Sit, Ubu, sit!

Midnight Quatermass 30: Halloween, dogs, robots and the return of Lord Fancypants & The Diablo Kid

This is MQ 30. If I wasn’t as tired as I am I’d probably pen a quick recap of why I started this thing and find a way to commemorate this little milestone. But I paused a Robert Duval movie to write this while listening to French punk rock and it probably won’t go out til gone 2am so le fuck that.

Needless to say that I didn’t think we’d get this far and I’m grateful for you being here.

Let’s crack on.

The New York Times ran a neat little piece on the best horror comic books to pick for Halloween and our new anthology made the list.

With the graphic novel adaptation of The Road also in there you can bet your high horse that I am going to tell folk that something of mine got mentioned in the same breath as Cormac fucking McCarthy. These books are a true team effort though so along with our own gang of creators there are pages and pages of other blood-spattered stories to enjoy. Out now!

It’s now exactly one week until Cooper’s vaccinations kick-in fully meaning that by the next QM I’ll have finally been able to put the idiot down outside and take him for a real walk. Although under test conditions the couple of times he’s tried walking on a lead he pulled the kids through the air so I suspect he’ll be dragging me along regardless of where I want to go leading either to rapid weight loss or a heart attack.

Can’t wait though. As cute and fun as he is the enforced puppy lock-down is something we all want behind us. I think I’ve been pretty restrained with the dog stuff both here and in my feeds and will continue that I think. I know some of you are cat people and I don’t want to bring religion into this safe space.

One news story that caught my eye this week is a rather more macabre follow-up to the one about the motel fuckwit being sat on my a law enforcement robot that I mentioned a few weeks back.

She was arrested following an attempt to cast spells at anyone who came near and, covered in blood, was subsequently brought down by a non-human operative who was less susceptible to witchcraft.

Yep, the Kentucky State Police deployed a robot against an actual witch.

Living in the future far exceeds my expectations.

I watched two new Korean flicks this week (and another disappointing, but lauded, American horror movie that I’m not going to pull apart here) and one of them at least was a bit of a belter.

I’m a sucker for a good Joseon period story and while UPRISING (2024) wasn’t quite top tier I enjoyed it a lot. It tells the tale of a slave forced to become the literal punching bag for a young nobleman only for them to forge a strong friendship that is tested when they find themselves on opposite sides of revolution. There’s just enough heroic bloodshed on offer, alongside beautifully choreographed fight scenes, to gloss over the cracks in the story that maybe needed another twenty minutes to properly flesh itself out.

I think everyone has seen the remarkable TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016) and has perhaps followed it up with the shows All of Us are Dead and the period Kingdom, but maybe less well known is the very long, but very perfect, Mr Sunshine, which I can only describe as Pride and Prejudice with Springfield rifles. No zombies, but I’ve watched it three times to date and each time I want the ending to be different even though I wouldn’t change a single thing. I should probably do a round up of top Korean drama here sometime, right?

Sadly the other new thing I watched this week was one of the final movies of Lee Sun-kyun and it’s a bit of a damp squib. The disaster movie premise of a cross section of Seoul society trapped on a failing suspension bridge would have been the quiet part of the pitch quickly followed by GENITALLY MODIFIED ATTACK DOGS delivered much louder and probably with a fist punching the air.

What plays out is basically Paw Patrol meets Cujo and while it was entertaining enough its still a movie about GENITALLY MODIFIED ATTACK DOGS that never once comes close to the wonder of 1972’s THE DOBERMAN GANG in which trained dogs rob banks.

But if it’s dogs you want then it’s dogs I got.

A few weeks back I posted a short story called Lord Fancypants and The Diablo Kid that went down so well that folk have been badgering me for a follow up. Well, be careful what you wish for because the vampire and the grumpy English fuck are back.

The Murder Dogs of White Hell

The bullet caught The Kid high up in the chest, lifted him out of the saddle and threw him back into the darkness.

The Duke swore and fell sideways from his own saddle as the round meant for him caught his mare full in the face. He rolled in the snow to avoid the dead animal crushing him and immediately rolled back to free his Sharps.

He still missed the familiarity of his old Hawken, but a breech load had the advantage when confronted with godless bushwackery of this nature.

Armed and aware of the disparity between the heat of the horse’s blood his right arm was soaking up and the chill of the snow covering his left, he looked out for a hint of movement anywhere in the darkness that his partner had disappeared into.

It was, as his grandmother used to say, quiet as a dead mouse in a wagtail’s grave.

‘Damn this’, he thought, closing his eyes, fully focussed now on the give of his trigger.

“Show yourself you cowardly cocksuckers,” he hollered, “So I may avenge Lola by sending you to oblivion!”

No response, but he heard fresh snow crunch off to his left, fired once and was rewarded with a satisfying grunt of pain.

“How’d you like that, you fucking flapdoodle?”

He tucked his head down behind poor Lola as more shots rang out.

Three of them at least.

A sudden scream of surprise in the darkness was cut off with a wet gargle then silence once more.

Two now.

He considered the rifle in his hands knowing he would not need to fire it again tonight.

Someone was thudding frantically through the snow towards him, telegraphed by frantic breathing. He looked over his saddle and for a moment caught a glimpse of a heavy-set fellow who seemed mostly beard and belly tossing his own muzzle loader behind him. The man’s eyes were wide and panicked and then gone as he was pulled off his feet and back into the darkness.

One left.

He stood, figuring if a stray round did take him then at least he wouldn’t have to vex his brain with how to continue their journey with only the one horse left between them.

He stepped around Lola, her blood already as cold as the snow she lay in, and found his partner standing over the man he had winged.

More than winged as it turned out. The round from his rifle had continued on its merry way into the darkness, but not before taking the man’s jaw with it. He was holding what was left of his face in one hand and a rough axe in the other.

The man’s eyes were wild, his tongue slopped unbidden like a red fish struggling to breathe out of water.

“You okay?” asked The Kid.

In answer he bent down and grabbed the axe from the bewildered bungler and returned it by rending his skull in two. The fish stopped moving.

“I bloody loved that horse.”

~

“I’m sorry about Lola,” said The Kid returning fifteen minutes or so later with the scant valuables the raiders had carried.

The Duke looked over The Kid’s shoulder into nothingness.

“Where’s Smitty?”

The Kid used a piece of already bloody shirt to wipe his mouth, before letting the wind take it.

“Heading back to Arkansas I reckon.”

The Duke looked down at his saddle and the bags he’d pulled from the dead animal.

“I’m not going to say I told you so.”

The Kid leaned down and picking the saddle up easily, allowed it to rest on his shoulder as he grabbed the overloaded bags.

“But…”

The Duke sheathed the Sharps and started off into the snow, letting it rest on his shoulder.

“We should never have come to fucking Sweden.”

~

For the fifteenth time The Kid reminded his friend where they actually where as they retraced the bushwhacker’s steps afore the fresh snow covered them.

“This is Norway. Not Sweden.”

The Duke took off his hat and gazed from left to right theatrically.

“Oh I beg your bloody pardon! Now that my wits have returned I can obviously see from the subtle shade of the absolute bloody nothingness that surrounds us that this particular white hell is so very different from the white hell of Sweden that you previously dragged me through. And…”

The Kid knew better than to interrupt him and adjusted the saddle a little.

“And the frigid fucking air that has reduced my balls to walnuts is so very different here from the abhorrent chill of the last month there.”

“I’m just saying those men we killed…”

“Those men you ate,” said the Duke, pulling his hat back on.

“Those men were Norwegian. Not Swedish.”

The Duke stops walking and turns to squint at his partner.

“Tell me, Diablo. Do I speak Norwegian?”

The Kid shook his head.

“You do not.”

“And how many words of Swedish do you think I understand?”

“I would have to say none.”

The Duke took a step forward and leaned close enough to The Kid’s face that he could smell the copper on his breath.

“So what fucking difference does it make?”

The Kid waited until The Duke had turned around and was walking again before he countered.

“It’s not a small detail is all I’m saying. Knowing the country we’re in and the people we kill.”

The Duke shakes his head and raises his voice to ensure The Kid can hear him over the howling wind. Not that he needs to. The Kid hears everything.

“I give not a single damn for those I kill as it matters not a lick the geography of the cunt they fell from when they all share the only common trait that matters; the need to be killed.”

The Duke smiles as he looks over his shoulder.

“But I guess if I was the one eating every mongrel I cut down then perhaps it would be contingent to keep track of their origin so one day in retirement I could pen a serial for the newspapers entitled The Global Cannibal.”

The Kid hears dogs up ahead. Alone.

“You’re quick to anger, Duke. I was the one shot from my horse.”

The Duke stretches his arms out wide as if to embrace the emptiness itself.

“You’re right, I have so much to be grateful for, my friend. Thank you for dragging me to the Eden that is Sweden.”

The snow starts coming down again.

“Norway.”

“Fuck. Off.”

~

There are twelve dogs and two sleds.

They don’t seem to mind the cold as they sit quietly in their necklines, taglines, gangline waiting on the return of men who never will. They don’t seemed surprised to see the two strangers with nary a bark or growl. Well trained at least.

The sleds are flimsy affairs to the eye, hardly there at all but for scant pieces of thin wood and rough rope.

The furs piled at the front look inviting enough, thinks The Duke as The Kid drops the saddle and bags atop them. Maybe there was a chance he wasn’t going to freeze to death tonight after all.

The Kid kneels in the snow and fusses the dogs. The ones that can reach him offer their paws as he ruffles the snow from their fur and makes calming noises. He’d always loved dogs and was fearful that they’d be wary of him or worse after he became what he now was, but if anything animals were more drawn to him, sensing perhaps a shared kinship.

“Let’s eat the fat one,” suggested the Duke.

The Kid stood and looked at the dog his friend was pointing at.

The husky, a Greenland, was eying the Duke suspiciously and to be fair it did seem a tad heftier than it’s companions, but that could have just been the abundance of fur.

“I don’t eat dogs,” said The Kid rubbing behind the husky’s ear.

The Duke’s face changed to mock surprise.

“But you’ll eat a Norwegian!”

The Englishman looked around, annoyed.

“Goddamn savages didn’t have a single mount between them. Not even a mule. I never thought I’d miss that effervescent gasbag, Toby, but here we are. For want of a nail…”

The Kid is testing the feel of the rein on the nearest sled.

“Nothing is lost. In fact this will be faster than going around as we’d planned.”

The Duke is puzzled for a moment.

“Faster…”

And then he watches The Kid test the rudimentary brake, a blunt piece of wood deployed by standing on it so that the weight of the driver caused it to bite the snow and provide a rudimentary anchor, with his boot.

“Oh no. No goddamn way.”

The Kid looks up into the looming darkness.

“Solid day by horse to go around… but we lost the horses.”

“You lost your horse. Lola was murdered.”

“These dogs are built to climb.”

The Duke looks at the animals incredulously. The fat one is the only one to look back up at him and takes a huge steaming piss into the snow.

“You want me to strap myself to a pile of heathen sticks and then have these blasted murder-dogs drag me up a mountain in the dark? Is that it?”

The Kid walks forward, takes the Sharps from him and tucks it securely into the furs.

“Up, over and down. And it won’t be in the dark.”

He nods behind the Duke who turns to see a faint glow to the south east.

“It’s dawn.”

~

The sun hadn’t manage to rise above the horizon in the last month or so and The Kid revelled in not having to hide less he be reduced to cinder. He smiled now as the dogs led him at speed up through the scant trees on a path of their own making.

‘Damn him to Hell’, thought the Englishman. ‘I do believe he’s actually having fun.’

The Duke however missed the warmth of the sun like he missed the comfort of a real bed, the taste of a real scotch and the companionship of a very real widower by the name of Kitty.

All three were waiting for him back in Liverpool.

Well, two of them certainly.

They had been travelling for almost a half year and the wanderer in him was saddlesore and broken by it. Unlike his travelling companion he had aged in the eighteen months since they first met back in California and while he had agreed to this madcap adventure its appeal had long since dulled.

Now he just wanted it to be over. Find the whatever-the-fuck-it-was and fall headfirst into the scotch, his bed and Kitty in whatever order they presented themselves to him.

But first they had to reach a speck on the map called Tromso and kill a monster.

But only if they made it there in one piece. At that exact moment, clinging onto the back of the flimsy sled for dear life, the Duke didn’t fancy his odds.

While the team pulling the Kid seemed adept at finding the smoothest path open to them, his own pack of murder-dogs found every bump and bloody drop on the side of the mountain causing his rickety splice of wood to spend as much time in the air above the snow as upon it.

He’d been sent flying from his perch twice so far. Each time narrowly missing birch trees that threatened to crack him open like an egg and each time he wiped the snow from his eyes to stagger to his feet he found the lead dog looking back at him, pissing like a fat racehorse in the ever present twilight.

Now as they neared the peak he shouted at The Kid who hadn’t been bucked off even once.

“Millard Pissmore!”

The kid heard him of course, but turned in confusion regardless.

“What?”

The Duke pointed at the lead dog who was pulling the team slightly to the left to ensure his passenger would hit an outcrop of rock at speed.

“Millard Pissmore. Like your new President. But with piss.”

The Kid gave him a blank look.

“Because of all the pissing!” the Duke shouted as his sled made contact with the bare rock and tossed him several feet into the air.

This time he managed to hang on, but his feet slipped from under him on their return and the dogs carried on regardless, dragging him, flailing feet, legs and all, up to the flat empty peak.

Once they stopped The Kid leaned in and helped him back on his feet.

“Like President Fillmore. I get it.”

The Duke watched as he fussed the lead dog who didn’t seem to care that his previous master had been partially devoured by his new one, wagging his stupid fat tail like a metronome ticking off all the ways that the Englishman hated it.

“Good boy, Millard. Good boy!”

The Duke secured himself once more on the back of the sled and shooed the vampire away.

“Get away from Pissmore, you recreant!”

The two dog teams slowly pulled them to the crescent where they were rewarded with a clear view of the lights of the port town below.

“Tromso,” said The Kid.

“If the thing you’re looking for is down there we’ll find it,” said the Duke.

He felt the need to reassure what he still thought of as his younger companion, despite that being far from the case. And to his credit the Kid did seem to appreciate the gesture. He slapped his partner on the back with a grin.

“First the fun part…”

The Duke narrowed his eyes.

“And what in Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell do you mean by that?”

In reply the vampire leaned over and whacked the hindquarters of Millard who went off like cannon shot.

“Going down hill they don’t have to keep anything in reserve!” shouted The Kid, unsure if he’d been heard as the team and the rag-doll of an Englishman sped on ahead.

And then, laughing, he set his own murder-dogs after them as he picked up the familiar voice on the breeze.

“Fuuuuuuuck yoooooooooou!”

~

The SS California had provided the fastest route down to Panama and from there it was a more dubious looking craft called The Crest that carried them on to Liverpool. The Duke sincerely believed it would have been cheaper to buy their own ship, but given that only two months earlier he’d been sharing hardtack for breakfast with his mule they dug into their newfound wealth and booked first class berths.

The plan had been to travel from the dreary north of England back to The Duke’s old estate and surprise his estranged family with a boot in the arse while introducing the Old World to the New World via the latest Philadelphian rifle technology and a vampire with a reputation as a gunslinger.

However, two weeks into the journey an article in a discarded Times had caught The Kid’s attention. It was a small piece about the death of a somewhat mediocre British explorer in Scandinavia and scant as the piece was it had quite a lurid description of the man’s fate that The Duke could only credit as the work of an excitable junior reporter more suited to Lloyd’s Weekly were he could straddle news and fiction to the delight of a lesser class of reader.

The explorer, one Thomas Mullen of Guilford, had been treated to something called The Blood Eagle which by this account alone was somewhat barbaric, painful and rather archaic even for the heathens of that particular region.

What had caught The Kid’s eye was the name given to the perpetrator of the execution; a leader of local rabble by the name of Viteengel. Or The White Angel.

It was after reading the article a fifth time that The Kid apologised and said he could no longer accompany The Duke home, but would now be travelling on to Sweden after they disembarked in Liverpool.

“Poppycock!” was The Duke’s initial response, but they had time to discuss the nature of The Kid’s sudden interest in Scandinavia and a few days later the bare bones of the narrative were laid down before them.

The Kid had once loved a woman named Hanna.

He didn’t say as much, but The Duke got the impression this may have been the only woman that his friend had ever loved.

Long gone now as they had met back in 1779 in the midst of revolution, but her young life had been cut even shorter by what The Kid could only bring himself to call ‘a damned monster’.

Coming from a 230-year-old fiend who drank the blood of humans to sustain himself The Duke thought this a very rum do indeed. But the idea of avenging a wrong of this nature, one that involved a doomed damsel no less, stirred the Arthurian part of a soul brought up on Mallory’s Le Morte d‘Arthur.

His idiot family could wait. There was honour at stake here too.

But The Kid was having none of it.

And so a few days of ship-bound arguing passed until at last…

“I owe you this at the very least. You restored my fortune and then some. And all for the cost of a wagon ride,” laid out the Englishman.

“You owe me nothing. Our deal was mutually beneficial.”

“Exactly. We’re partners are we not? So we go on together,” said The Duke with as much finality as he could muster. “Besides you’ll need a guide.”

The Kid was buckling. The Englishman, a seasoned browbeater, could feel it.

“You’ve been to Sweden?”

“Finland. Same bloody thing I assure you. Plus we’ll be hitting it in winter. Tad nippy, but if we travel far north enough after this critter of yours the sun won’t be able to sneak up on you and transform you into a pillar of fire. Handy for lost Israelites or toasting bread that may be, but ’twould be a ridiculous way to end our partnership, William.”

They had argued into the morning and with the room’s shutters secured against the light The Kid finally conceded that the journey so far had not been displeasurable and a slight detour would help cement their partnership.

And friendship, although this detail was left unspoken.

The Kid hadn’t known many friends in his long time walking the Earth for obvious reasons while The Duke, a renowned prick who could never seem too keep his mouth shut, could also count past friendships on what was left of the hands of a gin-sodden textile worker. Now fate had introduced him not only to the most interesting fellow he’d ever met, but one that was almost guaranteed to outlast him and could be trusted to give a fantastic eulogy at what he now envisaged would be the most lavish funeral for a once panner of filthy streams.

They stayed in Liverpool for five days preparing storage for their London-bound belongings and transport for the upcoming winter detour. It was in the Adelphi Hotel that the Duke met Kitty Williams and it was in her embrace that the first misgivings began to peck away at the Englishman’s sense of adventure.   

But a deal was a deal and their first week in Sweden hadn’t been too far removed from what he remembered of Finland. But then two things occurred. One, the harshest winter for as long as anyone could recall fell upon them and, two, the idiot Thomas Mullen had in fact died in a totally different country than the one they were in.

The Englishman penned an angry missive to the Times that he knew would never be published, inferring as it did that the editor and writer of the piece were the offspring of the same jackal that birthed them directly into the very sewer of Hades from which all journalists were plucked, dripping with offal and a natural inability to recognise a fact when confronted by one.

Undeterred they trekked on until their already minimal provisions started to wane and they found themselves on the miserable path that lead to poor Lola’s demise.

~

The Duke didn’t notice that he was petting the fat, pissy dog, Millard, absentmindedly in much the same way he had grown accustomed to petting Lola. The Kid did notice and was wise enough to remain silent about it.

They walked the dogs and sleds through the main thoroughfare which was almost empty. It wasn’t quite 7am despite the persistent twilight and visible heavens. Signs of life were slight.

Back in California a street such as this would have had a few sleeping drunkards at least, but here that would mean death so the liver-soddled, of which there were plenty, would be gently beaten towards makeshift barns at the edge of the township for their own good.

But also because no one wanted to spend the best part of a morning separating Sven the Ale from the permafrost.

The closest thing to pass for a hotel was a rather ramshackle tumble of a building called The Nordleys Inn, but it was open and had a fire roaring in the dining area so leaving the murder-dogs outside they settled in.

The first course of action, after The Kid had watched The Duke clear his plate of eggs and reindeer meat washed down with day-old treacle-thick bible-black coffee, was to work out if this bastard Viteengel gang was even here.

The information they’d followed had seemed solid enough, but after the last few days of being snowbound, bushwhacked and dragged over a mountain by Cerberus’ own foul-furred cousins The Duke would not have batted an eyelid if the old wrinkled inn-keep informed them that the shit-heels they sought had retired to California for the winter.

This all became moot when a walking pile of stinking fur who had to stoop less his head carve a niche in the doorframe walked into the establishment and shouted something indecipherable at the inn-keep and his new guests.

The Duke poured himself another coffee as The Kid turned and asked the old man what the turbulent arrival was blabbing about.

“He wants to know who brought the sleds and dogs back that belong to his brothers, Jens, Staale and Aksel.”

“Ah,” said The Duke.

“Do you know these brothers?” asked The Kid.

The angry giant seethed silently, but watched with great interest as the inn-keep came quickly over and spoke to them in a hushed tone.

“They are a blight on Tromso. Rasmus there is the oldest and the worst of them. His brothers settle for local torment, but this one has made a name for himself with the one they call The White Angel.”

“Viteengel,” said The Kid.

This was the only word that Rasmus was capable of understanding, but it was enough to set him off. He covered the distance in almost a single stride and swatted the old man away with one hand while lifting The Kid out of his seat and up into the air with the other.

The Duke had a hand on the Sharps laying on the seat next to him, but aimed a wry smile at the dangling vampire who was now being held by the neck ‘tween two meaty fists.

“I assume you’d prefer Rasmus here to speak of his nefarious associations rather than redecorate the ceiling with what little brains are rattling around up there with you.”

The Kid managed to shoot his friend a look of tired exasperation before taking hold of one of Rasmus’ fingers, bending it backwards until it snaps like a dry twig.

Rasmus screams and flings The Kid in the direction of the fire, clutching his broken finger and stamping the overturned chair into kindling.

The Duke takes the opportunity to pick up his coffee mug and rifle and lean on the bar next to the dazed inn-keep to observe the second round.

The Kid is back on his feet and like a matador stands statue-still as the burly Norwegian runs at him full-pelt with a roar that rattles the glassware.

The bear-like man swings out to connect with the slighter man’s head only to find his target is no longer there. Lightning fast, The Kid has sidestepped the attack and in a blur has drawn his Colt Dragoon and blown the man’s kneecap clean off as he passed.

Howling with pain the big man hits the floor and rolls on to his back clutching the mess of his leg with one hand and holding the other up in a gesture of surrender.

It’s this hand that The Kid shoots next and at a distance of some two feet rendering it a bloody mess of a stump while relocating the fingers and thumb around the room.

Rasmus immediately stops screaming and looks dumbly at where his hand was but just a moment ago while simultaneously pissing himself silly.

“Ah, now I see the resemblance to his brothers’ idiot dog,” says The Duke, swilling back the last of his caffeinated treacle. “I do believe you have his attention. If the inn-keep here would do us the small favour of translating from moron to English and back again...”

A low growl fills the room.

“That won’t be necessary,” says a soft American-accented voice behind them.

Everyone turns to the stunning young woman in the doorway shaking her long blonde hair free of snow. Sat happily at her feet is the fat dog, Millard, the very picture of contentment.

Rasmus, for his part, says nothing, while the other men each have a line of their own to deliver.

“Viteengel!” utters the barkeep.

“Hello, Hanna,” offers The Diablo Kid with a sad smile as he holsters the Dragoon.

Lord Fancypants looks from the woman and back to his partner and then shaking his head leans over the bar and swaps his mug for a half empty bottle of honest-to-god Scotch and, before pulling the cork with his teeth, sums up his feelings accordingly.

“Fuck. Off”

I’ll finish this off next week.

Until then stay safe.

Mike