I wake up mid-afternoon from a dream. The dream was vivid, seems important. By the time I’ve walked from my bed to the bathroom, it’s gone. Like it always is.
I work a night shift in a packaging factory. Twelve hours each night, Monday to Thursday. Stuff gets delivered by tanker — pastes and gels of different kinds. It gets hooked up to vats and squirted into bottles, tubes, plastic tubs, barrels for agricultural use. I’m on a line that puts mild anaesthetic into small tubes. It’s sold in sex shops to prevent premature ejaculation. I package thirteen thousand tubes into little boxes, put the little boxes into bigger boxes, shrink wrap them, mark them for distribution with the printed stick-on labels the supervisor gives me, put them in the loading bay.
It’s minimum wage crud but it won’t be forever. My plan is to get famous instead. My weekends, like my days, are nightbound but that’s because I’m a resident DJ at Thralls. While I put little boxes into big boxes I’m thinking about the set I’ll play on Friday.
On the way home in the morning I pass an office supplies store. The window display has a digital dictation machine: ‘value brand special offer’. It’s about the size of a cigarette packet. I buy one. Then I buy cigarettes, smoke two on the way home.
I put the dictation machine and the cigarettes on my bedside table. When I wake up I record what I remember from the dream. It’s not much. Something about butterflies. I read something recently about how some species migrate at certain times of year, wings folded, spiralling in the thermals at twelve thousand feet.
* * * * *
At work I think about the Friday crowd at Thralls. They like cyber industrial, but their idea of danceable includes weird hardcore — the stuff we call ‘noize’. I’ve played Mimetic there, and segments of Muslimgauze. Muslimgauze is Arabic in flavour; he pulled samples from Middle Eastern radio stations and remixed them, including all the squeaks and whines from frequency drift and bad reception.
There’s an argument between two guys working the hair styling gel line. One pushes the other into the shrink-wrap machine. The heat in there isn’t a whole lot more than a sauna, but when he comes out the other end, the air in his lungs cools and contracts, plus his face is covered in plastic wrap. As the first aider on site I puncture the plastic over his mouth. He still can’t breathe. I use a screwdriver to rip the shrink-wrap, peel it back from his throat to his ribs. Paramedics arrive and take over. He looks like a human chrysalis, half-opened, a stillborn butterfly.
Was my dream prescient?
In the town centre the comic shop is just opening. One rack near the counter has second-hand stuff from small independent publishers, the kind that ran for three or four issues of smudged print and ‘transgressive’ erotic horror before they closed down. Top left of the display, there’s one showing a gothic fairy with big wings, long legs, pointy tits, a few scraps of ragged clothing and an insectoid face modelled on a gas mask. The figure scribbled on the cellophane wrap is more than its original cover price. I buy it. I don’t know why.
I have tea, toast, a cigarette, and leaf through the comic. The artwork is dark, fairies like human/dragonfly mutants with costumes based on rubber and leather fetish catalogues. It’s number three in a series, there are references to a back plot and some characters that don’t appear in this issue. I can’t follow the narrative arc.
Late afternoon: I wake up wheezing, asthmatic and disorientated. Reach for the recorder, dictate what I remember. Go to the bathroom, the kitchen, play back the recorder while the kettle boils. Something else is there, right before my own voice. A muffled conversation between two people. Words are repeated, a phrase that sounds like ‘braxkesh lopa’. I don’t recognise the language. There are scratchy, fluttering sounds. Maybe someone tried out the recorder while it was at the factory, or in the shop. Or did I turn it on by accident in my sleep and the noises were from outside?
* * * * *
There’s a machine at work for putting glued labels onto bottles. The label is automatically fed onto a flatbed and a roller glues it. The bottle is held in a cradle and pushed down onto the label. We use it for glass bottles of sticky sweet cough medicine. There’s a maker’s name on the machine, and the date of its manufacture — 1947.
Sometimes the bottles come down too hard and glass pings everywhere. Only a couple of girls on the factory floor know how to make it run smoothly, but one called in sick and the other’s on holiday. Some idiot tries it and gets a shard of glass in his hand. The shout goes round for me but no one has shut the thing down. I walk to the end of the production line, hit the power switch as another bottle explodes. I bandage the guy’s hand so the glass stays in place until an ambulance gets him to hospital. It’s much later before someone points out two tiny shards from that last bottle caught my neck. You feel nothing when a glass cut happens, only the sharp hurt like a biological echo once the glass is out. For the rest of the shift, my patience is as broken as the labelling machine and my temper as brittle as glass.
On the plus side, it’s the last shift of the week. Any accidents they have tomorrow, someone else can deal with. I’ll be at the club.
The strange voices on the recorder are still there. I spend the morning copying them across to my laptop. Don’t think being a DJ these days has anything to do with records or CDs: the only disk involved is my hard drive, and I mix and play everything straight off the laptop. The sounds get sampled, ready to feed into my set.
I get a short and broken sleep. Dreams of something like winged seeds falling, fluttering to the ground. A chrysalis bursting open. I think this links back to the shrink-wrapped guy from the other day. I wake up, I dictate. On playback, other voices interlace with mine as though an argument was going on in the next flat. They don’t even sound human.
* * * * *
What I said about planning to be famous is true, but in reality it’s more a local notoriety involving Thralls. Thralls is on the edge of the city centre, above a TV and consumer discount electronics shop — the entrance is set back in an alcove, unmarked. Anyone who wants to go there knows where it is. It has the bare essentials — bar, stage, decks, dancefloor — with purple-black walls perpetually sweaty, and camo netting that separates the drinkers from the dancers.
There are new faces here, people I don’t recognise. The crowd is darker than usual, if that’s possible. More tribal, not with tats and piercings, but in the way they dress and act. The guys are all in black leather, but without logos, fringes, studs. Aside from variations in the length of their uniformly black hair they could be brothers. They could be clones. The girls show more variation. They’re all in rubber, ranging from full-length dresses to skimpy outfits that look like they were created from offcuts. All of them look focused, expectant.
It’s not the first time in this club that I hear a foreign language. Our music is international — we play tracks with German, Italian, Norwegian lyrics. The classic genre bands include Rammstein and KMFDM. But there are half a dozen people at the bar whose tongue I don’t recognise. It doesn’t even sound European. When one of the girls looks at me, I see her eyes are completely violet — no pupil or iris. I put this down to contact lenses. There are all kinds of special effects lenses out there. But I look back at her, and when I’m done admiring her legs under the asymmetric layered short skirt I notice the entire group all have the same eyes.
The dancefloor has a new weird thing hanging from the ceiling, a body-sized sack covered in some kind of translucent fur. The bar staff don’t know, or won’t tell. I’m reminded of the guy who got shrink-wrapped.
I won’t bullshit: no one DJs while they’re straight. I get kinked in the toilets, ready to do my set. In the booth I jack in and boot up while Fritzy does his last number. He doesn’t know about the sack thing either, nor can he tell me anything about the violet-eyed types.
I am so wired, and this will be a mental set... I start with Muslimgauze, ‘Turkish Manipulator of Limbs’, because it’s the one that lets the regulars know I’m in charge of their entertainment now. Towards the end, I mix in the sounds from my dream recorder.
Braxkesh lopa... Braxkesh lopa...
At a hundred decibels it sounds more intimidating, more alien than I expected.
And all the violet-eyed ones are there, gathering on the dancefloor as though it’s a signal. One glances up at me, the same girl or an identical one, and makes a gesture with her hand: two fingers tapping the side of her neck. She laughs. I’m puzzled, rub my own neck, see blood on my fingers. The scabbing on the glass cuts has broken. And she thinks... Thinks what? I’ve been bitten by a vampire?
The next track is cued up, but in the two or three heartbeats I’ve been looking down at my fingers the dancefloor has gone extreme. The scene is bathed in UV and fog, with flickering laser pulses from a couple of overhead barrel scanners. People are writhing on the floor, things dart through the fog and screams come back to me over the noize from the speakers.
It takes seconds to realise the sack hanging from the ceiling has burst, things are coming out of it. Like butterflies, but with hand-sized wings.
Then the next track kicks in and the lighting control programme responds with strobe.
I couldn’t tell you what happened. I’m looking out from the booth over true chaos, and my brain just processes snapshots. Butterflies on people’s faces, necks, arms, the legs of girls in miniskirts. A dark spurt of viscous liquid. Something maybe a couple of inches from my face, I can feel the air from its wings and it’s backlit against a strobe. It seems to hang there, inspecting me, sensing the blood on my neck and hands. Someone shouts, piercingly, and it’s gone. I see legs, the torso hidden under a roll of fog, heels battering the floor in some kind of seizure. Hands raised, beckoning, pointing, in gestures that look like a cross between sign language and Balinese dance.
When the emergency services find me, I’m still in the booth. The violet aliens had gathered up the butterflies on their arms, walked out into the night. Twelve dead on the dancefloor, exsanguinated. Was I ignored because I was already bleeding? Because the girl called it off me? Everyone else immobile, too traumatised to realise they should have evacuated. There are fifty different stories of what happened, fifty fantasies based on alcohol and other ingested substances.
The sack hangs loosely from the ceiling, split open, dripping sweet-smelling glop onto a bloodied dancefloor.
Jon Vagg mainly writes educational and coffee-table books. He is socially isolated, prone to insomnia and suffers from a highly deviant imagination. His stories have previously appeared, among other places, in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction 30, Ignavia 3.2 and Ballista issue 7.
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