Back to GatefoldIssue #4 by Meriades Rai
Nov 2007 |
Stefan Strang stood before a plate glass window and stared out into the driving rain. Night had fallen, and Greenwich Park was dark, illuminated only by a scattering of lamps along the footpaths and by the nigh-heavenly glow of the Royal Observatory nestled among the trees some two hundred yards distant. The downpour had lasted for over an hour. Thus far the rumblings of thunder were remote, but he was convinced that the storm was moving closer. Both literally and figuratively. All ends up it was a rather appropriate metaphor, he couldn’t help but think.
The oncoming storm. A war, between two opposing forces for the fate of an unsuspecting world. A shame, really, that whilst one of those forces was an army swelled with the ranks of nightmares and monsters the other was a ragtag bunch of strangers who actually had very little idea what was going on at all. Of course, considering his miserable-arse luck, it went without saying whose side he found himself on…
“He’s here.”
Stefan turned at the sound of a woman’s voice, sharp with Scandinavian accent, at his shoulder. No, not a woman – a girl. Samantha Parrington was rather striking, carrying herself with a regal poise and with a definite sense of aged wisdom in those delicate, cerulean blue eyes, but she was still only eighteen years old. Stefan smiled, then stopped, conscious that he might be coming across as lecherous. Not that he usually minded, but this situation was different. For a start, this girl had a sword, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. However, not smiling was rude. So he smiled again, trying very hard not to be at all lecherous and consequently feeling his face cramp, meaning that he now probably looked like he was retarded. He then cursed inwardly as he realised that the girl wasn’t paying him any attention in the first place but was instead staring out of the window. He rolled his eyes. Yep. Total fucking retard.
“Stefan, if you’d be so kind as to greet our guest at the door whilst I prepare the tea…?”
Behind Samantha, across the parlour in which they stood, Stefan saw the old man in the green cloak who was responsible for all of this – The Ancient – looking on benignly whilst leaning upon his gnarled cane. Stefan sighed and turned back to the window. There was a heavy-set man with a scarred eye loitering out there in the rain, regarding the crooked house in the middle of the park with some suspicion. And rightly so. If houses could be described as having personalities then this one was a cantankerous old fucker who was one udder short of a cow.
Samantha was dressed in blue jeans, cream sweater and camel suede calf boots, her platinum blonde hair tied back in a braid from her pretty face. She had appropriated her new attire in Glasgow before travelling down to London – appropriating in this instance being stolen from the goods bay of a department store after her departure from the Rosewell Institute – and it appeared that Eric Brooks had done the same before catching a flight from Dublin. With his shaved head and muscular frame sheathed in a black leather jacket and trousers of the same, and with that scar stretching from his right eye to the corner of his mouth, Brooks looked exactly like Stefan had expected an escaped convict would look, particularly one who had requested he be called Blade.
“At first impression, a formidable ally,” declared Samantha, who herself was adamant that she be referred to as Valkyrie. Stefan grimaced. Bloody oddballs. Well, if they thought he was going to answer to Doctor Strange then they could fuck off, couldn’t they?
Outside, Eric Brooks – Blade – seemed to make his decision. Reluctantly he started to climb the flight of steps leading up to the door of The Ancient’s misshapen Sanctum Sanctorum.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter,” Stefan murmured. “Well, that makes three out of four. Now we just have to pray the last poor bastard has what it takes to deal with whatever’s about to come and bite her on the arse, don’t we…?”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"CONFLAGRATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
“Shake your pussy, little kitten. You’re on in sixty!”
Patsy Walker exhaled a tongue of smoke, stroking the length of her cigarette between her gloved fingers, and stared at her reflection in her dressing table mirror. Half the glass was obscured by photographs cornered into the gilt frame, brief messages scribbled in lipstick and, in one instance, a pair of lacy pink knickers. Mementos and discards. The legacy of the performance circuit and all who rode her. None of these reminiscences belonged to Patsy. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. In the near distance she heard the melody of her signature tune rise. Shake your pussy, little kitten. She dropped the butt of the cigarette to the floor and snipped it beneath the pointed toe of her shoe, then headed out of her dressing room in the direction of the stage.
It was raining outside. Of course it was. This was Soho, London. All it ever did here was fucking rain. It was an urban myth that the Inuit had four hundred different words for snow – in truth it was barely a dozen – but one could easily draw an authentic parallel for Londoners and rain. Tonight it was, to use the popular vernacular, pissing it down, lurid with reflected neon and prompting the gutters along the edges of the labyrinthine back streets to flood and fester. The sign for Château Noir blinked steadily through the deluge on the corner of Marshall St. and Broadwick, a stone’s throw from Carnaby Street but a good hundred yards from the hustle at the heart of Soho’s sex district, the revue bars and porn pits and the Girls! Girls! Girls! milieu. It didn’t matter. The Château didn’t cater for stragglers from the tourist erotica scene. It was an establishment for a more discerning clientele.
The interior of the Château was warm and dry. The air was soft and golden with cigarette haze and lamplight, and it throbbed with the murmur of old jazz. Billie, Ella, Louis. The walls were wood panel, the floors varnished bareboard. The bar was mahogany. No beers, just spirits. No bullshit. Scotch, vodka, absinthe. There were posters on the walls, professional, in good frames and behind glass. A lot of them monochrome. Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lydia Thompson, Britt Ekland. The original billboard for The Night They Raided Minsky’s directed by Friedkin, a year or two before he moved out of art house and gained success with The French Connection and The Exorcist back in the late 60s, early 70s. Huge curtains flanked a raised stage, black and burgundy velvet laced with gilded rope, whilst the remainder of the room was divided into two levels, a main floor and a mezzanine, both filled with tables.
Château Noir wasn’t a strip joint. It was a Burlesque hall, steeped in the tradition of vaudeville and pageant that had been popular in Europe in the 1800s and then America in the early 20th century before being neglected until its widespread revival in the 90s. Striptease was certainly an integral ingredient of the overall performance, but the embellishments in the presentation – mostly nostalgic fetish – were what made Burlesque unique. The average mark slinking in off the street, hoping to get his rocks off in a private booth to a skin-and-bone heroin chic whore gyrating behind cum-stained glass or wrapping her thighs about a metal pole, he just wasn’t going to get the picture. Everything that was on offer here tapped into a deeper reservoir than seedy sex cabaret.
The Château was a class above. A shame, then, that this would be the last night it would open its doors.
Overhead lights, already low, dimmed further until the stage was cast in a hazy glow and in the audience the red tips of countless cigarettes burned bright like fireflies in the dark. Patsy Walker strode out into the spotlight to a sultry blare of brass – trumpets and hard horns, licked with a trill of sax and blues piano – and a wave of applause and whistles. She was tall, with a build somewhere between cosy slender and voluptuous; high breasts and sculpted hips, legs as long as summer days, she moved with a languid sweep, her entire body stirring with a kink as if it were delicately hinged in the region of her navel. Her sensual elegance was accentuated by her apparel, a corset of midnight blue crushed velvet trimmed with black Chantilly lace and a flared skirt of ruffled amber silk and ivory chiffon. In addition she wore arm-length gloves of matching blue silk, blue velvet pumps with a dagger toe and five-inch heel, and fully-fashioned, seamed black nylon stockings. Whenever she rolled her hips, which was often, the skirt hem skipped to flash the strip of her suspenders and a glimpse of creamy flesh where it met the lacy crown of her nylons, a familiar calling card of the slinky Burlesque tease.
Patsy’s greatest allure was her authenticity. With large green eyes rendered dark with stylised mascara, cherrywood-red hair cut into a slick bob about the moon of her face, and a sultry kiss of a smile, she could have been the embodiment of a Louise Brooks or a Carole Lombard. Paint her in vintage sepia and she would have shone, all monochrome and musical hall and erotique noir.
And, just in case the audience weren’t already lost, it was then that she began to sing.
“When God appeared before me I was drowning in my pool…”
A voice like drizzled black honey, rich and slow, all bourbon and cigarettes and misty-eyed memories. Patsy Walker.
“I was fifty over thirty but looking real cool…”
There was a hush at every table, on every barstool. When the door that led out onto Marshall St. opened, followed by the stark click of heels descending a flight of stairs, the only man who turned to look was the bartender. At the time he was drying a glass with a cloth. As he watched the approach of the new arrival his movements slowed.
“He said, A life of tedious insights and an overflowing cup…”
The woman was tall and lean, dressed in a black leather coat that fell in straight, delicate lines to her ankles. It glistened wetly. Still raining. Her hair was a tumble of damp ringlets that clung to her skin. Shoulder-length hair, russet threaded with gold. And copper-burgundy skin. Black lips, cerise eyes and copper-burgundy skin that had no right to exist.
“Just don’t cut the mustard. I’m afraid you can’t come up.”
“What can I get you?” the bartender heard himself ask. The red-haired woman smiled.
“Sweet melancholy,” she breathed, with an exotic cadence.
“Is that a cocktail? You’ll have to tell me what goes into the mix…”
And the red-haired woman’s smile grew.
“I fell way down it seemed into a bottomless pit…”
“First you take some unrequited love, and then you add a dash of pain.” the woman murmured, leaning forward against the bar. Her coat loosened a little, and a faint swell of breast caught the light. “A childhood sweetheart, clever and pretty with a kink in her blonde hair and a smart tongue that no-one else really appreciated. Not like you. You adored her from afar, until one day at the school library you got to talking. Ancient history. A shared interest. You allowed yourself to believe your new friendship would blossom, that all those old romantic movies weren’t so improbable after all, that everyone in the world would one day meet their perfect someone. A few days later you heard she was fucking some thick-necked gorilla eight years older than her, a squaddie with a thing for schoolgirls. You never spoke to her again, about ancient history or anything else. You know what happened to her? She got a habit. Amphetamines. Anti-depressants. Had an abortion. Then, a year later, a miscarriage. On a number of occasions she earned money by sucking cocks in the alleyway behind a West End nightclub. One night, someone she’d just deep-throated kicked her head against the wall until she haemorrhaged and then he urinated on herself as she died at his feet.”
“Where a sign saying Hotel Hades was the only thing a’lit…”
“Finally you add a twist of the knife. You never knew how much she liked you, did you? Even before that day at the library. She was shy. She’d just been looking for a way to talk to you, to get to know you. You would’ve ended up together if someone playing a prank hadn’t told her you were a confused homosexual who wanted to test his preferences on her. She was so hurt she fell into bed with the first guy she met the next night, the gorilla. Because of a cruel joke, you never got married the way you should have done, never had children. No Christmas Eves, no lazy Sunday mornings with toast and newspapers, no making amends after arguments over the in-laws with kisses and groping in the dark. She died choking on cum and blood when instead she could have been happy.”
“Beelzebub was hanging, but he wouldn’t cut no slack…”
The woman trailed a sharp, red nail upon the polished surface of the bar. Her coat had fallen open a little more. Her breasts were bare. She wore a collar about her throat, black leather studded with fragments of bone, pulled so tight it cut into her windpipe. “That is how you make sweet melancholy,” said Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound Islands of Pain, Desire and Regret, with a sigh of disinterest. “Now, kill yourself for me, you wretched little fleshling cunt.”
“He told me, The Big Cat has spoken. I’m afraid you’re going back.”
The bartender was weeping as he took the glass in his hand and swatted it against the edge of the bar, causing it to shatter. He then picked up a large shard, placed the jagged hook against his throat, and pushed. Blood erupted in a fountain as the glass sank deep. The bartender staggered, then fell. A number of men turned on their stools, suddenly aware that something was happening behind them. They saw the blood and the glass, and the woman in the black raincoat, which had now fallen aside to reveal a pair of long, tapered legs, smooth and bare, copper-red, legs that begged to be licked, up and down, inside and out. She had no feet. The click upon the stairs hadn’t been stiletto heels, it had been the sound of cloven hooves on wood. She radiated an unsettling heat, and a perfume of orchid and moist sex.
Someone cried out. Someone screamed. There was the sound of scraping chair legs, and then the clatter of an overturned table followed by the splintering of glass. Up on stage, Patsy Walker faltered at the same time as the blare of horns faded away – and then, abruptly, there was silence. The calm before the storm. Satana raised her fingers to her mouth and began to suck them clean of the bartender’s blood where it had splashed. Then, almost as an afterthought, she glanced up and methodically proceeded to make eye contact with each of the numerous men and scattering of women in her vicinity before finally turning in her stool and gazing across the darkened room.
“You are The Ancient’s puppet, yes?” she asked the performer upon the stage, in a raised yet measured voice. “You possess the ring?”
Patsy Walker, in her corset and heels and flared skirt, didn’t reply. But she wasn’t struck dumb through fear. In fact, she appeared remarkably composed. Slowly, she extended her gloved right hand, palm upwards, fist clenched – and then she flipped up her middle finger, about which nestled a ring of green malachite, stark against the blue velvet. “You’re late,” she said, her voice a smoky purr. “I’ve been waiting for you to show your face for three nights now.”
Satana inclined her head, her expression curious. “You aren’t afraid?” she mused. “Were you, perhaps, the first of the old one’s recruits to his cause? He seems to have primed you well.”
“Ah, well… there’s the mystery, isn’t it? Let’s just say I’m a little more open to fantastical tales of the paranormal and otherworldly forces than other women would be, due to certain… ancestral traits.”
A hush settled. If the atmosphere in the Château had been keen before, now it was decidedly razor-edged.
Satana’s countenance darkened, her eyes narrowing to smouldering slits. “Indeed?” she breathed. “Well, well. An unforeseen wrinkle. And so, The Ancient reminds us all of his eternal cunning…”
She stood then, her raincoat falling open to reveal a lithe body scarcely clad in swathes of gauzy nylon. She raised both hands above her head, fingers splayed. Her damp hair flickered, as if touched by a gust of breeze. And, all about her, men and women simultaneously turned towards the stage, their expressions flushed but otherwise blank, their arms hanging limply by their sides but their hands twitching and snatching at thin air. “That woman is your enemy,” Satana declared, her cadence sharp yet soft, like a dagger blade wrapped in silk.
“Now hunt her down and fuck her to death.”
The crowd surged forward in a single mass, their voices instantly raised in a wordless, communal wail. On stage, Patsy Walker looked on with a casual insouciance, kicking off one blue velvet shoe and then the other, leaving her standing in her stocking feet. Then she raised her right hand to her lips and softly kissed the malachite ring, which was beginning to pulse with a soft glow – as were her eyes, bright as jewels within the black rings of her lashes. In the next instant there came a curious sound, the gentle whisper of shredding material. Velvet and nylon, to be precise. Patsy flexed the fingers of both hands, revealing that her nails – painted black – had suddenly grown to some three inches in length, ripping through her gloves and glinting like a fan of blades. Below, her toenails – again, varnished black – had pierced her stockings in similar fashion and now dug sharply into the wood underfoot.
To Patsy’s left, three men were clambering up onto the stage. To her right, two more, and two women. Some old, some young. Suits and ties. Jeans and shirts. A cocktail dress. English, Japanese, Moroccan. Ordinary people transformed, students and shop assistants and legal secretaries and more, each of them howling and slathering like animals, their eyes white and vacant. And down in the darkened auditorium, leaning back against the bar whilst her tribe of mindless marionettes lumbered forth, there was Satana Blackheart, lighting a cigarette and flicking back her hair and smiling cruelly at what she had instigated. Surprisingly, Patsy was actually smiling in turn. They were actually alike in many ways, these two, opposite sides of the same coin. In another life, well… they could have been sisters.
Patsy glanced at her approaching assailants, her eyes sparkling. “Meiow,” she breathed, licking her lips with a tiny, pink tongue. “Come then, hungry hounds… let the chase begin!”
The nearest man made a grab for Patsy’s arm, but even as he did so she was already moving, springing backwards from her standing position and twisting at the waist in mid-air. She lashed out with one foot as she travelled, slashing her attacker across the face with her new talons and flinging him sideways against his fellows, then swept her other leg high and over her head, initiating a spiralling somersault that no Olympic gymnast could ever have executed. As Patsy whirled she snapped out one arm and then the other, ripping out the throats of two more of her attackers and filling the air with the mist of their blood.
More aggressors closed in, flailing with fists, teeth bared. One grabbed a handful of skirt and tried to tear it away, but a savage kick to the gut followed by another to the jaw sent the man screaming over the edge of the stage, down into the shadows where he crashed into a table with a crunch of bone. A woman lunged, her nails scrabbling at Patsy’s hair, but the latter ducked and shouldered her enemy against the legs with such force that it splintered one of her knees. She spun, leaping and skipping, a whorl of red hair and blue velvet and stocking legs, scattering her adversaries in all directions – the majority of them clutching at ragged strips of flesh and blood where their foe’s claws had bitten deep.
Patsy was rather enjoying herself, it seemed. It was at this point, however, that she became aware of a presence in her mind, its disembodied voice raised in a cry of utter disbelief.
What are you doing? What the holy fuck are you doing?
Patsy faltered in the midst of the melee, and received a fist to the stomach for her trouble. She spat, momentarily winded, then retaliated with a bestial snarl of rage, removing three quarters of her assailant’s face with one slash of her claws.
“Get out of my head, bitch!” she roared. “I’ll be with you soon enough…”
I’m not her, you idiot. Her name’s Satana. I’m Doctor Stefan Strang.
“Doctor Strange?”
Strang. Strang. Jesus, why is that so fucking difficult for everyone to grasp?
Patsy grunted and hurled herself clear of the mob that was now massing upon the stage, those still living stumbling over the bloodied bodies of those already fallen. Her speed and agility were astonishing, her balance exquisite, but she was beginning to run out of room to manoeuvre.
I’m an emissary of The Ancient, the voice in her head persisted. The old bastard who gave you the ring, remember? There are four of us, his disciples. You’re the last one. We –
“Listen, Doctor, can we do this later?” Patsy hissed, kicking out a leg and spearing a shrieking woman through the chest with the talons of her stocking foot. “Just in case you didn’t realise, I’m actually rather busy…”
Yeah, so I’m noticing. You realise that you’re killing these people, right?
“Kill or be killed.”
But they’re innocent people, for fuck’s sake! They’re not responsible for their actions. The Ancient recruited you to fight Satana and the others, not do their fucking work for them. If you just –
“Doctor Strange, seriously… can you please just get be quiet?” Patsy purred. “I think I’ve finally got everyone where I want them.”
What? What are you –
Patsy Walker had been corralled, perched upon the forward edge of the stage and tightly surrounded by Satana’s minions. She was streaked with blood, her outfit torn in numerous places, and her face and upper arms were lined with scratches, and yet still she smiled. Now, even as the voice of Stefan Strang warbled shrilly in her mind, she tensed – and then, a split second before the crowd surged forward to consume her, she leapt backwards, flicking her long legs up and over her head almost in the manner of a contortionist before snapping her upper torso sharply at the waist and executing a perfect somersault. Now veritably hanging in midair, her face turned towards the throng, she opened her mouth…
…and disgorged a bellow of crackling green flames, the same hue as her bright eyes and glowing ring. The cloud of unnatural fire engulfed the crowd in a rush, igniting in their hair, their clothes, scorching their skin to a thoroughly vile greenish-black and the texture of melting wax. Before, the mystically manipulated audience had howled; now, they screamed. Oh, how they screamed.
As her victims writhed and scuttled about the stage like burning ants, Patsy completed her back flip, landing with perfect precision upon a table. There were still three men to concern her here, three assailants who had been unable to clamber out of the auditorium and were now milling about the mezzanine. Three from in excess of fifty patrons unfortunate enough to have been in attendance at Château Noir that evening. Patsy executed the first with a flying scissors kick, slicing open his throat with the talons of one foot, then snapped out her other leg and splintered the skull of her second foe with a stocking heel. She ducked beneath the desperate lunge of her final enemy and disembowelled him. Shouldering his convulsing body aside she then stood tall, green eyes narrowed, staring at the bar directly ahead. There was blood on her lips. Not hers. She absently licked herself clean.
Satana Blackheart lit a cigarette.
“Impressive,” she murmured. “I would add for a human… but you aren’t, are you? Not fully.”
“Human enough.”
“Where I come from there are beasts similar to yourself that roam the Plains of Sufferance; swift, savage. Merciless. They roast the flesh from the bones of otherworldly souls cast adrift in the smouldering dunes. We call them - ”
“Infernatra. The closest translation in our tongue would be Hellcats.”
For the first time, Satana’s composure truly rippled in displeasure. The cigarette was burning away to a column of ash between her red fingers, forgotten. Patsy Walker grinned.
“I thought you’d have worked it out by now,” she breathed. “Those ancestral traits I mentioned? They’re ones you happen to be very familiar with. You and I, darling… we’re from the same stock. A hundred generations removed, but even so.”
Satana dropped the cigarette. Her eyes were suddenly as black as the dead space between fading stars.
“It’s true,” Patsy said. “You can sense it, can’t you?”
“All I can sense is the fetid stench of a half-breed abomination,” Satana hissed. “A vessel of pampered mortal flesh that can burn out as would a candle!”
She threw out both hands then, palms outward and fingers splayed, and released a torrent of crimson fire – hellfire, crackling with tortured screams and ripe with the reek of sulphur. There was no time for Patsy to dive clear, even with her preternatural reflexes. She was consumed, vanishing into the inferno without so much as a cry.
“Burn!” Satana Blackheart shrieked, her erstwhile beauty now twisted into something truly monstrous, all bloated eyes and snapping teeth and black, slathering tongue. “Burn for me! Burn for me!”
The entire interior of the Château was now ablaze, flames ripping through the auditorium and incinerating wood, velvet and flesh alike. The hellfire would rage so fiercely that, in the hours to come when the emergency services had finally managed to quell the blaze – with help from the perpetual rain – no identifiable corpses would be recovered, the ashes of human remains mingled with the cinders of what had once been London’s premiere Burlesque club in a tide of soot and dust. Patsy Walker would be declared upon the list of missing presumed dead. But that wasn’t to say she was dead…
“You know, I loved working here,” a voice echoed from the depths of the inferno. “I really did. I had friends, memories… and now it’s all gone. You’ve taken all of it from me.”
Patsy Walker had been devoured by flames. It was The Hellcat who now emerged, her risqué blue and amber outfit smouldering but not consumed any more than her flesh, which flickered with green flames like oil upon water.
“Bitch,” she declared, “I am not happy.”
Hellcat lunged and raked her claws across her enemy’s face with such savagery that Satana’s head snapped back and forth like a red cork on a spring. She flew backwards into the body of the bar, scattering large splinters of varnished oak in all directions and leaving in her wake a trail of scarlet blood that ignited upon contact with the air like a stream of miniature fireworks. Satana then received another scything blow, a stamp to her midsection as she lay dazed, but instinctively thrust out a hand and unleashed a concentrated burst of flame that buffeted her attacker to the side. She then lashed out a leg and slammed a cloven hoof into Hellcat’s right knee, almost shattering it. Hellcat staggered backwards, mewling in pain, whilst Satana slithered clear of the immediate melee like a crimson snake. She was on the verge of escaping from the burning auditorium when her adversary leapt upon her back, claws closing tight about her throat as their combined momentum sent them crashing headlong into the blaze once more.
The two women grappled amidst flames and scorched wood, faces pressed close together, each snarling and spitting and trading surges of red and green fire. Neither of them noticed that a lattice of wooden beams high overhead, weakened by the intense heat, had begun to splinter – and then, with an echoing crack, ruptured and fell. Hellcat screamed as a wedge of blistering wood slammed down against her back, knocking her clear of her foe. Satana grunted, rolling free of the ash and debris just before she was buried, then scrambled to her hooves. She glanced left and right, her wild hair aflame, smoke curling from her eyes. The club floor was now an ocean of fire. Of her enemy there was no sign.
“Pray that you perish now, fleshling,” she hissed, “for if you do survive this conflagration we shall encounter one another again… and next time I shall gorge on your fucking heart!”
And with that, Satana Blackheart whirled away and took her leave, ascending the burning stairs and vanishing out into the Soho night. In her wake, the ruin that had so recently been the Château Noir Burlesque club simply continued to blacken and blister and disintegrate to ash. Nothing could have survived this tragedy. At least, nothing of this world…
Get out! You’ve got to get out!
Rising slowly from the flames the charred figure of Patsy Walker, the Hellcat, scowled at the frantic cry of the voice in her head.
“Well, absolutely. Because, you know, that never occurred to me…”
For fuck’s sake, I thought you were dead.
“Do I look dead?”
Yes.
“Well, fuck you too.”
I’m just saying.
“Concerned, Doctor? How sweet. And we hardly even know each other.”
I don’t know you at all. And from what I’ve overheard tonight I’m not sure I ever want to.
“Tease.” Hellcat stepped clear of the flames, ascending the stairs to street level on the charred pads of her stocking feet. Just before she departed she turned and took one last look at the world she was leaving behind. Already there was nothing recognisable left of Château Noir. No bar, no tables, no stage. No memories or reminiscences. Not any more. And all those corpses, reduced to ash and blackened bones…
You let her escape on purpose, didn’t you?
Hellcat grimaced. “I couldn’t defeat her alone,” she said, quietly. “If I could, The Ancient wouldn’t have needed to recruit four of us, would he?”
Christ. What are you? I mean, really? Because the rest of us, we were just ordinary people before this shit happened. But you…
“Patience, Doctor Strange. I’m sure our esteemed master will attend to that revelation in his own time. And as for being ordinary, well…” The Hellcat smiled, humourlessly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was remarkably far from the truth.”
The Soho streets were filled with sirens, wailing and flashing, and a steadily gathering crowd far more interested in the unfolding catastrophe than in attempting to keep out of the rain. Hellcat breathed deeply, already gauging the surrounding shadows so that she might vacate the scene as quickly and anonymously as possible.
We’re in Greenwich, the rest of us. Join us and we’re complete.
The woman’s eyes glinted, green and hot.
“And then?”
Then we go to war. And God help this poor, bastard world, because I’m beginning to think that tonight was just the opening act…
next issue: Four Defenders. Five demons of The Cabal. And now – five dark hearts beating beneath the banner of The Order of the Damned? Don’t miss “Congregation”!
author’s notes
You know, it occurs to me that at some point in pretty much every series I’ve ever written you’ll come across a couple of smart-mouthed women beating each other senseless. I’m not proud of this. Honestly, I’m not. So, if any amateur psychologists out there (or even professional ones, I’m not choosy) feel like evaluating this unsavoury predilection, then please, analyse away. Until then, I apologise for all the female-kicking-in-the-face-ery. Especially as there’s lots more still to come…
A point of order: I really don’t like Hellcat. Never have, ever since I stopping reading comics on a casual basis in the early 80s and instead allowed them to consume me whole. I reckon this is because my first, seven-year-old crush on a comics character (long before I knew what a crush actually was) concerned Selina Kyle – Batman’s nemesis, the Catwoman – back in the days where she wore a far less fetishistic (but infinitely more sexy, even if entirely impractical) costume of ankle-length purple skirt with slits up the sides and kinky calf boots. As drawn by Neal Adams. Because Neal Adams on Batman rocked. But, I digress: to whit, I didn’t like Hellcat because she wasn’t Catwoman. Okay? Trust me, it makes sense when you’re seven. (Sidenote: fortunately, by the time Felicia Hardy appeared on the scene in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man I’d made my peace with this particular hang-up).
I hated Hellcat’s blue and yellow costume, and I hated the fact Patsy Walker was a model from romance comics that pre-dated the Fantastic Four, because that would mean the Marvel Universe wasn’t real (I. Was. Seven.). So why use her in this series? Because she’s a character who, for me, is synonymous with The Defenders, and because when I started sketching out my plots I realised that I had a very clear picture in my head of a protagonist somewhere between Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in The Avengers and Mina Harker as drawn by Kevin O’Neill in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As in, outwardly prim and sleek but rather volcanic beneath the crushed velvet and frills. And able to breathe green fire. Once I’d established this, I knew Hellcat was the only way to go.
And so, then there were four. The set-up is complete.
That must mean it’s time to step the action up a notch…
If you’d like to give feedback on this series, positive or critical, please don’t hesitate to drop a line to [email protected]
For those interested, a list of my fanfiction can be found at http://meriadesfiction.livejournal.com
Thanks for reading!
- Meriades Rai
The oncoming storm. A war, between two opposing forces for the fate of an unsuspecting world. A shame, really, that whilst one of those forces was an army swelled with the ranks of nightmares and monsters the other was a ragtag bunch of strangers who actually had very little idea what was going on at all. Of course, considering his miserable-arse luck, it went without saying whose side he found himself on…
“He’s here.”
Stefan turned at the sound of a woman’s voice, sharp with Scandinavian accent, at his shoulder. No, not a woman – a girl. Samantha Parrington was rather striking, carrying herself with a regal poise and with a definite sense of aged wisdom in those delicate, cerulean blue eyes, but she was still only eighteen years old. Stefan smiled, then stopped, conscious that he might be coming across as lecherous. Not that he usually minded, but this situation was different. For a start, this girl had a sword, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. However, not smiling was rude. So he smiled again, trying very hard not to be at all lecherous and consequently feeling his face cramp, meaning that he now probably looked like he was retarded. He then cursed inwardly as he realised that the girl wasn’t paying him any attention in the first place but was instead staring out of the window. He rolled his eyes. Yep. Total fucking retard.
“Stefan, if you’d be so kind as to greet our guest at the door whilst I prepare the tea…?”
Behind Samantha, across the parlour in which they stood, Stefan saw the old man in the green cloak who was responsible for all of this – The Ancient – looking on benignly whilst leaning upon his gnarled cane. Stefan sighed and turned back to the window. There was a heavy-set man with a scarred eye loitering out there in the rain, regarding the crooked house in the middle of the park with some suspicion. And rightly so. If houses could be described as having personalities then this one was a cantankerous old fucker who was one udder short of a cow.
Samantha was dressed in blue jeans, cream sweater and camel suede calf boots, her platinum blonde hair tied back in a braid from her pretty face. She had appropriated her new attire in Glasgow before travelling down to London – appropriating in this instance being stolen from the goods bay of a department store after her departure from the Rosewell Institute – and it appeared that Eric Brooks had done the same before catching a flight from Dublin. With his shaved head and muscular frame sheathed in a black leather jacket and trousers of the same, and with that scar stretching from his right eye to the corner of his mouth, Brooks looked exactly like Stefan had expected an escaped convict would look, particularly one who had requested he be called Blade.
“At first impression, a formidable ally,” declared Samantha, who herself was adamant that she be referred to as Valkyrie. Stefan grimaced. Bloody oddballs. Well, if they thought he was going to answer to Doctor Strange then they could fuck off, couldn’t they?
Outside, Eric Brooks – Blade – seemed to make his decision. Reluctantly he started to climb the flight of steps leading up to the door of The Ancient’s misshapen Sanctum Sanctorum.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter,” Stefan murmured. “Well, that makes three out of four. Now we just have to pray the last poor bastard has what it takes to deal with whatever’s about to come and bite her on the arse, don’t we…?”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"CONFLAGRATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
“Shake your pussy, little kitten. You’re on in sixty!”
Patsy Walker exhaled a tongue of smoke, stroking the length of her cigarette between her gloved fingers, and stared at her reflection in her dressing table mirror. Half the glass was obscured by photographs cornered into the gilt frame, brief messages scribbled in lipstick and, in one instance, a pair of lacy pink knickers. Mementos and discards. The legacy of the performance circuit and all who rode her. None of these reminiscences belonged to Patsy. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. In the near distance she heard the melody of her signature tune rise. Shake your pussy, little kitten. She dropped the butt of the cigarette to the floor and snipped it beneath the pointed toe of her shoe, then headed out of her dressing room in the direction of the stage.
It was raining outside. Of course it was. This was Soho, London. All it ever did here was fucking rain. It was an urban myth that the Inuit had four hundred different words for snow – in truth it was barely a dozen – but one could easily draw an authentic parallel for Londoners and rain. Tonight it was, to use the popular vernacular, pissing it down, lurid with reflected neon and prompting the gutters along the edges of the labyrinthine back streets to flood and fester. The sign for Château Noir blinked steadily through the deluge on the corner of Marshall St. and Broadwick, a stone’s throw from Carnaby Street but a good hundred yards from the hustle at the heart of Soho’s sex district, the revue bars and porn pits and the Girls! Girls! Girls! milieu. It didn’t matter. The Château didn’t cater for stragglers from the tourist erotica scene. It was an establishment for a more discerning clientele.
The interior of the Château was warm and dry. The air was soft and golden with cigarette haze and lamplight, and it throbbed with the murmur of old jazz. Billie, Ella, Louis. The walls were wood panel, the floors varnished bareboard. The bar was mahogany. No beers, just spirits. No bullshit. Scotch, vodka, absinthe. There were posters on the walls, professional, in good frames and behind glass. A lot of them monochrome. Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lydia Thompson, Britt Ekland. The original billboard for The Night They Raided Minsky’s directed by Friedkin, a year or two before he moved out of art house and gained success with The French Connection and The Exorcist back in the late 60s, early 70s. Huge curtains flanked a raised stage, black and burgundy velvet laced with gilded rope, whilst the remainder of the room was divided into two levels, a main floor and a mezzanine, both filled with tables.
Château Noir wasn’t a strip joint. It was a Burlesque hall, steeped in the tradition of vaudeville and pageant that had been popular in Europe in the 1800s and then America in the early 20th century before being neglected until its widespread revival in the 90s. Striptease was certainly an integral ingredient of the overall performance, but the embellishments in the presentation – mostly nostalgic fetish – were what made Burlesque unique. The average mark slinking in off the street, hoping to get his rocks off in a private booth to a skin-and-bone heroin chic whore gyrating behind cum-stained glass or wrapping her thighs about a metal pole, he just wasn’t going to get the picture. Everything that was on offer here tapped into a deeper reservoir than seedy sex cabaret.
The Château was a class above. A shame, then, that this would be the last night it would open its doors.
Overhead lights, already low, dimmed further until the stage was cast in a hazy glow and in the audience the red tips of countless cigarettes burned bright like fireflies in the dark. Patsy Walker strode out into the spotlight to a sultry blare of brass – trumpets and hard horns, licked with a trill of sax and blues piano – and a wave of applause and whistles. She was tall, with a build somewhere between cosy slender and voluptuous; high breasts and sculpted hips, legs as long as summer days, she moved with a languid sweep, her entire body stirring with a kink as if it were delicately hinged in the region of her navel. Her sensual elegance was accentuated by her apparel, a corset of midnight blue crushed velvet trimmed with black Chantilly lace and a flared skirt of ruffled amber silk and ivory chiffon. In addition she wore arm-length gloves of matching blue silk, blue velvet pumps with a dagger toe and five-inch heel, and fully-fashioned, seamed black nylon stockings. Whenever she rolled her hips, which was often, the skirt hem skipped to flash the strip of her suspenders and a glimpse of creamy flesh where it met the lacy crown of her nylons, a familiar calling card of the slinky Burlesque tease.
Patsy’s greatest allure was her authenticity. With large green eyes rendered dark with stylised mascara, cherrywood-red hair cut into a slick bob about the moon of her face, and a sultry kiss of a smile, she could have been the embodiment of a Louise Brooks or a Carole Lombard. Paint her in vintage sepia and she would have shone, all monochrome and musical hall and erotique noir.
And, just in case the audience weren’t already lost, it was then that she began to sing.
“When God appeared before me I was drowning in my pool…”
A voice like drizzled black honey, rich and slow, all bourbon and cigarettes and misty-eyed memories. Patsy Walker.
“I was fifty over thirty but looking real cool…”
There was a hush at every table, on every barstool. When the door that led out onto Marshall St. opened, followed by the stark click of heels descending a flight of stairs, the only man who turned to look was the bartender. At the time he was drying a glass with a cloth. As he watched the approach of the new arrival his movements slowed.
“He said, A life of tedious insights and an overflowing cup…”
The woman was tall and lean, dressed in a black leather coat that fell in straight, delicate lines to her ankles. It glistened wetly. Still raining. Her hair was a tumble of damp ringlets that clung to her skin. Shoulder-length hair, russet threaded with gold. And copper-burgundy skin. Black lips, cerise eyes and copper-burgundy skin that had no right to exist.
“Just don’t cut the mustard. I’m afraid you can’t come up.”
“What can I get you?” the bartender heard himself ask. The red-haired woman smiled.
“Sweet melancholy,” she breathed, with an exotic cadence.
“Is that a cocktail? You’ll have to tell me what goes into the mix…”
And the red-haired woman’s smile grew.
“I fell way down it seemed into a bottomless pit…”
“First you take some unrequited love, and then you add a dash of pain.” the woman murmured, leaning forward against the bar. Her coat loosened a little, and a faint swell of breast caught the light. “A childhood sweetheart, clever and pretty with a kink in her blonde hair and a smart tongue that no-one else really appreciated. Not like you. You adored her from afar, until one day at the school library you got to talking. Ancient history. A shared interest. You allowed yourself to believe your new friendship would blossom, that all those old romantic movies weren’t so improbable after all, that everyone in the world would one day meet their perfect someone. A few days later you heard she was fucking some thick-necked gorilla eight years older than her, a squaddie with a thing for schoolgirls. You never spoke to her again, about ancient history or anything else. You know what happened to her? She got a habit. Amphetamines. Anti-depressants. Had an abortion. Then, a year later, a miscarriage. On a number of occasions she earned money by sucking cocks in the alleyway behind a West End nightclub. One night, someone she’d just deep-throated kicked her head against the wall until she haemorrhaged and then he urinated on herself as she died at his feet.”
“Where a sign saying Hotel Hades was the only thing a’lit…”
“Finally you add a twist of the knife. You never knew how much she liked you, did you? Even before that day at the library. She was shy. She’d just been looking for a way to talk to you, to get to know you. You would’ve ended up together if someone playing a prank hadn’t told her you were a confused homosexual who wanted to test his preferences on her. She was so hurt she fell into bed with the first guy she met the next night, the gorilla. Because of a cruel joke, you never got married the way you should have done, never had children. No Christmas Eves, no lazy Sunday mornings with toast and newspapers, no making amends after arguments over the in-laws with kisses and groping in the dark. She died choking on cum and blood when instead she could have been happy.”
“Beelzebub was hanging, but he wouldn’t cut no slack…”
The woman trailed a sharp, red nail upon the polished surface of the bar. Her coat had fallen open a little more. Her breasts were bare. She wore a collar about her throat, black leather studded with fragments of bone, pulled so tight it cut into her windpipe. “That is how you make sweet melancholy,” said Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound Islands of Pain, Desire and Regret, with a sigh of disinterest. “Now, kill yourself for me, you wretched little fleshling cunt.”
“He told me, The Big Cat has spoken. I’m afraid you’re going back.”
The bartender was weeping as he took the glass in his hand and swatted it against the edge of the bar, causing it to shatter. He then picked up a large shard, placed the jagged hook against his throat, and pushed. Blood erupted in a fountain as the glass sank deep. The bartender staggered, then fell. A number of men turned on their stools, suddenly aware that something was happening behind them. They saw the blood and the glass, and the woman in the black raincoat, which had now fallen aside to reveal a pair of long, tapered legs, smooth and bare, copper-red, legs that begged to be licked, up and down, inside and out. She had no feet. The click upon the stairs hadn’t been stiletto heels, it had been the sound of cloven hooves on wood. She radiated an unsettling heat, and a perfume of orchid and moist sex.
Someone cried out. Someone screamed. There was the sound of scraping chair legs, and then the clatter of an overturned table followed by the splintering of glass. Up on stage, Patsy Walker faltered at the same time as the blare of horns faded away – and then, abruptly, there was silence. The calm before the storm. Satana raised her fingers to her mouth and began to suck them clean of the bartender’s blood where it had splashed. Then, almost as an afterthought, she glanced up and methodically proceeded to make eye contact with each of the numerous men and scattering of women in her vicinity before finally turning in her stool and gazing across the darkened room.
“You are The Ancient’s puppet, yes?” she asked the performer upon the stage, in a raised yet measured voice. “You possess the ring?”
Patsy Walker, in her corset and heels and flared skirt, didn’t reply. But she wasn’t struck dumb through fear. In fact, she appeared remarkably composed. Slowly, she extended her gloved right hand, palm upwards, fist clenched – and then she flipped up her middle finger, about which nestled a ring of green malachite, stark against the blue velvet. “You’re late,” she said, her voice a smoky purr. “I’ve been waiting for you to show your face for three nights now.”
Satana inclined her head, her expression curious. “You aren’t afraid?” she mused. “Were you, perhaps, the first of the old one’s recruits to his cause? He seems to have primed you well.”
“Ah, well… there’s the mystery, isn’t it? Let’s just say I’m a little more open to fantastical tales of the paranormal and otherworldly forces than other women would be, due to certain… ancestral traits.”
A hush settled. If the atmosphere in the Château had been keen before, now it was decidedly razor-edged.
Satana’s countenance darkened, her eyes narrowing to smouldering slits. “Indeed?” she breathed. “Well, well. An unforeseen wrinkle. And so, The Ancient reminds us all of his eternal cunning…”
She stood then, her raincoat falling open to reveal a lithe body scarcely clad in swathes of gauzy nylon. She raised both hands above her head, fingers splayed. Her damp hair flickered, as if touched by a gust of breeze. And, all about her, men and women simultaneously turned towards the stage, their expressions flushed but otherwise blank, their arms hanging limply by their sides but their hands twitching and snatching at thin air. “That woman is your enemy,” Satana declared, her cadence sharp yet soft, like a dagger blade wrapped in silk.
“Now hunt her down and fuck her to death.”
The crowd surged forward in a single mass, their voices instantly raised in a wordless, communal wail. On stage, Patsy Walker looked on with a casual insouciance, kicking off one blue velvet shoe and then the other, leaving her standing in her stocking feet. Then she raised her right hand to her lips and softly kissed the malachite ring, which was beginning to pulse with a soft glow – as were her eyes, bright as jewels within the black rings of her lashes. In the next instant there came a curious sound, the gentle whisper of shredding material. Velvet and nylon, to be precise. Patsy flexed the fingers of both hands, revealing that her nails – painted black – had suddenly grown to some three inches in length, ripping through her gloves and glinting like a fan of blades. Below, her toenails – again, varnished black – had pierced her stockings in similar fashion and now dug sharply into the wood underfoot.
To Patsy’s left, three men were clambering up onto the stage. To her right, two more, and two women. Some old, some young. Suits and ties. Jeans and shirts. A cocktail dress. English, Japanese, Moroccan. Ordinary people transformed, students and shop assistants and legal secretaries and more, each of them howling and slathering like animals, their eyes white and vacant. And down in the darkened auditorium, leaning back against the bar whilst her tribe of mindless marionettes lumbered forth, there was Satana Blackheart, lighting a cigarette and flicking back her hair and smiling cruelly at what she had instigated. Surprisingly, Patsy was actually smiling in turn. They were actually alike in many ways, these two, opposite sides of the same coin. In another life, well… they could have been sisters.
Patsy glanced at her approaching assailants, her eyes sparkling. “Meiow,” she breathed, licking her lips with a tiny, pink tongue. “Come then, hungry hounds… let the chase begin!”
The nearest man made a grab for Patsy’s arm, but even as he did so she was already moving, springing backwards from her standing position and twisting at the waist in mid-air. She lashed out with one foot as she travelled, slashing her attacker across the face with her new talons and flinging him sideways against his fellows, then swept her other leg high and over her head, initiating a spiralling somersault that no Olympic gymnast could ever have executed. As Patsy whirled she snapped out one arm and then the other, ripping out the throats of two more of her attackers and filling the air with the mist of their blood.
More aggressors closed in, flailing with fists, teeth bared. One grabbed a handful of skirt and tried to tear it away, but a savage kick to the gut followed by another to the jaw sent the man screaming over the edge of the stage, down into the shadows where he crashed into a table with a crunch of bone. A woman lunged, her nails scrabbling at Patsy’s hair, but the latter ducked and shouldered her enemy against the legs with such force that it splintered one of her knees. She spun, leaping and skipping, a whorl of red hair and blue velvet and stocking legs, scattering her adversaries in all directions – the majority of them clutching at ragged strips of flesh and blood where their foe’s claws had bitten deep.
Patsy was rather enjoying herself, it seemed. It was at this point, however, that she became aware of a presence in her mind, its disembodied voice raised in a cry of utter disbelief.
What are you doing? What the holy fuck are you doing?
Patsy faltered in the midst of the melee, and received a fist to the stomach for her trouble. She spat, momentarily winded, then retaliated with a bestial snarl of rage, removing three quarters of her assailant’s face with one slash of her claws.
“Get out of my head, bitch!” she roared. “I’ll be with you soon enough…”
I’m not her, you idiot. Her name’s Satana. I’m Doctor Stefan Strang.
“Doctor Strange?”
Strang. Strang. Jesus, why is that so fucking difficult for everyone to grasp?
Patsy grunted and hurled herself clear of the mob that was now massing upon the stage, those still living stumbling over the bloodied bodies of those already fallen. Her speed and agility were astonishing, her balance exquisite, but she was beginning to run out of room to manoeuvre.
I’m an emissary of The Ancient, the voice in her head persisted. The old bastard who gave you the ring, remember? There are four of us, his disciples. You’re the last one. We –
“Listen, Doctor, can we do this later?” Patsy hissed, kicking out a leg and spearing a shrieking woman through the chest with the talons of her stocking foot. “Just in case you didn’t realise, I’m actually rather busy…”
Yeah, so I’m noticing. You realise that you’re killing these people, right?
“Kill or be killed.”
But they’re innocent people, for fuck’s sake! They’re not responsible for their actions. The Ancient recruited you to fight Satana and the others, not do their fucking work for them. If you just –
“Doctor Strange, seriously… can you please just get be quiet?” Patsy purred. “I think I’ve finally got everyone where I want them.”
What? What are you –
Patsy Walker had been corralled, perched upon the forward edge of the stage and tightly surrounded by Satana’s minions. She was streaked with blood, her outfit torn in numerous places, and her face and upper arms were lined with scratches, and yet still she smiled. Now, even as the voice of Stefan Strang warbled shrilly in her mind, she tensed – and then, a split second before the crowd surged forward to consume her, she leapt backwards, flicking her long legs up and over her head almost in the manner of a contortionist before snapping her upper torso sharply at the waist and executing a perfect somersault. Now veritably hanging in midair, her face turned towards the throng, she opened her mouth…
…and disgorged a bellow of crackling green flames, the same hue as her bright eyes and glowing ring. The cloud of unnatural fire engulfed the crowd in a rush, igniting in their hair, their clothes, scorching their skin to a thoroughly vile greenish-black and the texture of melting wax. Before, the mystically manipulated audience had howled; now, they screamed. Oh, how they screamed.
As her victims writhed and scuttled about the stage like burning ants, Patsy completed her back flip, landing with perfect precision upon a table. There were still three men to concern her here, three assailants who had been unable to clamber out of the auditorium and were now milling about the mezzanine. Three from in excess of fifty patrons unfortunate enough to have been in attendance at Château Noir that evening. Patsy executed the first with a flying scissors kick, slicing open his throat with the talons of one foot, then snapped out her other leg and splintered the skull of her second foe with a stocking heel. She ducked beneath the desperate lunge of her final enemy and disembowelled him. Shouldering his convulsing body aside she then stood tall, green eyes narrowed, staring at the bar directly ahead. There was blood on her lips. Not hers. She absently licked herself clean.
Satana Blackheart lit a cigarette.
“Impressive,” she murmured. “I would add for a human… but you aren’t, are you? Not fully.”
“Human enough.”
“Where I come from there are beasts similar to yourself that roam the Plains of Sufferance; swift, savage. Merciless. They roast the flesh from the bones of otherworldly souls cast adrift in the smouldering dunes. We call them - ”
“Infernatra. The closest translation in our tongue would be Hellcats.”
For the first time, Satana’s composure truly rippled in displeasure. The cigarette was burning away to a column of ash between her red fingers, forgotten. Patsy Walker grinned.
“I thought you’d have worked it out by now,” she breathed. “Those ancestral traits I mentioned? They’re ones you happen to be very familiar with. You and I, darling… we’re from the same stock. A hundred generations removed, but even so.”
Satana dropped the cigarette. Her eyes were suddenly as black as the dead space between fading stars.
“It’s true,” Patsy said. “You can sense it, can’t you?”
“All I can sense is the fetid stench of a half-breed abomination,” Satana hissed. “A vessel of pampered mortal flesh that can burn out as would a candle!”
She threw out both hands then, palms outward and fingers splayed, and released a torrent of crimson fire – hellfire, crackling with tortured screams and ripe with the reek of sulphur. There was no time for Patsy to dive clear, even with her preternatural reflexes. She was consumed, vanishing into the inferno without so much as a cry.
“Burn!” Satana Blackheart shrieked, her erstwhile beauty now twisted into something truly monstrous, all bloated eyes and snapping teeth and black, slathering tongue. “Burn for me! Burn for me!”
The entire interior of the Château was now ablaze, flames ripping through the auditorium and incinerating wood, velvet and flesh alike. The hellfire would rage so fiercely that, in the hours to come when the emergency services had finally managed to quell the blaze – with help from the perpetual rain – no identifiable corpses would be recovered, the ashes of human remains mingled with the cinders of what had once been London’s premiere Burlesque club in a tide of soot and dust. Patsy Walker would be declared upon the list of missing presumed dead. But that wasn’t to say she was dead…
“You know, I loved working here,” a voice echoed from the depths of the inferno. “I really did. I had friends, memories… and now it’s all gone. You’ve taken all of it from me.”
Patsy Walker had been devoured by flames. It was The Hellcat who now emerged, her risqué blue and amber outfit smouldering but not consumed any more than her flesh, which flickered with green flames like oil upon water.
“Bitch,” she declared, “I am not happy.”
Hellcat lunged and raked her claws across her enemy’s face with such savagery that Satana’s head snapped back and forth like a red cork on a spring. She flew backwards into the body of the bar, scattering large splinters of varnished oak in all directions and leaving in her wake a trail of scarlet blood that ignited upon contact with the air like a stream of miniature fireworks. Satana then received another scything blow, a stamp to her midsection as she lay dazed, but instinctively thrust out a hand and unleashed a concentrated burst of flame that buffeted her attacker to the side. She then lashed out a leg and slammed a cloven hoof into Hellcat’s right knee, almost shattering it. Hellcat staggered backwards, mewling in pain, whilst Satana slithered clear of the immediate melee like a crimson snake. She was on the verge of escaping from the burning auditorium when her adversary leapt upon her back, claws closing tight about her throat as their combined momentum sent them crashing headlong into the blaze once more.
The two women grappled amidst flames and scorched wood, faces pressed close together, each snarling and spitting and trading surges of red and green fire. Neither of them noticed that a lattice of wooden beams high overhead, weakened by the intense heat, had begun to splinter – and then, with an echoing crack, ruptured and fell. Hellcat screamed as a wedge of blistering wood slammed down against her back, knocking her clear of her foe. Satana grunted, rolling free of the ash and debris just before she was buried, then scrambled to her hooves. She glanced left and right, her wild hair aflame, smoke curling from her eyes. The club floor was now an ocean of fire. Of her enemy there was no sign.
“Pray that you perish now, fleshling,” she hissed, “for if you do survive this conflagration we shall encounter one another again… and next time I shall gorge on your fucking heart!”
And with that, Satana Blackheart whirled away and took her leave, ascending the burning stairs and vanishing out into the Soho night. In her wake, the ruin that had so recently been the Château Noir Burlesque club simply continued to blacken and blister and disintegrate to ash. Nothing could have survived this tragedy. At least, nothing of this world…
Get out! You’ve got to get out!
Rising slowly from the flames the charred figure of Patsy Walker, the Hellcat, scowled at the frantic cry of the voice in her head.
“Well, absolutely. Because, you know, that never occurred to me…”
For fuck’s sake, I thought you were dead.
“Do I look dead?”
Yes.
“Well, fuck you too.”
I’m just saying.
“Concerned, Doctor? How sweet. And we hardly even know each other.”
I don’t know you at all. And from what I’ve overheard tonight I’m not sure I ever want to.
“Tease.” Hellcat stepped clear of the flames, ascending the stairs to street level on the charred pads of her stocking feet. Just before she departed she turned and took one last look at the world she was leaving behind. Already there was nothing recognisable left of Château Noir. No bar, no tables, no stage. No memories or reminiscences. Not any more. And all those corpses, reduced to ash and blackened bones…
You let her escape on purpose, didn’t you?
Hellcat grimaced. “I couldn’t defeat her alone,” she said, quietly. “If I could, The Ancient wouldn’t have needed to recruit four of us, would he?”
Christ. What are you? I mean, really? Because the rest of us, we were just ordinary people before this shit happened. But you…
“Patience, Doctor Strange. I’m sure our esteemed master will attend to that revelation in his own time. And as for being ordinary, well…” The Hellcat smiled, humourlessly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was remarkably far from the truth.”
The Soho streets were filled with sirens, wailing and flashing, and a steadily gathering crowd far more interested in the unfolding catastrophe than in attempting to keep out of the rain. Hellcat breathed deeply, already gauging the surrounding shadows so that she might vacate the scene as quickly and anonymously as possible.
We’re in Greenwich, the rest of us. Join us and we’re complete.
The woman’s eyes glinted, green and hot.
“And then?”
Then we go to war. And God help this poor, bastard world, because I’m beginning to think that tonight was just the opening act…
next issue: Four Defenders. Five demons of The Cabal. And now – five dark hearts beating beneath the banner of The Order of the Damned? Don’t miss “Congregation”!
author’s notes
You know, it occurs to me that at some point in pretty much every series I’ve ever written you’ll come across a couple of smart-mouthed women beating each other senseless. I’m not proud of this. Honestly, I’m not. So, if any amateur psychologists out there (or even professional ones, I’m not choosy) feel like evaluating this unsavoury predilection, then please, analyse away. Until then, I apologise for all the female-kicking-in-the-face-ery. Especially as there’s lots more still to come…
A point of order: I really don’t like Hellcat. Never have, ever since I stopping reading comics on a casual basis in the early 80s and instead allowed them to consume me whole. I reckon this is because my first, seven-year-old crush on a comics character (long before I knew what a crush actually was) concerned Selina Kyle – Batman’s nemesis, the Catwoman – back in the days where she wore a far less fetishistic (but infinitely more sexy, even if entirely impractical) costume of ankle-length purple skirt with slits up the sides and kinky calf boots. As drawn by Neal Adams. Because Neal Adams on Batman rocked. But, I digress: to whit, I didn’t like Hellcat because she wasn’t Catwoman. Okay? Trust me, it makes sense when you’re seven. (Sidenote: fortunately, by the time Felicia Hardy appeared on the scene in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man I’d made my peace with this particular hang-up).
I hated Hellcat’s blue and yellow costume, and I hated the fact Patsy Walker was a model from romance comics that pre-dated the Fantastic Four, because that would mean the Marvel Universe wasn’t real (I. Was. Seven.). So why use her in this series? Because she’s a character who, for me, is synonymous with The Defenders, and because when I started sketching out my plots I realised that I had a very clear picture in my head of a protagonist somewhere between Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in The Avengers and Mina Harker as drawn by Kevin O’Neill in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As in, outwardly prim and sleek but rather volcanic beneath the crushed velvet and frills. And able to breathe green fire. Once I’d established this, I knew Hellcat was the only way to go.
And so, then there were four. The set-up is complete.
That must mean it’s time to step the action up a notch…
If you’d like to give feedback on this series, positive or critical, please don’t hesitate to drop a line to [email protected]
For those interested, a list of my fanfiction can be found at http://meriadesfiction.livejournal.com
Thanks for reading!
- Meriades Rai