The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)

The Babosi’s eyestalks rotated and they looked at each other.
 

“SLACHI TOTH *CLAP* SAOSK WISK KE SOS *CLAP CLAP* SOSH *CLAP*”
 

They spoke through a combination of words and the slapping and clicking of their secondary limbs against their torsos. Their language was difficult to understand. They used their mouths for words and their arms for punctuation. It was as visual a language as it was an auditory one.
 

“What are they saying?” Richard asked.
 

Moomamu saw fear in Richard’s face that he’d not seen before. Here was a human with no reference for anything like this. Being captured by a trio of Babosi. It was mostly unheard of on Earth.
 

“They’re asking each other what to do with us.”

“TOSH *CLAP CLICK* SO EXCUPO *CLICK CLACK SLAP* SUOSO?”

Some more clicking. Moomamu watched and listened. He didn’t understand.

“Erm… yes, giant Babosian sex perverts. We are here to observe and watch and learn,” Moomamu said. “We are not here to participate.”

The smallest of them looked at Moomamu. His eyeballs undulated to Moomamu’s words. “Well … I’m not. I don’t know about him. He probably showed up expressly to participate.”
 

He pointed to Richard and the six eyeballs followed his finger to Richard.

“I didn’t show up for that. You brought us here,” Richard said, his face flustered as the blood rushed to his head. “I don’t want to participate either.” Richard shook his head as if to say “no” but when he clapped his hands together the Babosians replied.

“SKSOSK SHSO SO TO XESCO *CLAP*”

“Yes, that’s correct.” Richard clapped his hands again. He smiled. He thought he was getting somewhere. “I want to go home.”

“SHOCKZEO.”
 

The largest Babosian started to bounce with excitement as the other two pointed to a hole in the floor whilst keeping one of their eyes on Richard. It was some sort of natural spring. Full of a dark wine-like liquid. The fruity smell. The overpowering one was coming from that hole. That, or one of the many holes that lined the floor.
 

“Good sir, it sounds like they’re going to let us go,” Richard laughed. “I think they’re going to let us go.”

“No, they’re not,” Moomamu said. He felt a little sorry for Richard. No animal, living or dead, deserved what was about to happen to them. “They’re going to include us.”

Grant Darlington-Whit

“We really need to get some better lighting in here,” Grant said as he wandered into the attic room. “And it smells like shit.”

He pulled his pipe out of his smoking jacket pocket and placed it in his mouth, his dark moustache curling around it. He grabbed a lighted candle from a wooden slat and lit the small tobacco hill.
 

“The only thing that smells like shit in here is you,” a frail voice said. It was coming from the pale woman who sat with her legs crossed in the middle of the floor. Her yellowing white gown draped over her skinny and wrinkled body. She looked like an old corpse. Reanimated to remind people that dying is not a good look.

The attic was like most other attics. It was full of old toys, unused suitcases, hunting trophies, creepy dolls … the usual nonsense. The ceiling was angled on both sides so you could only stand up straight in the middle. There were dark corners where insects and spiders lived amongst the cobwebs. And then there was a small section right in the middle, for the pale woman. She’d been using it for years. As long as Grant could remember. Back when he was a kid. In all honesty, the whole place pissed Grant off. It made him nauseous and wheezy, and he hated the feeling of bugs crawling down his back or getting cobwebs in his hair.

“You’ve been in here for so long, I can never understand why you don’t move to somewhere a little less dusty,” he said.

“This is where I do my work. A writer has his desk. A mechanic has his bench. A seamstress has her factory. This is my place,” she said, her eyes covered by the gown draped over her. She looked like a murdered bride, freshly sniffed out by a police dog.

Grant nodded and smiled and couldn’t help but think she looked like she was made from talcum powder, held together with string and tape. If he were to kick her she’d explode into a fine chalky mist.

“So you’re looking for work?” she said, smiling, revealing those horrible yellow and black pegs she called teeth.

“Yes,” he said. “Bexley’s healing up and ready to go. Rosie’s … well, she’s herself, waiting for whatever is asked of her.”

The pale woman’s head swayed to unheard music and she whispered something under her breath.
 

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll ask the higher being.”

“Good, good,” Grant said.
 

A moment passed. He shook his head. He hated the pale woman. So much. If he could he would wrap his hands around her neck and …

“What. Now?” the pale woman shrieked. “You want me to do it now?”

“Yes,” Grant said. “Yes now.” He’d lost his train of thought.

The pale woman scoffed and stood. She walked over to the attic window — too dirty for sunlight — and grabbed a square board. She placed it on the floor along with an ornament of some kind. It was a circular piece of concave glass held in a wooden fixture.
 

She whispered some words under her breath, repeating something that sounded like “Hello” or “Spirit” or some such bullshit. Grant couldn’t hear and he didn’t care too much. This was all ritual, he thought. The little board with the letters and numbers, it was just a shitty little kid’s game. Do this to talk to spirits. It was for Halloween parties, not for serious work. Not for Family business.

However, it did work for their purposes. A Ouija Board actually made a perfect channelling device for higher beings — extra-terrestrials who communicated on a different plane of existence from their own. The pale woman would go on and on about how it was important that she spoke to her spirit and all that rubbish, but Grant knew, and his father knew, to let her go along with the charade. It was the meat that counted, not the garnish.
 

“Come to me, dear spirit,” the pale woman said. Grant shook his head and smiled — a ludicrous routine. “Come to me and bestow your advice, oh otherworldly one.”

Grant stymied a laugh and lit some more tobacco. He blew smoke into the room and the candlelight flickered. The glass moved. It moved to letter after letter and the pale woman laughed with giddy excitement as it glided across the board. With each finished word, the pale woman shouted it out to Grant.

The process was long, and Grant found himself growing tired, but a tip was a tip and work was work. And this particular tip-off was about a certain farm, and a certain pig. It wasn’t that complicated. He didn’t need to write it down.

The pale woman stopped at the last word. She didn’t shout it out. She looked … paler, if that were possible, and Grant took the pipe from his mouth.
 

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I have the sudden feeling that … there’s something with this case, something more evil than we’ve faced before. Something … more sinister. Something more vile. Something that may destroy us all if we don’t stop it.”

“Okay, okay,” Grant interjected, laughing and shaking his head. “I think you’re tired now. Must be nap time. You’re getting biblical again, you old sod.”
 

He shook off the woman’s theatrics. He had to laugh otherwise he’d be forced to hit her. He took the tip and went to his children.
 

Moomamu The Thinker

The tallest of the Babosi carried Richard and Moomamu to the giant pool of fruity goo. It bubbled beneath them. The pungent smell stung their eyes. It reached into their lungs.
 

The Babosi lowered Richard and dipped him into the spring, the same way Moomanu’d seen humans dip biscuits into their caffeine drinks. Dunking in and out, in and out, soaking it through. When he was lifted enough to breathe, he coughed and sputtered, until dipped again. The Babosi dipped him one more time and held him there for twenty seconds or so before lifting him out, Richard’s fine suit doused in the caustic dip.

Richard was busy catching his breath when the Babosi held him above its anus-like pleasure-hole in the middle of its torso. The hole widened and puckered up as the Babosi pushed Richard into it, holding onto him by his feet. Once fully submerged the Babosi writhed and clapped its extraneous limbs and pulled Richard back out.

“SCOD DSDOZC DOZH *CLAP CLICK* COCHZ.”
 

The two others watched on and danced with glee, their arms slapping and clicking with a new vigour. Moomamu noticed Richard’s hat was missing — stuck in the pleasure-hole, lost forever. Between trying to catch his breath and scream, Richard was reinserted into the pleasure-hole and pulled back out. Once out again he looked like he was losing consciousness. His face turning a shade paler. His eyes ever more bloodshot. His energy dropping.
 

After a few more rounds, he looked like he’d stopped breathing completely and he was tossed to the side like a used tissue, narrowly avoiding a sharp rock next to the spring. He didn’t move. Moomamu could just make out his flushed face and his chest rising and falling. Whatever light of life was in the poor human, whatever had kept him going for the past fifty years in that pocket dimension, had been vanquished with a few thrusts inside a Babosian pleasure-hole. He saw the very light evaporating above the poor human’s head.

A second smaller Babosi walked over to Richard’s almost lifeless body, picked him up and carried him towards the main orgy, still slurping away in the distance. Moomamu watched as Richard’s body was carried away, swinging in the Babosi’s hand like a toy. The Babosi skipped along like a small human spawn running towards its friends, to show off its new plaything. As Richard’s body disappeared into the cacophony of writhing limbs, Moomamu turned back to the remaining two Babosi.

“SZCOH *CLAP* SEQUZL *CLICK*”

“SIXS?”

“UIUPOX! *CLAP*.”

They spoke and clapped, occasionally pointing at Moomamu with their primary limbs.

“No thanks,” Moomamu said, still upside-down. “I’m not really into that sort of thing.”

The larger Babosi’s eye wandered to Moomamu like it was detached from its own body. It got so close Moomamu could see the red veins just beneath the white exterior. It’s giant pupil like a black hole — readying to breathe him in.
 

Without warning the Babosi holding him dunked him into the goo below. The hot bubbling fragrant mess was all around until it wasn’t and he could breathe again. He was dunked again and again, each time feeling the sticky caustic mess get into his beard. Into his hair. Into his ears and nose. It burned his skin. When they pulled him out the last time, the substance stung his eyes so badly he felt like he could rip them out.
 

The Babosi lifted him out, held him in front of his or her eyestalks and then lowered him by his feet towards the pleasure-hole.
 

Moomamu peered down at the pleasure-hole. Its wrinkly edges widened as he screamed like a small human female and all he could think about was Gary.

***

And with that Moomamu opened his eyes, still screaming, and back on the snake-thing, the now familiar howl of its wheels grinding and braking against the metal tracks all around. He must have slipped out of this universe and back pretty quietly because nobody seemed to notice he’d been gone. Gary did little more than bat his eyelids before he closed them again. The humans on the seats around him were sleeping. One of them was gargling air with his open mouth. The human next to him was giggling every time the man gargled.

“CALLING AT ANGEL. NEXT STOP KING’S CROSS.”

Moomamu found his face involuntarily doing the smile configuration. The snake-thing whirred onwards into the dark and Moomamu ran his hand over his beard and watched in horror as a thick film of fruity mucus transferred from his beard to his hand. In fact, he was covered in the stuff. The smell was making him sick. He couldn’t complain too much. The image of Richard Okotolu’s almost-lifeless body disappearing into the sea of fleshy limbs clung to him like the goo to his beard. His smile configuration dropped.

Yeah, Moomamu didn’t feel like he could complain too much.
 

Bexley Darlington-Whit

Bexley zipped up the duffel bag. It was a Burberry bag. Expensive. He liked the feel of the soft fabric against his skin. He’d packed everything — knives, divining rods, IR thermometer, EMF, two different flashlights, various sensors that checked for changes in temperature, movement, sound, etc, a quartz crystal, an amethyst, his knuckleduster, the old pistol with The Family brand on it, and a collection of notebooks, one of which was his personal diary. Rosie didn’t know about the diary.

He placed the bag in the boot, next to Rosie’s — some unnamed brand — and slammed the Saab boot shut. He walked over to the passenger seat, climbed in. The car still smelled of Hannah Birkin’s burnt flesh. The smell had nested within the fabric lining of the interior. He could tell Rosie was thinking the same thing because she reached into the glove box and opened a fresh packet of pine air fresheners and looped them around the rear view mirror and opened the windows and turned on the fans. She was trying to push the bad air out, get some clean air in.
 

“Your hands doing okay, Bexley?” she said as she turned the ignition.
 

“Yes. They’re fine,” he said. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“We, my fine brother, are going to see a man about a farm, and a farm about a pig.
That
is where we will find our next space-time inconsistency.”
 

She blew her fringe out of her eyes and the car roared into life. They sped around the corner, through Soho, and stopped at the first set of traffic lights. In front of them was a sea of cars as far as they could see.
 

Rosie turned the CD player on and Abba came on singing ‘Waterloo’. She smiled at Bexley as if to say “You may as well get comfortable”.