Enraptured: A Novelette About Lamias



  ENRAPTURED

  A novelette about lamias by

  Richard Martinus

  ___________

  Copyright text & cover image © Richard Martinus Wilson, 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names and descriptions of characters, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Enraptured

  Author’s afterword

  Other works by this author

  ___________

  PROLOGUE

  I opened the front door and found myself face to face with a short, skinny girl of about nineteen or twenty summers. A natural blonde from the look of it, and her delicate, high-cheekboned face, if not stunningly beautiful, was pretty and full of character. Oh, and her wide, golden-irised eyes were quite unlike anything I’d ever seen before. She carried a clipboard with several sheets of paper attached, while a large bag, rather like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, rested on the doorstep next to her feet.

  She consulted the top sheet on her clipboard. “Mister Richard Martinus?”

  “That’s me. And you are?”

  This was going to be one of those phoney surveys as a prelude to them trying to sell you high-speed broadband or solar panels or whatever, so I should have sent her packing. But I didn’t have anything I had to be doing at that moment and I confess I was enjoying watching her smiling, perky face, so I inclined towards indulgence. And I mentioned the eyes, right?

  “I’m April,” said my visitor. “I’m here to tattoo your forehead.”

  “You’re… what?”

  “Your forehead. Is now convenient? Only I’ve got loads more people still to do today.”

  “What are you? Some kind of door-to-door tattoo artist?”

  “No!” April chortled. “This isn’t my normal job. You wouldn’t believe my normal job! But there’s this really big do on, so it’s like an all hands to the pumps kind of situation, see?”

  I didn’t see, really, but that was rather beside the point.

  “I don’t think I want a tattoo on my forehead,” I explained.

  “It’ll be just fine,” April assured me. “Nothing big or embarrassing – just a QR code. It’ll give you a sort of roguish air.”

  “What do I need a QR code for?” If this was some new government policy, I’d missed the announcement.

  “Oh, you know – it’s for the rapture thing.”

  The rapture thing. Did this mean anything to me? Well, Rapture was a 1981 hit for the group Blondie, but something told me April wasn’t here to discuss long past their sell-by date American new wave bands and, anyway, I’m more of a Pink Floyd man.

  Fat raindrops started tumbling from the sky, meeting their end in large, dark splodges on the walls and pavement.

  “What about my wife?” I asked. “Is she down for a tattoo too?”

  April consulted her clipboard again. For some reason, a snatch of the song ‘I’ve got a little list’ from The Mikado went through my head.

  “Yup, she’s here,” said April. “Is she in?”

  “No, she’s just popped out for some milk and a Radio Times. She won’t be long.”

  The rain was falling more heavily, flattening April’s hair as drops struck her head.

  “Look, do you want to come inside and wait?” I asked. “I promise you I’m quite harmless.”

  “I’m not,” said April, with a feral grin. “Anyway, I can’t very well tattoo you on the doorstep, can I?”

  I ushered her into the hallway where, noticing the shoe rack, she dutifully slipped off her trainers.

  “Tea?”

  “Please – one sugar.”

  “Make yourself at home.” I indicated the doorway that led into the living room.

  Now, our living room is fairly small, and it is dominated by a positively gargantuan padded armchair. This wasn’t really our idea of interior design – the damn thing had just looked much smaller in the showroom. We would have gotten rid of it in exchange for something a bit more apropos, but our daughter fell in love with it and, whenever she visits the parental home, she swoops into the monster chair and can only be prised out with difficulty for meals, bed, etc.

  When I returned to the living room with two mugs of tea, April had partially buried herself in a nest of cushions in the middle of the armchair and was peering out at the surroundings with an expression of unalloyed delight. The beast had made another conquest. I handed April her mug and perched on the near end of the settee. I had a whole bunch of questions for my vivacious visitor, but one thing she’d said in particular had been niggling me whilst making the tea.

  “What is it about your normal job that’s so unbelievable?” I asked.

  April took a sip from her mug and grinned at me over the crest of a bulging armrest.

  “I’m a lamia,” she said, as others might say “I’m a stockbroker” or “I’m an aromatherapist”.

  “A lamia,” I repeated. “Don’t they eat their young or something?”

  “Eew – of course not! That wouldn’t make much sense, would it? We’d become extinct in one generation!”

  “Not much of an evolutionary stable strategy,” I conceded. “I’m very sorry – the curse of half-remembered Wikipedia entries. What do lamias do?”

  So April told me.

  I

  “Mel! Mel!”

  The tall woman in the slate-grey business suit turned around to see who was hailing her. Her body was lean and sinuous; her shoulder-length hair was black with a splash of blue and white highlights; her aquiline face would have been starkly beautiful but for the long, jagged scar that ran down its left side from temple to cheek. The presence of the scar was all the more surprising when you consider that she could easily have eliminated it from her default human avatar had she wished. She kept it because, to her way of thinking, it was a badge of honour.

  Melody appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with embryonic laughter lines at the corners of her green eyes softening an otherwise austere visage. Those green eyes now watched her young colleague April struggle towards her through the swell of humanity that ever heaved within the shopping mall.

  “Hey, squirt. What are you doing here?”

  April drew up to her side. She was a full foot shorter than the older woman, but made up for it by being bouncy.

  “I did the night shift, remember? Only then I couldn’t get to sleep, so I came here to kill some time watching the kids play the townie game.”

  “The townie game?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t. Enlighten me.”

  April explained, “You all go and hang around outside Burger King. The boys line up along one wall, wearing puffer jackets and baseball caps and trying to look hard. The girls line up along the wall opposite wearing trainers and the tightest, shortest skirts they can get away with without freaking out their parents. One of the boys shouts: ‘Oi, Ria, come over here!’ at one of the girls. There follows a lot of discussion and giggling among the girls, after which one of them, not Ria, shouts: ‘She’s not coming – you come over here!’ After lengthy discussion among the boys, he doesn’t. Return to start and repeat as often as you want: the townie game.”

  Melody gazed blankly at the golden-eyed girl for a few moments as people elbowed past.

  “You’re losing your marbles,” was her considered opinion.

  “It’s what they do!” April protested. “Come and see if you don’t believe me!”

  “I believe you secretly wish you were taking part. Fess up
– in your heart of hearts, you’re a crypto-townie.”

  “I resemble that remark!” cried April, the malapropism deliberate, her indignation not entirely feigned. “I’m nothing like a townie! I have self-respect!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Townies are wack!”

  “Whack?”

  “Wack.”

  “Whack.”

  “You’re not saying it right. It’s wack.”

  Melody twisted her mouth into shape.

  “W-wack.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Fabulous. Is wack good or bad?”

  “Wack is not good! ‘Townies are wack’ means ‘townies are well bad’. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

  Melody observed, “I’m just wondering whether Donald Duck impersonations are consistent with the dignity of our status as the underworld’s most feared predators.”

  April chortled. “I bet it’s set out somewhere in our professional code of conduct. Where are you headed, anyway? Can I come along?”

  “I was looking for an Ann Summers or something of the sort – get some new lingerie ideas. My current imaginary wardrobe is starting to look a bit last year. I don’t think I ought to take you, though. It’d probably corrupt your impressionable young mind.”

  “I bet you don’t even know where they have one here. I do!”

  “Oh, very well. Lead on, Macduff.”

  April linked arms with her colleague.

  “Walk this way. And it’s ‘Lay on, Macduff’.”

  “What is?”

  “The quote from Shakespeare. ‘Lay on, Macduff’.”

  “Who’d want to lay on Macduff?”

  April was about to suggest Mrs Macduff as a possible candidate, but was distracted by a sudden stinging pain in her posterior.

  “Ow!”

  Melody stopped in mid-stride. “What?” she demanded.

  April didn’t answer. Instead, she spun around and shouted, “Did you smack my bum?”

  A number of people in the immediate vicinity stopped and stared. April ignored them.

  “Yeah, you!” she continued, equally loudly, pointing at a young man who had his back to her. “I’m talking to you!”

  The young man slowly rotated his head to look over his shoulder.

  “Wasn’t me,” he asserted.

  Melody, who had also turned to face the accused, stamped towards him.

  “Did you smack my friend on the bum?” she demanded menacingly.

  “Jesus, sister, get a grip!” said the young man. “It’s no biggie. Sort of a compliment, if you think about it.”

  “No,” said Melody, “it isn’t a compliment. Neither is this.”

  She arced forward, her body stretching impossibly until it was over twenty feet long, her suit melting into her increasingly tubular form, morphing into grey and green scales. Her head lengthened, grew larger, sprouted a snout armed with formidable, curved fangs. Mouth wide open, the monstrous apparition fell on the petrified young man and bit his head off. His twitching, decapitated body slumped to the floor, spraying arterial blood onto the equally petrified lookers-on.

  “Eew!” April squealed. “Did you have to do that?”

  The giant serpent that was Melody couldn’t answer for a moment or two, occupied as she was with peristalsing her victim’s head down her gullet. This task accomplished, she responded: “Yes. On mature reflection, I reckon I did.”

  “You are really revolting sometimes!”

  “You bite victims, don’t you?”

  “But I don’t swallow!”

  “Oh.” The news seemed to surprise Melody. She pulled in the end of her tail so as not to trip up any of the screaming shoppers who were stampeding towards the exits. “Well, no harm done – he’ll grow another one in a couple of days.”

  “Only if he was already dead,” April pointed out. “Most people in this place aren’t, you know. Did you check?”

  “Of course not – there wasn’t time. But he was dead all right, I’m sure of it. Sure-ish…”

  “And even if he was,” April persisted, “he might have been with the other lot.”

  “In Heaven? A girl’s bottom-slapper? You’re having a laugh! Eternal damnation’s almost too good for them.”

  “Or in one of the top five levels of Hell. You know we’re not supposed to touch them, let alone chew bits off them!”

  Melody looked down at the headless corpse and the slowly congealing lagoon of blood around its upper end.

  “Bugger,” she muttered. “Something tells me I’m going to be spending the afternoon completing incident report forms.”

  “Meanwhile, let’s get out of here,” April urged. “There’s a pair of security guards heading our way.”

  “Okay.” Melody shook herself and shimmered back into her human form. “Any place here do good coffee and cakes?”

  “You’re still hungry?”

  “Dessert.”

  They set off at a rapid walking pace, pointedly ignoring the security guards’ efforts to attract their attention.

  “Bottom-slappers are wack,” said Melody.

  April cried, “By George, she’s got it!”

  They turned a corner and slipped into the first café that presented itself. The cakes were good.

  II

  Glenda twisted in her chair, trying to fidget herself into wakefulness. It had already been a long day, during which she’d had to attend to no fewer than four victims. That was all very well for the youngsters, but she was of an age when she needed to rest between feeds or she’d get dyspeptic, sleepy and very irritable. For her, two feeds during one eight-hour shift were more than enough; indeed, staffing levels had originally been set so that no lamia of any age would have to do more than this. Now she felt in urgent need of a post-prandial nap.

  In outward appearance, Glenda was a strikingly handsome woman in her late forties or early fifties. Her defiantly white, almost waist-length hair was combed back and tied up with a colourfully patterned scarf. The rest of her outfit was elegantly sober, in navy blue and white. Buxom but nowhere plump, she embodied serious senior crumpet, eliciting the kind of thoughts to which the middle-aged man’s fancy lightly turned in the spring, when it wasn’t turning to thoughts of gardening.

  “Where was the rest of your team?” asked her line manager Carnemelleck, a short, round and distractingly priapic satyromorph.

  “April covered the night shift,” said Glenda. “Melody has taken a few days off. I insisted – she was starting to get very jaded. Our three blocked vacancies you know about. We’re overstretched. If anyone goes off ill – which, any day now, will probably be me – we’ve had it.”

  “It’s not just the recruitment freeze that’s the problem,” complained her boss. “If it were, we could work something out. It’s you lamias – there’s a nationwide shortage. So it’s in your own hands, really – you’ll just have to do some procreating.”

  Glenda replied, “I’m too old; April’s too young; Melody is, as it were, disinclined.”

  “You’re hardly too old,” the demonic manager protested gallantly. As Head of Nether Parts Punishments, Tartarus Eternal Repository, Afterlife Services England & Wales (Hell), he knew something of the lamian breeding cycle. Lamias produced offspring parthenogenetically but, in order to stimulate ovulation, they needed first to have non-violent intercourse with another demon or a human – or, at a pinch, anything male and suitably endowed. If all went well, they would lay an egg several weeks later which, after six months’ careful tending, would hatch into a young serpent demoness genetically similar but not identical to her mother. (Lamias have lots of spare DNA which they can shuffle around, enabling them to avoid turning into a race of clones. It’s quite an interesting subject that merits scientific study.) By the age of ten, most lamias could disguise themselves as humans and other things; by eighteen or nineteen they were ready to start work in Hell, doing that special thing they do. Lamias were something of a long-term investment.

>   Carnemelleck looked at his maturely magnetic subordinate. He offered her a sympathetic smile accompanied by a discreet raised eyebrow, to indicate that, if she were contemplating refreshing the stock of lamiadom at this moment in time, he would be prepared to step into the breach and help supply any necessary stimulation. Glenda interpreted the look correctly, excepting only that she failed to spot the adjectives ‘sympathetic’ and ‘discreet’. She regretted not attending the meeting in her natural form (i.e. a twenty-six foot long venomous reptile), so that she could have leant over, picked her boss up in her mouth and given him a vigorous shake without appearing indecorous.

  “We also can’t afford to have anyone swanning off on maternity leave,” she snapped. “Advertise abroad.”

  “Can’t,” said Carnemelleck. “We’d be accused of plundering the less-developed world of its qualified staff again. Overseas is a no-go zone, recruitment-wise.”

  The weary lamia sank back in her seat, closing her eyes.

  “Well, you’ll have to do something,” she said. “This can’t go on.”

  “I have one suggestion,” said the naked goat-man, idly prodding his swollen phallus with a blunt paperknife. “How about a secondment?”

  Opening her eyes in surprise, Glenda protested: “You just said there was a nationwide shortage.”

  “There is. So it wouldn’t exactly be, at least, not in so many words… a lamia.”

  Glenda expelled a refined snort.

  “Preposterous! Nobody else can do what we do. Not properly, anyway.”

  “I know it’s not an ideal solution, and it goes without saying that it would only be temporary – six months at the most. But if you were willing to approach this with an open mind, I could put out some feelers…”

  “And that’s really the best you can come up with?”

  Carnemelleck spread his hands.

  “These are difficult times.”

  “So they keep telling us,” Glenda sighed. “All right, go turn over some stones and see what crawls out – but I know I’m going to regret this. Last time I opened my mind I allowed myself to be talked into watching Anaconda. That film was an unforgivable travesty!”