Posted by Untold Hallowe’en Tales of the Lair Legion: I Married an Elder Blasphemy - Hallowe’en IV: The Gory Bit on November 12, 2000 at 06:05:58:
Untold Hallowe’en Tales of the Lair Legion: I Married an Elder Blasphemy
Hallowe’en IV: The Gory Bit Most of the Lair Legion died in the first two minutes of the attack. The screaming tentacles burst up through the very floor of the Lair Mansion, slicing time and space as easily as they shredded steel and flesh. The elder creature Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu had awoken from its eons-long slumber as it had been bound to do by Wilbur Parody one hundred and forty years earlier, and it was seeking its bride. Hallowe’en 1860, the Mansion of the League of Improbable Gentlemen: “Well if we were going to get help from the future,” Lance Runner, President of the League complained, looking at spiffy, Nats, and ManMan, “I’d have thought they would have sent us something a bit more impressive than this.” “I have a toasting fork,” Visionary warned, “and I’m not afraid to use it.” Mister Odran, Parody’s secretary, had turned out to be a little more difficult to shake down for information that he seemed, on account of actually being the cosmic creature known as Samhain, the Destroyer of Tales. This was why he was currently gripping Greyhound and Dr Waltz by the throats and dangling them at arms length in the air as he choked the life out of them. “Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!” shrieked Yo, as the pure thought being rearranged time/space using Mumphrey’s chronometric energies. In 2000, the devastation of Paradopolis unwound like a video in fast reverse. Building untoppled, people undied, vast unfathomable entities never appeared. The Lair Legion and their allies became unshredded by the Groper out of Grossness. Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu’s tentacles slid down into the Earth, sealing cracks in the mansion walls as they went. CrazySugarFreakBoy! shut the front door. Suddenly the League of Improbable Gentlemen’s mansion had a much improved plumbing system – or at least a more complicated one. Now it could get KACL-Talk Radio. It also had a score or more of heroes from the distant future ready to swell the ranks for the big battle at City Hall. “And now,” Samhain promised Messenger and Lisa, “your sad and gory end.” Three floors below Lucius Faust opened the trapdoor that the party revellers had used to descend down into the tunnels below Paradiopolis. Just in case Nats and spiffy couldn’t find it. “You think you can stop me, little Austernal?” Samhain thundered. “Me?” Cosmic fire danced around Circe, searing her flesh from her bones and reducing her bones to ash. “I have decided that I don’t like you,” Visionary told his host, I. van Risoy. “You’re slime. You’re slimier than, uh, something that’s really slimy.” “In thy face, villainous caitiff! Feel now the might of Mjalcolm making work for yon plastic surgeons!” Donar shouted as the heroes from the future took on the future’s end. “They’re quite good, aren’t they?” Hastings Vernal asked Hunter Victorious as the two of them watched the mayhem. “Listen, young one, I have a few things to tell you…” “Alright, bad guys. Put down the elder being and surrender!” Nats warned Wilbur Parody and his assembled cult. Suddenly Visionary was in a bed in the Lair Mansion and Cheryl was looking down at him – which was one of the nicest things Visionary could think of. Nats, Lisa, and spiffy were likewise stirring. Across town Messenger and Dancer and ManMan picked themselves up and wondered what the hell had just happened. Dancer shed a few tears for poor, brave, doomed Marie Murcheson.
So terrible was the slaughter of the Parodyverse’s heroes that none of them even realised when the Manga Shoggoth, itself the product of elder god scientific research, intervened to try and halt the Crawler Beneath’s rampage. But Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu had slept for millennia under the Lair Mansion, basking in the special energies which made that location so important to the forces which had ordained the Parodyverse, and there it had grown fat and powerful. When the Shoggoth assumed the mass of a city block and slimed his corrosive protoplasm over the multi-angled tentacle creature, Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu merely assumed the size of a city and boiled off the Shoggoth like a Cthulhic rice pudding.
Then the creature flexed, flipping Paradopolis and its sister city Gothametropolis like toys laid out on a child’s counterpane, sending whole blocks, whole neighbourhoods, flying into debris of oblivion. The death toll had surpassed four million within three minutes of its awakening.
Sensing the destruction of their pawns and agents, the Great Powers of the Parodyverse began to manifest. Some chose to take shape, others just focused their wills. The Family of the Pointless walked the shattered and burning streets. Samhain’s death-song echoed through the ruined houses. More powerful entities yet, things which could not easily be named or defined, rippled behind them vast and terrible. All of them realised that things had changed, and that if the final purpose of the Parodyverse was to be fulfilled it would have to be here, now. They had to trigger the Resolution War.
The Groper out of Grossness, dark Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, ignored them all. It shredded the veil between life and death, found the trembling and helpless spirit of the ghost of the Lair Mansion, Marie Murcheson, and took her once more as his bride as it had done long ago. From her ectoplasmic shell it would spawn forth a million million monstrosities like himself that would feed upon the very stars.
Then the wards prepared long ago by mad, visionary Wilbur Parody triggered themselves. The former holder of all three principal cosmic offices had designed the city that had taken his name as a huge cosmic trap for the kind of entities that now came to play out the final act in the purpose of the improbable little dimension they had ordained. Suddenly the creators of the Parodyverse found themselves trapped within their creation. Some went a little mad.
Wilbur Parody knew than that he was seconds away from being the supreme being of the multiverse. Not bad for one virgin sacrifice, he thought.
The Earth cracked as the gods and the things they worshipped were shackled to his will. The trap was sprung, and nothing could stop him now.
“Hmph. Well that’s enough of that,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton opined, pushing a button on his temporal pocketwatch and bringing time to a complete halt.
“Can you do that?” Asil asked, somewhat wide-eyed.
“Have to. No choice. Can’t be doing with a blaggard like that conquering infinity, what?”
“No, I mean, I thought you said you were a very minor cosmic office-holder,” Lisa’s innocent clone explained. “I thought the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity was pretty low down on the cosmic league tables.”
Mumphrey glanced at the artefacts of office he was wielding just then: Cane of Destiny, Cloak of Eternity, Fountain Pen of Causality, and his usual Chronometer. “Well, usually it is,” he admitted, “but every office-holder is supreme in their own ballywick, if they really want to be uppity about it, and this just so happens to be the sort of job that one’s expected to handle when one’s holder of the Chronometer. So when I do m’job at this level I’m not relying on my power, or even the power of these gadgets, but channelin’ the power of the chappies who set it all up.”
“Yo is thinking you are doing it all very well,” the pure thought being who had brought the situation to Mumphrey’s attention noted. “Yo is hoping you are to be turning time back now to un-massacre all Yo’s cute-friends.”
“Will that work?” Asil asked anxiously.
“Hmph. Bit of a problem there, m’dear,” the eccentric Englishman worried. “Y’see, this sort of power I’m using is only available while there’s a temporal crisis of this magnitude. If I wind back time, the crisis isn’t happenin’ so I don’t have the power to stop it happenin’, y’see?”
“Er…”
“Yo understands, cute whiskered Mumphrey,” Yo smiled. “Is to be easy. Please to be loaning Yo infinite temporal energy and Yo will be sorting all of it to be sorted.”
Asil ducked.
Spiffy looked down at his great-great-great grandfather’s body which he was currently wearing. “Well, in real life I’m taller,” he offered. “And I have a fern.”
ManMan was occupying the body of Civil War hero Blanchford Bertram, a man who would one day discover and carry the same sentient knife that Joe Pepper did at the end of the twentieth century. “”And I wear white leather and suede,” he added. “Look, apparently something bad is going to happen down in City Hall, something that makes the future go incredibly wrong. Can’t we just go down there and stop it?” ManMan couldn’t tell them that Mayor Parody was behind the plot; the League never realised that Wilbur Parody was anything other than a well-connected philanthropic civic leader.
“Something horrible is going to happen to my true love… that is the true love of the person whose body I’m in.” Nats protested. “I think her fiancée is going to do something bad.”
“Your true love’s fiancée?” ManMan checked.
“Yes. My brother. My body’s brother. My body’s brother is going to do something bad to my body’s true love. I think.”
“And I thought my love life was complicated,” Joe Pepper smirked.
“I wish mine was,” spiffy sulked.
“Never mind that,” urged Nats, “Time is running out. My host, William Reed, was trying to warn Marie Murcheson about the danger she was in, but some mutated Morshlocks tried to kill him instead. We’ve got to get to that City Hall Hallowe’en bash and save the girl!”
“We are not going to do anything until I understand what the hell is going on here,” Runner insisted.
“I’ve plenty of time for a cup of tea, then,” Lady Circe D’Aosta decided. “And a bath. And a trip to Paris.”
“Look, our source warned us that there’s this occult ritual being carried out tonight in the tunnels under the city,” spiffy warned.
“This is the source in Herringcarp Lunatic Hospital?” League honorary secretary Hastings Vernal noted.
“He’s not mad,” ManMan protested. “Well, he is, in a conquer-the-multiverse kind of way, but he knows what he’s talking about. We have to stop this plot so that… um, well..”
“So that his plots can go ahead,” spiffy sighed. “I know that doesn’t sound too promising, but the alternative…”
“We can’t just go down to the Mayor’s party and demand entrance in order to stop a terrible evil being committed on the word of a mental asylum inmate and two ragamuffins from the future!” Lance Runner objected.
“I rather think you should,” Lucius Faust advised them. Everybody in the Mansion library jumped at the unexpected arrival of the master of the mystic crafts (except HV). “There’s a rather nasty chap called Odran who’s trying to kill two of your allies, who are coincidentally two of our future-guests friends as well.”
“Two of ours? Who?” spiffy wondered.
“I believe you know them as Lisa Waltz and the Messenger,” Faust informed them. “The League knows them as Dr Christopher Waltz and the Greyhound.”
“Lisa and Messy? Boy, this Odran guy’s in trouble,” ManMan estimated.
“You know Odran as Samhain, the Destroyer of Tales,” indicated Faust.
“Boy, we’re all in trouble,” ManMan revised his opinion.
“Let’s go,” Circe decided, over Lance Runner’s protests.
“I’ll join you all shortly,” Hastings Vernal told the League and their allies. “I believe we’re going to need a few more members to deal with this situation.”
“Who can you call up this quickly?” Runner shrugged.
“Oh, I’ll find someone,” HV promised with a sideways glance at the Parodyverse’s sorcerer supreme.
“Someone will probably turn up,” Lucius Faust agreed.
“Mr van Risoy, you appear to be somewhat upset about something,” Mayor Wilbur Parody noted of the young man who had burst into his office.
Visionary waved his borrowed hand towards the chair where Marie Murcheson (currently occupied by Dancer) was sitting held motionless by the Mayor’s power and shocked because her fiancée had just traded her with Parody in exchange for a glittering future. “Sure I’m upset. You’re bartering that young woman like she was some kind of thing, and I’m here to stop you.”
Ivan?” Leyland Reed puzzled. “What’s come over you? You were the fellow who suggested this deal to me. You set it all up.”
“I was?” Visionary gulped. “Oh. Well, I changed my mind. It’s just plain wrong.”
Dancer was rapidly discovering that she was in a time-frame about a hundred and thirty-nine years before she gained probability twisting powers. This was not a good thing. “You had this planned, Leyland, you sleaze? You want me to sleep with your boss to further your career?”
Wilbur turned to her. “Ah, you misunderstand, my sweet Marie. It is not I for whom you will provide carnal delight and whose offspring will claw their way from your womb. I have… another husband lined up for you.”
“I’ve got a headache,” Dancer answered. “Anyway, you’ve got the wrong girl. You want Sorceress. She’s always the impregnee. I think it’s in her contract. I can get you her phone number.”
“Marie?” Leyland puzzled. “Why are you talking so strangely? What’s the matter with you?”
“Talking strangely? Here are a few words for you, Leyland…”
“Let her go, now, or you get the fork,” Visionary warned.
Wilbur Parody was looking at him curiously. “Ah,” he understood, “Ghosts from a future that will be wiped out when our plans tonight succeed. A last-ditch gambit by the Paradox Stranger, no doubt. His come-uppance is already in hand. Did you truly expect to be able to thwart me, little walk-in spirits?”
“You talk big,” Vizh answered, “but I’m the one holding the toasting fork.”
“I have spend more than half a century preparing for tonight. I have bred Miss Murcheson’s lineage with special care to provide exactly the right conduit for the spawn of Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu…”
“The Groper out of Grossness!” Visionary recognised the Lair Legion’s old foe.
“I think that’s damn near all my dates,” Dancer admitted.
But Parody was now in full super-villain exposition mode. “I arranged for Miss Murcheson to be orphaned and gave her to Dr Waltz to be brought up, in exchange for Waltz promising me that one of his descendants would perform a small… duty for me.”
“Lisa’ll provide small duties for anyone, whether they like it or not,” Vizh explained. “Although this does help explain why she’s pure evil.”
“Not that,” spat Parody, “Her bonding with the Booke of the Law. Idiot.”
“I’m sorry, Marie,” Leyland told his fiancée. “I do love you, but you betrayed me. And I have a whole city to build.”
“And I’m sorry, Leyland,” Dancer answered, “but Parody’s willpower just isn’t enough to stop me from doing this.” Then she brought her leg up in a high kick that was stopped half way as it impacted with something soft and vulnerable on the person of Leyland Reed. “Well, you weren’t going to be using ‘em for anything anyway, were you?” she asked him sweetly as he crumpled.
“Enough!” Wilbur Parody growled. “You have taken too much of my time already. Little spirits, be silent!”
Then Sarah Shepherdson and Visionary found themselves trapped in the back of the minds of their respective hosts, unable to do more than observe as a tragedy unfolded.
“This is all very satisfying,” the personification of the end of stories chuckled grimly, “but it would be even better if we did away with this silly substitute body thing.” He shook his enemies like dogs on a lead, and the 1860’s pathologist and courier toppled to the floor. Now Samhain was tightening his throat-holds around the real Messenger and Lisa. “There, that’s better,” the villain approved.
Lisa caught him in the eye with a razor-brief. “I object,” she told him, rolling across the floor as the Destroyer of Tales dropped her and stepped back to deal with his injury-to-the-eye motif.
Dr Christopher Waltz looked up blurrily as a very nearly naked brunette vaulted over him and uncoiled her whip. “Hi gramps!” she beamed at him before catching the lash round Samhain’s neck and twitching Odran through the French windows.
Samhain didn’t fall. He hung there in midair and gestured and Lisa was slammed back into and through the door adjoining the secretary’s office to Wilbur Parody’s study.
Before he could move in for the kill, half a dozen parcel bombs bracketed him and sent him spinning backwards. Samhain turned to the one-eyed postman who had delivered them and responded with a backhanded slap that smashed Messenger into yet another wall.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” the Greyhound noted to his fellow fallen angel. “Don’t worry. I can deliver these.” Seizing up a handful of dead letters he distracted Odran by embedding the weapons in the enemy’s chest. “I like what you’ve done with them,” he told Messenger.
Dr Waltz crawled through the broken door to check if Lisa was still alive. He found the first lady of the Lair Legion propping herself up unsteadily by leaning on Parody’s desk. The Mayor himself had departed to arrange the nuptials of Marie Murcheson. “Are you alright, miss?” Waltz asked worriedly.
“Oh yes,” Lisa replied in vicious tones. She tapped the heavy volume she’d found on the Mayor’s table, a vast handwritten tome called ‘The Laws and Ordinances of New Paradiopolis’. “Just meeting an old friend for the first time.”
Waltz looked confused. “Er, your friend and the Greyhound appear to be getting beaten into pulps out there,” he noted. “What are you doing?”
Lisa laid her hands on the Booke of the Law. “Summoning help,” she promised.
Then the entire mansion wheezed and groaned like a police public call box sundering the time vortex and dematerialised, preventing the whole destruction thing for happening again.
“Ah, welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” Hunter Victorious bade them, putting away his watch with a certain satisfaction. “If you would be so good as to follow me, the enemy is this way.”
“This art proving to be a most satisfactory Hallowe’en,” Donar approved.
The postman snarled his defiance to the last, but couldn’t break the Destroyer of Tales’ grip on him. Lisa managed a reply. “Are you saying that nothing can save us now?” she challenged.
“Nothing can save you now,” Samhain replied.
Then Circe d’Aosta hammered him in the head with twin eyebeams like solar flared.
“What a classic villain mistake,” sighed Lisa as she slumped to the ground.
“Surrender, villain!” ManMan/Bertram warned. “We’ve got an Austernal and she’d loaded.”
“Stacked,” Circe corrected him, telekinetically projecting Samhain through the ceiling.
“C’mon spiffy,” Nats/William Reed urged his companion. “Without our powers there’s nothing we can do to help here. Let’s find Marie.” The merging of his consciousness with that of his ancestor had placed concern for the woman at the very top of his agenda.
“Sure,” spiffy agreed. “If you’d had the power to fly, that would have made all the difference.” It wasn’t often that the fern-wielder got to diss someone else’s superpowers. He and Nats peeled away and went off to find the damsel in distress.
“Lady Circe!” cried Lance Runner, leaping forward to gut the enemy with a cavalry sabre.
Samhain caught the president of the League and hurled him out of the window. “She could even reassemble herself from that, given time,” the Destroyer of Tales noted. “But she’s out of time.”
He turned back to find ManMan standing protectively over the Austernal’s ashes. “Are you saying nothing can save us now?” ManMan asked hopefully.
“Yes,” spat Samhain. “Nothing can save you now.”
NTU-150’s repulsor rays took down the wall and the Lair Legion attacked.
“Shut up,” van Risoy told the small voice at the back of his mind. “You understand nothing. Parody is about to reorder the universe, and I shall be a part of it. What does one futile wench matter against that?”
“Right, that’s it,” Vizh threatened. “I’m going to start kicking you in here now. Get ready for a huge headache.”
Marie Murcheson looked very fetching in her sacrificial nightdress. She did object to being chained to an altar, and expressed this by screaming loudly.
“Sshh!” Dancer advised her. “Don’t let them cast you in the role of victim.”
“But they’ve chained me to a stone and are about to have me ravished!” Marie objected.
“Yes, my life is getting more and more like Lisa’s,” Dancer worried, “All the same, the screaming won’t help. Let’s try something different. Talk to Leyland.”
“Leyland?”
“Yeah, he’s scum, but he’s stupid scum, and he might tell us something we can use.”
Marie reached out for her former fiancée, straining against her shackles. “Leyland!” she cried. “You can’t mean to let them do this!”
“I…” he hesitated, but then saw the eyes of van Risoy and Parody upon him. “I have made my choice, Marie. Even had you been faithful to me I would have had to surrender you up to this opportunity. Once you are given to the Beast his energies will empower our great cosmic trap, the city we call Paradiopolis. It’s all so clear to me now, why Mayor Parody had me design certain things in certain ways.”
“Not the wedding night you envisaged, perhaps,” smirked van Risoy. “But at least no-one can say you’re not willing to experiment.” He winced then as if he had a sudden headache.
“And none of you people are concerned that what you’re about to do to me is terribly, terribly, wrong?” Marie challenged the ruling class of Paradiopolis that was assembled to partake of Parody’s triumph.
Nobody answered.
Van Risoy chuckled. “Nothing can save you n…”
“Shut up,” Wilbur Parody told him.
“Yeah! Up yours!” Troia added, trying desperately to make good her words as she angled her spear to attack.
“And in your pants,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! pointed out, leaping past, grabbing the waistband, and letting fly with the silly string.
Samhain batted his opponents aside with a cry of outrage.
“Okay,” Ziles noted to herself. “Relaxor cream isn’t helping his mood or his complexion. Better try something else.”
“Gaah!” cried Goldeneyed as he punched the Destroyer of Tales.
“Huh?” puzzled Exile, also beating on Samhain.
“Just for old times’ sake,” G-Eyed shrugged. “People were always shouting ‘Gaaah’ back then.”
“Gaaah!” Banjooooo agreed, getting into the spirit of the thing and hammering Samhain with his tail.
“Gaaah!” added Finny, crushing the villain in a huge draconic claw.
“Oh yeah, definitely Gaaah!” Hatman assured them, as he charged Samhain in his Bulls hat.
“Imbeciles!” the Destroyer of Tales thundered, hurling them all away from him with a thought. “I am the very personification of Hallowe’en. This is my time! Not one of you can prevail against me.”
“Hallowe’en isn’t about death and destruction,” the Sorceress contradicted him, doing something complicated to time/space around Samhain. “It’s about the triumph of good over all the powers of evil.”
“And giving sweets to cute children,” Yo added. “And bunnies.”
“You’re right in one thing, though,” Cap admitted. “Not one of us can prevail against you. But all of us together can!”
Then Paste Pot Pete and Cobra jumped the villain from behind while Trickshot distracted him with a Spaghetti Arrow. Then the Dark Knight did something unpleasant with knightarangs. And that set things up for another hero who nobody had realised was even there yet: “Spaaaaannnnkkkk Raaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!”
“William! How did you find us?” Leyland Reed frowned. The route they had taken through the complicated subterranean Morshlock tunnels had been enough to confuse the architect, and Leyland could think of no way his brother might have tracked him.
Nats decided not to mention the ‘spiffy and Nats this way’ signs they’d found at every junction. Faust wasn’t taking any chances.
“William!” Marie called. Then she added, “I love you!”
“Oh wow!” Nats replied. “I mean… wow!”
“Get a grip,” spiffy advised him, stalking forwards. “Alright you lot, we’re here to free the girl. Any objections?”
“Well, there’s me.” I van Risoy strutted out from the crowd. “I have been trained in the pugilistic arts, and I think you’ll find will you shut up in there?””
spiffy shrugged and used his opponent’s momentary distraction to plant a classic right hook. Van Risoy dropped like a stone. “Heh. Might not work against the Yurt, but it’s fine against the yutz.”
“I also object,” Wilbur Parody answered. “And I am Mayor of Paradiopolis.”
“Big deal,” shrugged spiffy. “I’m Mayor of everywhere else.”
“I also have access to cosmic forces which could crush you like a flea and which I have no qualms about using right now.”
“I, um, I usually have a fern.”
“Excuse me,” Nats interrupted, “but while you two are playing cosmic top trumps I’m just going to go kick crap out of my brother, okay?”
“Okay,” spiffy agreed.
“Very well,” assented Parody. “Now where were we?”
“You people do realise that you’re trespassing?” Cheryl asked the assembly.
Everybody turned to regard the newcomers who were picking their way down the crude stone staircase from the mansion above. “This is Parody Island, and you don’t have a permit for human sacrifice here,” Lisette explained.
“We’re summoning a god under Parody Island?” Leyland Reed shrugged.
“Nah,” Nats told him, “You’re bleeding under Parody Island.” Then he hit him.
“You call this a human sacrifice ceremony?” Valeria of Carfax sniffed. “Amateurs.”
“Anyway, we’d like you to stop making that annoying chanting noise and go away,” Cheryl told the cultists. “The Lair Legion and friends will be back here soon, and you don’t want to distract Donar on a Xena night.”
“You will now all remain motionless,” Parody commanded, and Cheryl, Nats, spiffy, Lisette, Valeria, and even Flapjack lurking in the shadows found themselves unable to move. A mournful bell tolled the hour and the atmosphere of the cavern thickened and became greasy. “I believe it’s time for the wedding,” the Mayor of Paradiopolis chuckled.
“I’m sorry,” Marie told Dancer, “but I have to do this.” And she screamed.
Something dark and scaly and multidimensional rose from the black lake in the torchlit cave. It formed eyes and orifices randomly as it extended one night-black tentacle out towards the altar where Marie lay chained.
Wilbur Parody leaned over her with an obsidian dagger. “Don’t worry,” he promised her as he touched the point between her heaving breasts. “I won’t kill you. I just need a little blood to complete the bond between you and your husband.” He paused and considered something he found amusing. “You can say ‘you won’t get away with this, you fiend,’ at this point, if you like. However, your friends here cannot intervene, and your allies from the present and the future are distracted battling Samhain. The sorcerer supremes present and to come are warded from this hall, and the Paradox Stranger has already played his hand.”
Something cold and wet caressed Marie’s ankle and slid along her calf. She screamed again.
Wilbur Parody chuckled and carved the appropriate symbol across her chest.
Visionary hit him with a lectern. “You won’t get away with this, you fiend,” the possibly fake man said. I. van Risoy was unconscious, which meant that Vizh got free use of the body while he was away.
As Parody slumped to the floor the room was filled with chaos. The binding spells on Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu were sundered. Ebony tentacles snatched up half a dozen of the elite revellers and shredded or consumed them before anybody could react. spiffy, suddenly able to move again, pointed them towards the mansion stair. “That way!” he shouted. “Follow Cheryl!”
Valeria was leading the way but a probing midnight tendril reached towards her. “Get out of my way, blasphemy!” she commanded it, and it exploded in a spray of goo.
“Er…” Lisette said.
“You didn’t see that,” Valeria told her. “Please?”
“This way into the mansion,” Flapjack called to the fleeing party guests. “Perverts to the left and deviants to the right!”
Leyland Reed tried to escape with the others, but he was nearer to the stone slab where his fiancée was to be offered up to the elder beast’s lusts. Squirming cilia seized him and dragged him back to the Groper out of Grossness. “No! Nooo!” he screeched, but to no avail. Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu was feeling horny.
“Eeew,” shuddered Dancer.
William Reed had freed Marie from her chains. “Let’s get out of here!” he told her.
But Marie Murcheson shook her head. “I can’t,” she told him. “I’m linked with that thing now, and I can tell that it will follow me to the ends of the Earth, destroying everything in its path, until it has me,” she mourned. “And if it does have me, makes me the vessel for its spawning, then its offspring will snuff out the stars,and it will empower that evil man Parody to become supreme over the Parodyverse, maybe beyond.”
“So… what do we do?” William Reed asked.
“Only one choice, one way, William my love,” Marie answered. “Kiss me.”
William Reed kissed the woman he loved. Marie Murcheson plunged the obsidian dagger into her own heart.
Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu screamed in monstrous rage even as it faded back into the nightmares it resided in.
“Marie!” screeched William.
“No!” Wilbur Parody cried, dragging himself up to the altar stone. “My plans! My preparations!” His face twisted into a mask of hate. “I’ll destroy you all for this.”
“Actually,” the Hooded Hood intervened, “you won’t.” He turned to spiffy, Nats, and Visionary. “Go home,” he told them.
In the lobby of the mansion a white spectral figure hovered on the stairway. The Lair Legion assembled at the bottom to look at the translucent girl in the tattered bloodstained nightdress. Somehow Mumphrey and Asil were amongst them, and it was Mumphrey who walked up the stairs to speak with the ghost.
“It’s alright now, m’dear,” the eccentric Englishman assured her. “Parody’s future was averted. Leyland Reed screamed out the remainder of his days in Herringcarp Asylum. That Samhain was eventually destroyed. Wilbur Parody gets his comeuppance in the end. You saved everyone by what you did. Do you remember now?”
Marie Murcheson nodded.
“Now that she knows how she died, won’t she just fade away?” Troia wondered.
“She’s still bound here by Parody’s blood-rite,” Xander noted. Nobody had known he was there at all. “I can probably undo it if you want me to.”
“She doesn’t,” Sorceress told them. “She’s happy to stay here. It’s where her friends are.”
“I suppose we could use another psychic defence,” the Dark Knight considered. “Now she is a known quantity.”
“Alright,” sighed Finny. “Welcome to the Lair Mansion, Ms Murcheson.”
Marie smiled for the first time, then blurred and faded; but her scent of wild roses lingered in the hallway.
“Every mansion needs a ghost,” grinned CSFB! “Or two.”
Mumphrey diplomatically said nothing. No point in upsetting the detective and the dragon any more.
“Back to the party then,” Trickshot suggested. “It’s even better in a genuine haunted house.”
“Aw man, I am never going to shower again,” G-Eyed muttered.