HOW I ROSE FROM THE DEAD IN MY SPARE TIME and SO CAN YOU By W.C.Leadbeater # EPIGRAPH: In the Mindstorm era, the greatest of all scientific criminals, Saklas the Demiurge, put the STAR WARS satellite VADIS, the Vast Active Destructive Intelligence System, into Earth orbit, causing mindstorms, hurricanes of hallucination, winds of change, gales of neurotic eroticism, to bombard the Earth. # LADYTRON Like the Subliminal Kid, I was moving with inflexible authority. Unfortunately, I was doing it Halloween night thru a graveyard. This was a dangerous place-- Just then VADIS flew overhead, causing me to change into the Lizard-thing, the Savage Id, two hundred pounds of walking, fearsome goup. I am a cosmicomic swamp monster, the true Rootboy covered with slime. My hair is natty dread. A dreadlock Congo bongo I. My head is that of a chitinous insect. My arms are saurian tentacles. My testicles are sore from ejaculating as a cosmicomic book author. I move on cat's feet, iron claws. But other than that I'm pretty much normal for a two hundred pound nerd from Invisible City, North Dakota. Who possessed a super-secret decoder ring which transformed him into the idol Yog- Soggoth. When VADIS wasn't doing it for me. But right here, right now, it was the beginning of a great adventure: who can sleep in this cold, this night? Winter comes early to the Invisible Landscape and we already had three feet of snow, not to mention wind-chills of 20 below. My wondering eyes burned: I'm half blind; I have the killer glaucoma; I have a legal prescription for dope--perhaps the fact that I'd just smoked my tenth joint for the day had something to do with VADIS-- And then there appeared a vorkling ho. Being horny, I immediately took her up on her offer of dingy-homner for 20 buckadingdongs. "What's your name, sugar?" I asked as she bit me on the neck. "Ladytron," she replied. "Here's my phone #: CPL-5938." Suddenly I rose from the dead. And I hadn't died. # BATTLE ABOARD THE SOTUKNANG Realizing that I'd been changed into a vampire slime monster, and was one of the undead, and that I suddenly had the power to defeat Saklas, I turned into a batwinged swamp monster and flew off into the Northern constellations. In the stratosphere I encountered Saklas' galactic dread- nought, guided there by ESP. "Nyaa-ha-ha!" Saklas chortled. "Dark fearsome loathsome apparition from some black dimension of funereal dread, I shall turn the force of my monad on you, thus changing you back in- to--well, whatever you were before you became a vampire." "Don't you recognize me, Demiurge? It is your old enemy, the Savage Id! The thing from the lost mire-pits." I hammered my way thru the airlocks with the force of my warty protuberances, breaking into the interior of the ship even as Saklas shouted to his #1 gnome, Scottie, "Fire all of your guns at once as we explode into space!" Laser beams of savage vorkling fury assailed me. But already being dead, I couldn't die... I just had to make sure I was in a coffin before daybreak. As the starship SOTUKNANG blasted from the stratosphere to the ionosphere I used my powers of acid slime to breach the final portal. An emergency airlock snapped into place behind me, as wind whistled at my ears. I stepped forward to do battle with the Kirby Cartoon Creature who confronted me in his Galactus-style Marvelous costume. I reached my hands around his neck to burn him with the acid slime that oozed from my pores. I leaned forward to bite him on the neck; I was sure that if he realized that the resurrection comes before Death (and Death is a Substance: 3Death) he'd convert to Christianity and stop being the evil world Creator. The False Creator who claims to have made the world in seven days and nights. The True Creator employs the long, slow processes of time. It wasn't that simple. "Scottie!" he ejaculated. "Beam me a clove of garlic!" Her hands went to the transporter controls and as the wee shrunken elven thing beamed up the required spice, I backed away shrieking, eyes exploding. I need my head examined. I need my eyes excited. Saklas immediately had a hypo-sprayer of Substance 3Death ready to inject me with. He grabbed me by my dreadlocks, pulled my head close, and went down with the sprayer on my saurian tentacles--this superhero business is the pits. I'm a Marvelous Comic character, but even I can die... if the editor cancels my strip. I needed Ladytron. Reeling and rocking, dying of the light, I raced forward to the instrument control panel and jacked into the mainframe. I networked with the phone number CPL-5938. "Ladytron! I'm dying!" A few moments later, I saw Ladytron flying thru the halls of the galactic dreadnought, no doubt beamed there by gnomes. Gnomes with machine guns filled the corridors. I know I'm really going psychotic when I start seeing gnomes with machine guns. Seeing me, they fired off their pulse-pounders and jackboot sprayers. Ladytron's leathery wings were ripped full of holes where the spray of bullets touched her. Twenty cloves of garlic zapped into Saklas' hands. "Nyaa-ha-ha! Now I've got you! You won't be able to come near me, demon from the pits of hell!" Ladytron said, "Sorry, but I'm a product of recombinant genetics: I'm immune to garlic." As I blacked out from the 3Death I saw her bite Saklas on the neck. He rose from the dead and he hadn't died. I fell in a deep, dark slumber and awoke to find myself in a coffin-- # DR. NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY I was in my psychiatrist's office. Perky Pam, our psychiatric nurse at the Perky Pam Layout back in Invisible City, had spent all day driving us to Fargo cuz Dr. Curly, the only shrink for a hundred miles around, had split town for Schnook, the next town up the road on Dawn's Highway--Dawn was a time that I feared; twilight was my hour; and midnight my destination and my desolation. Dr. Night said, "Pam tells me you're suffering from the delusion that you're a vampire--on top of being a swamp monster. That seems a rather incongruous combination, so tell me, what's the poop? VADIS got you scared silly again? Remember, you're a paranoid schizophrenic, VADIS is only a basketball player--" "...turning into an angel," I concluded for him. "A White Death-angel. All of my girlfriends have been black except for Lucy Ogdoad; that's how come Bubba Reality, the world's greatest boxing champ, put a wiretap on my--" "I already heard that story last month," Dr. Night said. "But you've gone to elaborate lengths to maintain your delusion: you rode the Magic Bus down here in a coffin, and you had me close all the blinds so--" "So sunbeams wouldn't be shafts to kill a bodanon which is immaterial." "Yes. Well, I think I'll put you on Clozarel; it's an atypical antipsychotic, but you're going to have to have a blood drawing every week to establish a white cell count; we'll have the nurse do the first one on your way out and--" He offered me a pill; a donut of Death. I swallowed it. Then I bit him on the neck. He was undead now. As I departed (in my coffin) and the nurse entered I perceived that she was Ladytron holding a needle, and as I relaxed there was a little prick. Mellow thoughts flooded me as the tranks began to flow--cuz it makes me feel like I'm a man to put a trank into my brain--and I found I no longer needed the coffin. I was sitting behind Perky Pam on the Bobo Boat Bus. I took a bite and batwings grew from her back. So I knew I wasn't completely crazy. My thoughts turned to Ladytron and our next encounter; that would be neurotic eroticism and psychotic sexuality. Vampires love to make out. At least, Ladytron does. END