on that at some point. And it is possible that Sally wasn’t responsible for… what she did before,” the jobbing occultist ventured. “There’s a lot of destiny flapping around CZ. I sensed a few things but I don’t know how appropriate it would be to break confidentiality about them.”
“The Lair Banshee evidently senses some things too,” Liu Xi pointed out. “What does she say?”
“Marie’s not manifesting right now,” Hallie reported. “Look, CZ is down. We need data. If anyone knows anything useful about Citizen Z or her condition then we have to have it.”
G-Eyed hesitated. “Well… let’s hear what the doc has to say first.”
Vizh was well used to pulling the argument back to the point by now. “Your prognosis,” he urged Whitwell. “Please!”
The doctor glanced over at Hallie, who was a whole medical diagnostic array by herself. “Well, tentatively,” he offered, “I’d say that this woman is in a state of metabolic encephalopathy – that’s a coma as you suspected. Added to that she’s suffering from respiratory problems and arrhythmic cardiac function. If her condition deteriorates I will need to hook her up to life support and then I will need to remove her clothing.”
Liu Xi noticed Sally stir. “If there’s something you want to say that will help, you should say it,” the elementalist encouraged the flexible ex-felon. “Hatty was right before. Whatever our own… problems, we have to be a team.”
Silicone Sally moved back to the unmoving Citizen Z in her purple and black outfit. “You know, I spent a lot of time being that costume,” she recalled. “Well, obviously not that actual costume but one a lot like it, back when… when…”
It took a moment for the retcon to click into place in her mind. Previously, the Baroness had taken on the CZ identity to infiltrate the Legion. Sally had used her flexible plastic form to enhance Beth’s speed and dexterity and strength as part of a plot to overcome the team and rule the world. Now…
“When Lady Wilton wanted to check on us incognito,” Visionary recalled. “You played the role of the outfit, giving her superpowers. It was an important trick to fool the Parody Master. That’s why we voted you onto the team afterwards in your own right.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. But the point is, I got to know that costume pretty intimately. And the Baroness, unfortunately. She wasn’t that much into underwear.”
Ham-Boy blushed.
Silicone Sally held up one limp corner of CZ’s short ragged cape. “This outfit is a modified version of the one I copied, which was itself a feminine version of the uniform worn by the World War II Citizen Z who Heinrich Zemo killed. The colours on this one are slightly darker and the raggedy cape is new. And it has a whole set of different gizmos.”
“The Baroness’ version had all kinds of traps and electronic gadgets in it,” Vizh remembered. He’d once had to wear the outfit – or Sally. He tried not to think about it.
“This version of Citizen Z can charge her devices with some kind of weird energy,” Liu Xi reported. “Even her costume. Right now it’s just limp cloth. When she’s awake it twitches as if there’s a wind and it leaves a kind of… psychic blur.”
“I wish Al B. was back to do a full analysis of the data I’m getting,” Hallie admitted. “I’d even listen to the Shoggoth right now. With a major back-up of my sanity parameters first, of course.” Once he had completed his LairJet retrieval task. the team’s resident elder being had shifted his main consciousness back to his biomass with the field team.
“This isn’t the first time CZ has gone like this,” Hatman noted. “During our field trip she actually – I don’t quite know – walked out of her body and possessed someone else.”
“Maybe that’s what she’s doing now?” suggested Sally. “Maybe she’s bringing in pizza?”
Goldeneyed sighed. “Okay. I think I know what’s going on. I think I know who is under that mask.”
“Tell us, Bry,” Hatman encouraged his long-time friend. “What’s gotten you so worked up over this?”
“You know we all had those weird visions when we got attacked by the psionic Spawn of Umsharr, right? They were digging in our brains for secrets.”
“Like my problem with Lord Slithis,” Liu Xi supplied. “And my meeting with… nobody.”
“Yeah, well I had this shared mindscape with Sally and CZ. Except CZ didn’t remember being CZ, and when she pulled her mask off she was Bethany Shellett.”
“Beth?” Vizh puzzled. “Didn’t she emigrate?”
Hallie was able to call up records instantly. “After she was restored from her crippling injuries via the Baroness’ nanotechnology and that bit where…” She halted as the retcon caught up; now Beth had not been sent to infiltrate the LL staff to be close enough to assassinate Mumphrey while under the Baroness’ control; the Wiltons’ marital disputes had never got that bad. “Beth didn’t want to be near superheroes any more. She took a teaching post in London. But then… the nanotech evidently failed. Her injuries recurred. She went back into her coma.”
“Why are we only hearing about this now?” demanded Hatman. “Don’t we keep a watch on our friends, even those who don’t want anything more to do with us?”
“Of course we do,” the A.I. insisted. “Except… this time we didn’t. I have no idea why.”
“I have a theory,” Vinnie warned. “But here’s the thing. I reckon that Beth’s comatose body is inside that CZ costume, but not her mind. While she’s in a coma her flesh can be possessed by a walk-in spirit. That is what is playing the part of Citizen Z.”
“I got sent to jail by a ghost?” Silicone Sally objected. “A ghost wearing a coma victim wearing my old form?”
“But what ghost?” Goldeneyed demanded urgently. “We need to know!”
“Why did Marie attack her?” Ham-Boy worried.
“It looks like we need to ask her,” Vizh told them. “Maybe then we can get some answers.” He turned to G-Eyed. “Quickly – to your bathroom!”
***
“These aren’t just zombies!” CSFB! shrilled as he slithered beneath the attack of writing intestinal organs from the late Joanie Bigger. “These are super-zombies! That’s so much groovier than un-super-zombies!”
Yuki punched the head off Cooter Wallace but his body kept on fighting her. “Any idea how they got to be super? Or how many of them there are?” She flashed facial recognition software through her forebrain and managed to ID one of the horde that had risen from the swamp. “That’s Jemiah Corcoran of Cantrelle, Louisiana. Three drunk-driving offences and one unlicensed shotgun.”
Donar caught the shark-headed monster that was trying to bite his baseball-bat-holding arm off and examined the undead closely. “This one hast torn his own head off and replaced it with yon zombie shark. ‘Tis rare to find a shambling horror that doth take such attention to detail.”
The Shoggoth reformed after diving to absorb a half dozen attackers. “These are very spicy,” he admitted. “Possibly a little intoxicating. 120% proof zombies.”
Voodoo Vicaress had already tried using her juju powder to take command of the invading undead. to no avail. Now she appealed to a higher authority. “Grandma! We gon’ just hide in this corner while the Lair Legion fight these zuvembies?”
Grandma M’Tumbe shook her head and indicated that she had retrieved one of her bargain buckets so that she could nibble as she spectated. “Hush, chile. You know dis place has all kinds of obeah on it to protect us from attack.”
“Where is it then? Because right now only the Lair Legion is stopping us being zombie-chow!”
The old voodoo woman nodded. “Like I said, all kinds of obeah.” She reached down and passed a drumstick to Al B. Harper where he was calibrating a backpack of sensor equipment.
“Thanks,” the Archscientist nodded. He absent-mindedly stored the chicken leg behind his ear beside his pencil as he finished his adjustments. “Donar, could you please zap this emitter pack with a medium-sized lightning bolt now?”
The hemigod of thunder turned to the stitched-together revenant of Sharkjaw Smith. “Excuse me one moment. I shalt return to smite thee right fully forthwith.” He pointed his enchanted baseball-bat-with-a-nail-in-it at Al B’s equipment array and loosed the requisite energy bolt.
The pack exploded. Every zombie around the swamp hut exploded with it.
The Shoggoth burped.
CrazySugarFreakBoy! rode out the shockwave with a dizzying somersault and landed beside Grandma’s bucket. “Take cover,” he warned her. “Here comes the scientific explanation!”
It was not often that Donar delivered it. “Yon Al B. didst projecteth out a wave of Ausgardian lightning to splendid effect. ‘Tis troubling that only creatures infused with energy from one of the Ausgardian realms wouldst react so explosively.”
“Ausgardian undead,” Yuki scowled. “Why would…?”
“Ausgardian necromancy plus an added twist of something else,” Al B. warned. “There’s some really weird signature I’ve never encountered before. I want to call it trans-cosmic energy, but…”
The Manga Shoggoth giggled. “You are very silly sillies!” he scolded them playfully. “Have I ever tol’ you how much I luvvle you all?”
“Is there any chance that might have some kind of effect if consumed by an elder creature?” Yuki asked.
“We should all get tattoos!” the LL’s resident elder creature enthused. “I would look really cool with a byakhee on my flagella.”
Grandma M’Tumbe spat a chicken bone into her spittoon with deadly accuracy. “Flamin’ gods slumming here and bringing their undead with’ em,” she glowered. “No offence, Mr Donar.”
“Nome taken, aged crone,” the Prince of Ausgard assured her. “‘Tis most vexing for the nonce. Yon incursion requires smiting most smitefully.”
Yuki checked the pockets of what was left of the undead. “This one was a shopkeeper in Cantrelle. That’s the point of origin, or contagion, or whatever.”
CSFB! grabbed Voodoo Vicaress for a smoochy farewell kiss, winked at her, and bounced off to fire up the LairJet.
“Now will you put some pants on, girl?” Grandma chided.
***
Flapjack lurched menacingly between G-Eyed, Vinnie, and the door they hoped to enter.
“Aw, c’mon!” G-Eyed argued. “It’s my bathroom, man.”
“Now it’s your bathroom,” the Lair Legion’s major domo responded in a menacing growl. “Hundred and fifty years ago, it was a hallway where an innocent girl called Marie Murcheson walked, before she got sacrificed in an occult ritual and eventually came back as the Lair Banshee. She’s the prior occupant.”
“We only want to talk to her, Flapjack,” Vinnie de Soth assured the protective hunchback. “We won’t upset her.”
“She’s already upset. Don’t make it worse. I have electrodes.”
“We only have a few questions,” G-Eyed promised. “It’s not like I couldn’t just teleport past you. Or shift you to Transylvania.”
“Yes, you could, young sir. And I’m sure that being only a humble servant of the household and a faithful Flapjack of the Carpathians there is no way in which I might pay you back for such treatment. I am only the fellow who washes your underwear and who prepares all your food and who watches over you when you sleep. Oh yeth!”
The returning lisp was a bad sign.
“Please, at least let Marie decide for herself whether she’ll see us,” appealed Vinnie. “Don’t make me fetch villagers with pitchforks and burning torches.”
Flapjack considered. “Good threat,” he decided. “You can ask her. Nicely.”
Goldeneyed knocked politely on the door of his bathroom and poked his head inside. “‘Scuse me, Miss Murcheson. May we come in?”
The Lair Banshee rose from the only seating in the room and glided over to the team’s teleporter. “I’ll come out. It’ll be a bit crowded with all of us in here.”
“Maybe we should do the big revelation scene somewhere with less of G-Eyed’s used jockey shorts laying about?” Vinnie agreed. “Lair Library, maybe?”
“Wherever is convenient,” Marie offered. “I’m sorry to be curt. I have a terrible headache now.”
G-Eyed eyes flashed as he shifted them to the oak-panelled room on the east wing’s second floor. He neglected to transport the belligerent and protective butler but brought the jobbing occultist along. Sophisticated anti-teleport buffers embedded in the mansion’s fabric were programmed with exceptions for Goldeneyed’s power.
Vinnie felt nauseous anyway. “We could have just walked,” he pointed out.
G-Eyed wasn’t in a mood to wait. “Can we get down to why you freaked out over Citizen Z now, Marie?” he asked. “That girl’s lying in a coma in the Lair Infirmary. If she’s who I suspect then she’s already done enough of that!”
“I’m feeling rather ashamed of myself, Bry,” the Lair Banshee replied. “I’m still getting used to being dead again, and a banshee again, and an integral part of the Lair Mansion’s Celestian defences. It’s so different this time.”
Vinnie understood. “Before when you were a guardian banshee you were hardly sentient, barely coherent. This time you’ve retained your memory and personality from life.”
“I suppose I have. It’s an adjustment. So when I sensed that… attack…”
G-Eyed frowned. “Citizen Z attacked you?”
Marie shook her head. “Wrong word. She trespassed.”
“Remember how I said this Citizen Z is a walk-in spirit?” Vinnie explained to the eccentric Englishman. “She’s borrowing a body of a coma victim – with permission, she claims. She’s certainly keeping it alive by occupying it, offering it a semblance of health and vitality, maintaining its autonomic functions. Marie is Parody Island’s defence against supernatural incursions.”
“I am,” the Victorian lady confessed.
Goldeneyed thought about this. “But the Celestian defences were put on Lair Island to deal with cosmic-level threats. I should know, I spent the best part of a year hooked up to them myself - without even a bathroom break. They don’t bother with trivial stuff like supervillains. We’ve had vampires and ghouls and Lord-knows-what traipsing through here and very little of it provoked a banshee attack.”
“This spirit did,” Marie insisted. “The defences were outraged at her incursion. They acted through me before I could even think. I’m so sorry about endangering everybody.”
“What’s so terrible about Citizen Z?”
The Lair Banshee’s lip curled with distaste. “I’m a genius loci of this house. She’s a genius loci of Herringcarp Asylum.”
“She’s what?” G-Eyed exploded.
***
The LairJet flew low over Cantrelle. Yuki was mapping out a grid pattern for Al B.’s sensor analysis. “Looks like everything and everyone in a ten mile radius has been wiped out,” she saw. “No animal life signs at all. This was a major event.”
“There’s a lot of secondary damage down there,” the Archscientist reported, looking up from his scopes. “Two different destruction patterns.”
CSFB! peered out of a viewing hatch with his gawker goggles. “Yeah, part of it was your usual zombie apocalypse insurance claims, same as with every horde from Disco Hitler to the Necromancer General. I think the rest was when Donar made all the zombies explode with lightning.”
“That was soooo funny,” snickered the gooey mess slopping round the back of the aircraft. “They just go Boom! Plop! Boom-plop!”
“How long is that effect going to go on, Harper?” Yuki demanded. “The Shoggoth is disturbing enough without him blowing bubbles through his protoplasm.”
“I’m still trying to figure what kind of energy could have such an effect on as alien a metabolism as his,” the Archscientist admitted. “Usually he just ignores our electromagnetic spectrum if it’s inconvenient to him. This is… bigger.”
“Dark deeds are afoot,” Donar confirmed. “I feeleth it in my beard.”
“That could be breakfast, big guy,” CSFB! warned. “On the other hand, it might be your old sparring pal Lord Slithis the Necromancer. Would his creatures have an Ausgardian undead vibe?”
“Aye. Save that Slithis is smitten unto paste for his former misdeeds. He art no more.”
The wired wonder pressed his eerie earring communications stud. “Not what I’m hearing from Hallie. Breaking news is that, smitten to paste or not, Slithis has somehow grabbed a lien on Liu Xi’s soul.”
“That suggests he’s still in play,” Yuki Shiro agreed. “And if so, then this incursion seems right out of his playbook.”
“Except for the additional trans-cosmic energies that are supercharging the undead,” Al B. worried.
“Except for that. We need to… hold on, we have incoming.”
Al B. refocused his sensors. “Birds. Seagulls mainly. All heading right for us.”
“Zombie seagulls!” CSFB! realised. “Holy Hitchcock!”
“Evasive manoeuvres,” Yuki warned. “If they pile into the jet engines…”
“Boom-plop!” contributed the Shoggoth.
Donar summoned tempest winds to deter the avian undead. The LairJet bucked in the sudden hurricane. “There musteth be newly created since our last encounter,” he called in a voice that somehow boomed over the storm. “Our enemy must be nigh!”
Al B. struggled with his instruments, redesigning them as he went. “There’s an anomaly nearby, but I can’t pinpoint it!”
The Shoggoth sloshed against a wall of the canted LairJet. “Wheee! ‘S not n’ anomanamanaly yet. ‘S gonna be an anomananan… ‘s gonna be one soon in your silly timespace refererererences…”
“You mean something’s about to appear?” CSFB! interpreted.
There was a deafening boom that overrode the storm. A powerful dimensional channel opened up right around the LairJet, sucking it through the Doom Tube and across the galaxy.
“Now,” Lord Slithis, New God of Undead commanded the planet of corpses he had animated for one single purpose. “Kill them!”
The bait had worked. Now it was recruitment time.
***
“Is this a good idea?” Hallie asked.
“No,” said Vizh. “Give me a better option and I’ll take it. Really.”
“Let’s review the plan again,” the Mansion’s resident AI suggested. “Citizen Z – or her body – is deteriorating. The banshee managed to exorcise the indwelling spirit that was animating her body before. We think the ghost involved was an agent of Herringcarp Asylum like Marie is of the Lair Mansion. So the only way to help her is to take her back to Herringcarp Asylum.”
“That was pretty much the way I heard it before I descended into nightmare, yeah,” agreed the leader of the Lair Legion.
“So now you and Hatty are heading off to see the Hooded Hood.”
“I tried calling Lisa like Sir Mumphrey did but I just got connected to her 0900 number. And I didn’t understand all the button options.” Vizh shuddered.
“What about Sir Mumphrey and the Baroness? They were heading that way to visit the cowled crime czar last we heard.”
Hatman shook his head. “No word from them yet. I still think we need to go. We need to get to the bottom of this, and it’s the only way we might help Citizen Z.”
“Couldn’t we just post CZ back there. Or maybe call EEE?”
“I think this is part of my job now,” Visionary worried. “Besides, most of the time the Hood doesn’t do anything really bad.”
Behind the possibly-fake man Vinnie winced. “Ouch. Karma-quake,” he squirmed. “Is it too late to go and fight zombies instead?”
***
Sir Mumphrey Wilton reduced the front doors of Herringcarp Asylum to ancient dust, aged a million years in an instant.
Baroness Elizabeth Wilton shrugged noncommittally. “I still say a nuclear strike from space would have been just as effective,” she sulked.
“The Hood would just have retconned it. If he hadn’t just shifted his lunatic asylum somewhere else again,” the eccentric Englishman grumbled.
“Or you could have sent in that superhero team you play with. What’s the point of feeding them if you can’t command them to a suicide attack against your foe?”
“Winkelweald has tampered with the histories and backstories of damn near every Legionnaire. He’s shaped their origins or convinced each of them to do story-critical things at various times. Even saved their lives. If they tried to fight him now all he’d need to do was let go of some retcon or other he made just for this contingency.”
“I agree that’s the way to do it. But what if he looses his Purveyors of Peril on us and we didn’t pack a super-team?”
Mumphrey made a throaty noise suggesting that he would be unimpressed with such unsporting behaviour. Besides, today he had not come equipped with only his Chronometer of Infinity. In affecting the Keeper of the Chronometer’s background, the Hooded Hood had transgressed cosmic law, which meant that Mumphrey was able to draw upon the Higher Powers available to his office. His present equipment included his seldom-used Inverness Cape of Singularity, the Cane of Destiny. and his Fountain Pen of Causality, which respectively boosted his resistance to change, magnified the energies available to his timepiece’s functions by several orders of magnitude, and allowed him to do dramatic things to local timespace. For neatness’ sake Mumph had eschewed the items’ outer forms and folded them all inside his regular pocketwatch.
“Herringcarp Asylum is an endless labyrinth,” Elizabeth noted as they strode into the gargoyle-festooned entrance hall of the dusty institution. “What was your plan for finding Ioldabaoth?”
“Winkelweald, you pestilent pustule!” Sir Mumphrey roared up to the vaulted roofs. “Come out and face me like a man, you arrant blaggard!”
“Ah, that plan,” sighed the Baroness. “Squirt testosterone over his walls until he feels the need to stop it.”
“Come on, Hooded Hood! Crawl out from whatever dank hole you’re cringing in and face the music!”
A bubble of vibration coalesced around the Wiltons and shattered in rainbow sparks.
“Retcons?” shouted the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. “Not likely. I’ve put my defences up now. Cowardly backstabbing attacks can’t touch me. Come out and take your thrashing!”
“Yes, do stop being tedious, Ioldabaoth, and explain yourself,” the Baroness insisted. “I object to being married off without consultation. Ask my Uncle Otto.”
Another, stronger wave of retrospective continuity crashed upon the barriers around the Chronometer.
“Dash it, Hood, you’re wasting my time!” Sir Mumphrey objected. “Not like you to miss a gloating opportunity, you noisesome bounder, so get out here and face the music!”
One end of the hall blurred and shifted. That side of the chamber was now filled with ornate gothic columns supporting elaborate coffered ceilings over a huge, carved throne.
A grey-cowled figure sprawled upon it, smirking at his uninvited guests. “What is it, Wilton? I’m busy, Make an appointment.”
Sir Mumphrey scowled over at the man who occupied the chair. He had the mantle and powers but…
“Who the devil are you, sirrah? Where’s Winkelweald?”
“Oh him,” scorned the throne-sitter. “He’s gone now. Out of date. Retconned. There is no Ioldabaoth Winkelweald any more. Never was. Only Iscanean Went: me. The new Hooded Hood.”
And his eyes burned green.
***
Next Time: Planet of the Recruiting Undead! The Secret Secret Origin of Citizen Z! The siege of the Bean and Donut Diner! And the New Hooded Hood! It’s all in UT#350: One Of Our Archvillains Is Missing!, coming to a Parodyverse board near you on December 25th! Don’t miss it!
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom (for previous stories by HH and others)
Who's Who in the Parodyverse (slightly outdated yet again)
Where's Where in the Parodyverse (for some location guides and a pretty map)
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2015 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2015 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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