NEVER ENDING STORY
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AUTHORS: Mr. Frankenstein, Dropa Blue, Appleseed024, Neonspectraltoast
"Uh-huh ? Yeah...right. I'm onto it...goodbye."
He replaced the telephone, stared at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then sighed and put on his hat and raincoat. He took his .32 pistol from his writing desk drawer, checked the cylinder to assure himself it was loaded, then hesitated.
Would bullets be enough ? Count Orlok was not, if the stories about him were to be believed, any ordinary kind of vampire. Bulwer knew that well enough. He also knew that the various cross-culture apotropaic objects he placed around his neck and in his pockets would only provide, at best, a temporary advantage.
Orlok hadn't lived - or unlived, or whatever the terminology was - for centuries without developing a certain immunity to quaint, if rather ordinary, folk magic. Bulwer understood all too well that Orlok was not the quaint - and rather ordinary - monster that the Carpathian peasantry had held in awe and fear. They were caught in time loops, unable to move much beyond the distant century that had spawned them, whereas Orlok was well seasoned in the art of time travel, and crafty in his ways; a master of sorts in his temporal ventures.
Bulwer began to think that maybe that career as an accountant may not have been such a bad option after all. Normal hours, guaranteed income, and no monsters, unless one counts the typical office manager as a sort of monster. Bulwer had experienced that particular species more often than he cared to recall.
But this wasn't going to put food on the table or cash in the bank. The client wanted Orlok brought in undead or unalive, as the case may be. Still, Bulwer had to consider the extreme danger of hunting down such a cunning and powerful enemy.
Could he actually entertain any realistic hope of catching his target off-guard ? When you lived [unlived ?] on a knife edge, as Orlok undoubtedly did, your instincts must be honed to an extraordinary degree. How close could Bulwer get to Orlok before his presence was felt? Perhaps Bulwer was already on Orlok's preternaturally sensitive radar.
Nevertheless... he switched off the light, locked the office door and, like Elvis before him, left the building.
Outside, the air resonated with the rippling vibrato of constant - if distant - thunder, and the smell of ozone. The sound reminded Bulwar of the London air raids of his youth. The bombs, the anti-aircraft searchlights quartering the sky, then - flashback ! - they became the strobe lights at an Acid Test, Ken Kesey at the controls, the Warlocks playing a mind-expanding drone, bathed in a kaleidascope of
gelatin light. Bulwer steadied himself on the arm of a nearby girl, or so he thought. Suddenly he looked up at her face. Staring back at him was...Grace Slick!
"Jesus Christ!" Bulwer stammered. Grace Slick smiled and offered Bulwer
another hit of Blue Sunshine from a silver tray. She reminded Bulwer of one of the Sirens that beset Odysseus. But barely had this thought registered before the image began to melt, rearrange itself, and suddenly he found himself staring at Peter Fonda vomitting into a goldfish bowl.
"Easy does it, Bulwer," he said to himself. "Think: What is the connection
between this grotesque phantasm and...and... someone left the cake out in the rain, I dont think that I can take because...NO ! CONCENTRATE ! It's some kind of psychic attack...
But was Orlok responsible? Bulwer had many enemies within the realms of Darkness, many of whom had the power to orchestrate such an assault on the senses. And somehow these scenes from Sixties counterculture didn't match Orlok's usual style.
To him, "the Sixties" probably meant the 1760s, when it was claimed he enjoyed the visceral carnage of the latter half of the Seven Years War. In those days Orlok, young and headstrong by Undead standards, would have presented a much softer target than the rather more circumspect creature time and experience had forged.
However,Orlok was not without his weaknesses; he was known to indulge in rather ostentatious psychosexual dramas and compulsive acts of horrific public violence, for which he had attracted a certain notoriety, and with it a following of non-vampiric crazies, vicious but basically stupid - potential weak links who could be exploited by an experienced hunter, which Bulwer most certainly was.
Bulwer knew that at least some of Orlok's minions congregated in the bleak labyrinths of Whitechapel's
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