1: the trap is set
This one wasn't actually advertised anywhere. One of my associates in GodNet got sick of me whining about being poor all the time, and sent me netmail, giving me an address and a time.
It was out in Belgrave, somewhere; the Volkswagen was going and I had enough petrol to get there and back, so I looked it up in the Melways and set off on a rather overcast Sunday afternoon, skidding around the steep, rain-slick mountain corners.
The address seemed to be one huge block of heavily-wooded land; I had to drive up and down a few times before I found the drive-way. Huge stone lions on either side. How did I miss them the first time past?
The road up to the house was just as winding as the roads through hippy-riddled mountain Belgrave, and almost as long. the grounds were immaculately kept, and looked like the scenery at the start of Ken Russell's film, Gothic. The house was immense; a huge, sprawling mansion, its upper reaches shrouded in mist, its base clothed in vines and oddly-shaped topiary. A single ancient, eroded pillar had a verdigris-stained plate set at chest level; if one looked closely, one could discern ornate lettering which read:
What the hell was a wastrel? Something like a minstrel? The only association I had with that word was an old cartoon strip by Dori Seda in Crumb's WEIRDO magazine, the one where she was describing how she kept getting crabs from her bed-partners. From that, I gathered that a wastrel was a cross between a hippy, a New-Ager and a member of the Society of Creative Anachronism. I had an image of young female hippy nipples poking shyly through thin cotton shirts with gathered sleeves. This house, on the other hand, looked like the sort of place Penelope Keith would live in. I just hope they weren't after a gardener.
Just as I started up the dark grey stone steps, I caught a flicker of white out of the corner of my eye, off in the greenery nearby. I almost turned to look, but then I received another flash off to the other side. Uh-huh. Sidhe. I paused, rummaged around in my pocket and found a small plastic bag with a pinch or two of white powder in the bottom. I went over to the pool-table-textured lawn, kneeled down in the centre of a vaguely-defined circle of slightly darker grass and scattered the powder. "Share and enjoy," I murmured. Angel dust. How appropriate. I thought I heard faint giggles as I made my way up to the doors.
I rang the doorbell and stood in the freezing drizzle for exactly six minutes before the doors creaked open. I expected the traditional decrepit ninety-year old retainer like Faithful Old Crumble in Marty Feldman's Last Remake of Beau Geste; I certainly didn't expect a traditional sixteen-year- old schoolgirl, short blonde hair, grey pleated skirt, blazer, hockey stick and all. "Ah. I'm here about the, ah - " She smiled mysteriously and indicated that I should follow her.
She led me down a dark corridor, expensive, dusty old carpets, vaguely pagan embroidery in foot-thick frames, into a large drawing-room. Heavy furniture with masses of brown varnish and the scent of age. A table took up about a third of the room. It looked like the sort of thing Elizabethan monarchs would sign declarations on; sitting on this, a Solburne S4000 workstation, a scattering of floppies, an Eizo monitor and a gordian knot of cables. Seated in one of Morticia Addams' thrones was a woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in what looked like a black lace funeral gown. Her face was partly hidden by a veil, but I could see through it, and she was beautiful. The warning signals that had been clanging in the back of my head ever since I'd seen the house suddenly jumped in volume. I sat on the carpet a few metres away, crossed my legs and smiled up at her.
Apparently, she was a writer, author of over a dozen successful Mills and Boone romances, and recently she'd been contacted by her publishers and asked if she'd like to move on to something racier.
"I wasn't shocked at the idea of writing pornography,' she murmured.
"Erotica." I suggested.
She smiled. "I wrote all of my other novels in longhand, but for this, I thought I needed something a bit more modern. The publishers sent me that," gesturing at the workstation, "which they'd come into possession of by way of a receivership move." I got up, went over to examine the machine. Bare-bones UNIX, no editor more advanced than vi. I wondered if Matt Dillon had a UNIX version of DME handy.
The woman - Jeanette - followed me over and stood uncomfortably close. "I need technical support, someone to manage backups, to show me how to use this computer ... a general amanuensis, even."
So, she was going to write erotica and test it on me. Heh.
I heard a faint beat from somewhere on the first floor. Cocking my head, I listened. "Metal Church; Beyond the Black," I guessed.
She pursed her lips. "That's Althea. She showed you in." Uh-huh. Jeanette moved even closer and placed a lace-gloved hand over mine. "We have plenty of spare rooms here, if you needed somewhere to stay - it would save you the trouble of driving out from Hawthorn every day." I stood there rigid as she put her arms around me from behind, but it was the unmistakable scent of opium that gave me the impetus to escape from her clutches as politely as possible. I left her with the phone number of a friend who knew a bit more about UNIX than I did.
As I backed the Volkswagen around in the gravel parking area, I saw her looking at me from a high window. Her expression was one of a calculating huntress who had seen her prey escape a trap.
2: the trap is re-set
SOMETHING HAD been nagging me, scuttling around in the back of my mind like a rabid outhouse spider (do spiders get rabies?). For the past week, ever since my visit to Wastrel Towers, I'd spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about it ('it' being the offhand way I'd put their problem off onto someone else) and then deciding firmly to stop worrying; this all came to an end when I got another call from Jeanette, or rather from her secretary, Fione. The voice on the answering machine reported that the guy I'd referred them to hadn't 'worked out' (why did I imagine that he'd ended up in a dungeon?), and would I please reconsider my decision? I hovered over the phone as she spoke, writhing in an agony of indecision - should I pick it up or not? By the time I'd decided to, she'd hung up. Anyway, that was it.
The next two hours were a flurry of frenzied preparation, grabbing things I thought I'd need and stacking them in the back of the VW. Some clothes, a twelve-pack of Jolt from my cache under the house (given that setting her machine up would be a three day job at least); hopefully, I could get in there, leech the software, set it up and get out before they had the chance to work any serious magick on me. Given that I wasn't really that comfortable with her UNIX box, I packed my own machine, modem and four-point power-cord adaptor as well, making sure I had a good complement of 2-3 crossover cables for machine-to-machine software transfers. And off I went. I didn't bother ringing ahead; they knew I was coming.
It was a mildly sunny morning, warmth filtering through the soft top of the VW as I made my way up the precarious mountain roads. The tape in the deck (SPK's Leichenschrei, back to back with Auto-Da-Fe) wasn't exactly appropriate for this woodsy hippie environment, so I popped it out; it fell under the passenger seat, dammit. Things were a bit hairy, negotiating mountain curves while rabbiting through the glove box for another tape, but all this peaceful outdoorsy silence was getting to me. I found something, slotted it - This Mortal Coil, and I could never remember which album it was. The one with the track three-quarters of the way through that has small child babblings in it. Not bad.
She was waiting for me at the huge doors, wearing her black velvet Morticia Addams dress. Driving up, I was tempted to spin out onto the immaculate lawn and do some three-sixties, but I recalled the faery ring I'd seen last time I was here and decided against it. Wouldn't want to piss off the Wee Folk, after all. She smiled as I approached, carrying the CPU of my machine.
I settled in quickly; my machine was set up on the antique desk-table thing, and spent most of its time connected to any of a dozen UNIX sites, happily leeching software at 9600 baud. While it did this, I didn't have much else to do, so I wandered the estate, which was half immaculately-kept garden, half wilderness. It wasn't standard Australian bush wilderness, either; I felt like I'd wandered into Robert Silverberg's garden, the one he did just before writing Lord Valentine's Castle. It was a goddamn jungle down there. I expected to see tigers.
The front lawns were pretty much of a muchness, topiary shaped like cute animals (I didn't notice any Ren- or Stimpy-shaped ones, alas), lawns as even and flat as billiard tables, beds of flowers ranged just so. Boring. The garden around the back was much better, in my opinion. It crept up on the manor like a kitten stalking a sock, wild and unrestrained. Nearer the house, there were one or two token efforts to tame it, but they were just that; token efforts. Some vaguely-defined paths led off into the wilderness, and I took to wandering these while my machine was busy downloading large chunks of code from Finland or Boston or wherever the hell they were.
The antique desk quickly came to resemble my desk at home, littered with disks, cables, screwdrivers, coffee mugs, pieces of paper with obscure notes to myself, pencils, little goddess statues, alien things made from Plasticine, cassettes. Jeanette didn't mind - she said it gave the place a worked-in air, but I expected that she'd be a bit squicked if the place was knee-deep in empty Jolt cans, so I was careful not to be too sloppy. I didn't want to appear like what's-his-name, the bad guy in Jurassic Park.
I'd been awake for almost seventy-two hours straight before I'd gotten all the stuff I wanted and had unarchived it. Some kind soul had provided a handy-dandy installation script, which I perused before running; most of it was involved with compiling, and despite the terrifying speed of Jeanette's machine, this was going to take another six hours at least, and I'd just run out of Jolt (which I'd been drinking simply because I had it, not because I needed to maintain any fevered pitch of concentration). I looked around; Jeanette wasn't there. Typing 'qt' on my machine told me it was just past ten to two, and judging from the darkness outside, it wasn't in the afternoon. I was looking about for something comfortable to sleep on when a young woman came in - my dream of the seductive librarian, rimless glasses, short brown hair, black skirt, jacket and stockings, the whole deal. I was quite proud of the way I didn't drool on the table.
"I'm Fione - we almost spoke on the phone recently." How did she know I'd almost picked up the phone? Was NOTHING hidden from these people? "You've been working like a demon - would you like me to show you to your room?"
I unfroze my stunned expression and smiled gratefully. "That would be wonderful, Miss ... uh ..." Her smile made me feel dizzy. Either that or the caffeine was wearing off and my fatigue was catching up with me.
"That's an unusual badge," she commented as I followed her up the stairs. She moved backwards briefly, so she could point to the gold-copper diamond on my coat lapel.
"I made it myself," I replied. "Are you... uh, familiar with Clive Barker's Hellraiser films?" She nodded. "And do you ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation?" She nodded again, warily, smiling. "I once wrote a story about a starship manned by Cenobites. Their comm-badges were shaped like little representations of Leviathan, the Dark God." I pointed to the badge. "Like so."
She sighed, shaking her head. "Writers. Jeanette's the same, you know. She just loves acting out the major scenes from her romances. Shelby - he's the gardener, you probably haven't met him yet - is getting on a bit; he's not really up to the more, uh, dramatic scenes." We made our way down a very long hallway. "I try my best, but I'm not a very convincing hero. Perhaps you could fill in for me." Considering the genre that Jeanette was moving into, I think I could learn to live with that.
The bedroom was small - the way I liked them - most of it taken up with an overly-ornate four-poster bed. Not caring if Fione was offended by the sight of my naked body, I stripped off my clothes and got under the sheets, crisp, cool, fresh. There was a faint warmth and a trace of Fione's scent here - had she been warming the bed for me? I was in serious trouble; trying to leave was going to be almost impossible. I began to wonder why I would try; but of course, that's what they WANTED me to think.
Fione came over and, in a completely natural fashion, hugged me. "Sleep well." I was overcome with that wonderfully dizzy variety of drowsiness, and it was all I could do to hug her as if I meant it in return. "Thank you. You've made my stay here, so far ... it's been ... well ... `Words fail me. Nothing I could say could possibly match the depth of my feelings in this matter.'"
She grinned, recognising the reference. "Good night," she said with genuine warmth. Uh. As she left the room, my gaze was trapped by the sway of her black-clad hips, the slits at the back of the dress parting to reveal those beautiful legs clad in sheer black stockings. Maybe, later on in the evening, I'd have the opportunity to crawl out on the balcony and howl at the setting moon.
I awoke early the next morning with the idea that something had gone wrong. I checked on the machine's progress; about an hour after I'd gone to bed, it had started unpacking the spell-checker dictionaries, and the script had failed when the archive of Swedish proved to be corrupt. I sighed, killed that archive, and edited the script, bypassing the dictionaries section. I unpacked the English one manually and restarted the script from where it had failed after adjusting the script's exit-error-level thingy.
The house seemed to be deserted; it was only half-past seven in the morning, and it was possible that the level of indolence in this den of iniquity was the same as it was around my place at Hawthorn, so I found the kitchen and raided the 'fridge. None of the jars were labelled, but even I could identify home-made lemon butter; I hacked two inch-thick slices off the end of a loaf of very brown bread, impaled them on a long fork and toasted them over the wood-burning stove.
I'd brought my own coffee with me, having developed a preference for cheap instant made with lukewarm tap-water and saccharine tablets. My tastes had evolved quite a bit since the time when I used to drink Blue Mountain with four teaspoons of sugar in it.
I made up a cup and went over to the window which overlooked the back garden. It was still half obscured with predawn fog, resembling something out of last year's Tolkien calendar. I must have sat there for over an hour after finishing breakfast, my breath misting the window, my gaze lost in the hazy greenery before I realised with a start that Jeanette was standing right behind me, wearing a dark green velvet dressing-gown. It was as if she'd only just started existing there; one moment, nothing, and the next, a palpable sensation of warmth and some strange scent that somehow reminded me of the forest outside.
My first thought was, VAMPIRES! Then I realised that it was daytime.
"How is the installation going?" she asked casually.
"Minor hiccup just after I retired, last night; apart from that, it's going well. Should be ready for testing by lunchtime." She smiled and swept out of the kitchen.
I followed her; she was kneeling on the floor of the dining room with her arms on the table, chin resting on her hands, watching the monitor as the machine worked; seemingly hypnotised by the dance of the cursor as it flashed back and forth, unarchiving, installing, compiling. I left her to it and went out into the back yard, crunching my second slice of toast.
There was a heavy smell in the air, one that you ordinarily felt after a long, hot summer's day; the smell of sun-warmed grass under a still sky, despite the cool breeze which carried a hint of the morning's cold. My bare feet marked a trail through the dewy grass as I walked off into the shallow rise of the forest, where the overhanging trees cut off most of the overhead sun, but the air was just as thick, possibly even thicker, with the overpowering scent of pines. I wandered along a trail which became less and less defined, occasionally discovering with my tongue previously-untapped caches of lemon butter at the corners of my mouth.
The trail wound downhill again into a natural basin behind the hill, the house now out of view. It was almost dark in here, the occasional shaft of sunlight coming through the overhead canopy like a spotlight in a night-club, highlighting a smooth, round rock here, a ring of red-capped Amanita there, and -
in the centre of a seemingly-natural ring of huge oak trees, a statue. Around two metres tall, carved from light grey, porous-looking stone; well- weathered, the features eroded, softened but still plain. it looked vaguely Indian, Kali or Shiva or one of that crowd within a circle of old bronze which arched overhead, sunlit glints flashing off less corroded parts; she stood on one slightly bent leg, arms held in a dancing posture, eyes blank and undetailed, that frustrating, slight Mona-Lisaic smile on her face, rigidly hemispherical breasts the size of basketballs. She appeared to be wearing a stone corset with garters; most likely a joke by some frustrated Victorian stone-mason. I found a clear spot at the base of one of the trees, facing the statue and sat down, wondering why I felt vaguely stoned, dreamy. The morning heat of the forest, I supposed.
I wondered if there were any funny ingredients in that lemon butter.
Nah.
As my eyelids drooped, a leaf fell out of the tree, drifted past my face, tickling my nose, which wrinkled in vague annoyance. Just as I was about to drift back off to sleep, it happened again, this time the stalk of the leaf almost being inhaled up my nose. I sneezed, and thought I heard that faint giggle again, behind me.
I knew how to stop that kind of behaviour. I swallowed some air, then belched loudly, scratched my crotch and started picking my nose. There was a brief pause, and then it seemed like every leaf in the tree fell out and buried me. More giggles. I knew better than to get angry; I smiled, and felt inclined to giggle back.
After I brushed away enough leaves to be able to see out, I opened my eyes and there was a young girl about fourteen years old lying on the grass before me, peering at me through strands of wayward brown hair which was gathered at her forehead by a circlet of tiny white flowers, her chin resting on her hands just as Jeanette had. I tried to ignore the fact that she seemed to be naked, dappled sunlight falling across her pale behind; I smiled politely and nodded a greeting.
She spoke in a very faint voice, her words only just barely audible. "May I ask you a question?" I blinked and nodded. "Whatever happened to those other people - the ones with flat noses, dark skin and black curly hair?"
I thought for a moment, and then replied carefully, "They don't get on very well with us, and when we started settling here, they moved north. They're still around, but they're more like us than they used to be. Cultural contamination, I suppose."
She accepted this. "I liked them better. They liked telling stories ... they didn't ... they weren't as pushy as your people. They didn't make as much mess."
I wondered what i could possibly say by way of apology. "My people are very slow learners. They grew up in crowded, smelly cities and it's only recently that they've realised what a mess they're making."
She nodded sagely. "It's even getting crowded up here. You're the third person we've seen in as many seasons." She idly picked a dandelion, waved it about. "The last one got lost here and died. It was snowing." I frowned. Was this a threat? She seemed to remember something unimportant which had happened a long time ago, and continued, "He was a UNIX hacker."
I froze. A what? "I beg your pardon?"
She looked up and smiled sunnily. "He was a UNIX hacker. He had a back-pack full of manuals, UNIX net connectivity, C compilers, Kernigan and Richie Rich comics, that kind of thing. We all talked to him while he was dying. he thought he was imagining things, but we captured his thoughts as he died." She closed her eyes, a wistful expression on her face. "Ever since, I've wanted to see the Net."
I grimaced. "It's gone downhill quite a bit since it got commercialised. I'm sorry."
She waved this away. "That's all right, you didn't mean to do it. Do you think Jeanette would let us use her new toy?"
"Her UNIX box?" She nodded excitedly. "I don't know if she wants to connect it to the Net... I suppose it would be easy to set up, and I don't see any reason why she wouldn't let you use it. Does she know about ..."
"Oh, yes, we're good friends." I wasn't at all surprised.
I remembered something then, and despite thinking that I was about to make an awful faux pas, I asked, "May I ask you a question?" She looked at me suspiciously for a few moments, then nodded guardedly. "A friend of mine once told me that ... uh, your people don't like to hear us whistling." She looked at me curiously, her head to one side. "She said that it's something you can't do, and that you're jealous ..."
She giggled at this, rolled onto her back, tiny breasts wobbling. "Oh, no..." she managed between peals of laughter, "the only sound of yours that we really don't like is that boring, repetitious music... you know, the kind with the constant thumping rhythm and the people saying `word up' and `yo' over and over and over..."
"Rap music?"
She wrinkled her nose with distaste. "Yes. Don't like that."
I thought of my ghetto blaster sitting on the table, of my tapes, the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil and Clannad and Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. I smiled and wondered if an extension cord would reach all the way out here. "I have some music which i think might be closer to your taste," I murmured, thinking that, perversely, she'd probably like Skinny Puppy's Spahn Dirge better than Saucerful of Secrets. "I'll try to arrange it."
She smiled, eyes closed. "Oh, one more free bit of advice," she whispered with an odd tone of urgency. "Eat the bread and drink the wine, but do not eat the meat!"
There was a kind of break in reality at that point; almost like a cross-fade in a film. One moment I was lying against a tree chatting with a fairy, and the next I was just lying against a tree, and it was raining. Consulting my watch, I saw that it was now two in the afternoon. I got up and returned to the house as briskly as possible. I'd only lost about six hours. it could have been a lot worse.
Inside, Fione welcomed me with towels fresh from a clothes-dryer and, despite my feeble protestations, removed my clothes, leaving me with a dark-grey terry-towelling robe, very much like the one worn by Bruce Dern at the start of Silent Running. It made me feel very monkish; I had to resist the temptation to press my palms together as i swept into the machine room.
Jeanette was sitting at the machine. With no knowledge of computers whatsoever, she'd figured out how to get DME running and was using it to read the documentation. I pulled up a chair next to her and we spent the next two hours in what I called 'computers 101', which was made up of all the bits I felt had been left out of all the computer courses I'd ever been to. She was a very quick and confident learner; before long, she was resizing windows, searching-and-replacing, block-marking and moving with ease. She kept marvelling at the macro I'd included which swapped two transposed letters.
I was trying to be all tolerant and bemused when she turned in her chair, put her hand around the back of my neck, pulled me close and kissed me. I hesitated, then returned her affection. I'd only intended for this to be a brief demonstration of her thanks, but she obviously had other plans, sliding out of her chair, her other arm securing her hold on me, pushing me to the floor, her lips seeking my throat. For a second I panicked, tensing in her embrace; then I relaxed, giving in to the inevitable. It was almost a relief when I felt her teeth enter my flesh...
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