‘I’m not leaving you,’ said Minnie fiercely.
‘You’re going that way to get help,’ said Mervyn, even more fiercely. ‘If you get shot there’ll be hell to pay. Even if Stuart doesn’t kill me, your mother will. And prison uniforms are very unfashionable. Do you want your mother wearing luminous orange?’
She look annoyed and shook her head. ‘I’m
not
leaving you!’
‘Don’t make me fire more than I have to,’ Stuart’s voice floated down to them. He was coming closer. ‘I’ve already damaged the hotel’s fixtures and fittings. The convention will get the blame. They might not let us back next year.’
‘I’m sure they’ll understand,’ shouted Mervyn.
Minnie scowled. ‘Look, I was a member of the TA!’
‘Then look after the civilian who needs looking after! That’s what they train you to do, isn’t it?’
While they were arguing in whispers, Nicholas had been silent. He was pale and his hands were shaking. He looked at Minnie imploringly.
‘All right,’ she said grimly. ‘Follow me, Mr Everett.’ She grabbed his hand in readiness.
‘Good. Go!’
Minnie and Nicholas made a dash for the doors leading into the foyer. Mervyn also broke cover, ran into the middle of the stairwell and towards the fire doors.
They wouldn’t budge. They were locked.
Mervyn allowed a whimper to escape. He turned.
Stuart had reached the bottom of the stairwell and was facing him.
‘This is getting really boring,’ said Stuart. ‘If I was making a film of this with my friends, I’d cut this bit.’
Mervyn pressed his back into the door. The door moved.
No, they weren’t locked. They were just a bit stiff. He hadn’t pressed the bar down hard enough.
He spilled through the door and ran outside, just as Stuart fired, shattering the door panel and creating a hailstorm of glass shards.
Stuart ran after him. ‘Someone’ll have to pay for that!’ he shouted.
Nicholas and Minnie ran into a curiously deserted foyer. Bits of alien were scattered on the carpet. Schedules that had been fastened to pin boards had been allowed to fall drunkenly to the floor. It was like the hotel had been victim of a sudden tsunami.
They went to the desk to find the receptionists cowering behind it, eyes wide with shock.
‘There’s a madman with a gun inside the hotel!’ barked Minnie.
‘We know!’ they chorused.
They looked behind them. Roddy was there, holding his gun
*
Stuart ran out of the fire door and around the hotel, head twitching in all directions.
Where?
Mervyn couldn’t have got out of sight in so short a time. There weren’t that many places to hide, a few scrappy bushes, some cars…
The Styrax. The Styrax Superior.
The door on the Styrax.
Slightly open.
Stuart’s characteristically sunny grin reappeared on his face and he dashed over. As he got nearer he saw that the front lights were on—the ones that represented the ‘eyes’ of the Styrax. They were not immediately noticeable in daylight, but they were definitely glowing. Someone had turned the ignition.
He reached the car, slowed, walking gently so as to not crunch the gravel underfoot. His fingers curled gently around the concealed handle. Bracing his feet on the tarmac, he wrenched the door open.
No one there.
He climbed inside, checking under the seats, behind the seats, looking in the back. That was when Mervyn saw his chance and dashed from behind the withered palm tree by the hotel, pelting along the slip road and up to the motorway.
Behind him, he heard an engine splutter and a monstrous revving sound. He whipped his head back and saw the Styrax Superior judder into life. It edged towards him, slowly at first, but then picking up speed.
Brilliant
, thought Mervyn.
I’ve successfully manoeuvred myself into running from a homicidal maniac in a car.
The Styrax growled towards him. The lights were activated, and the now familiar call of ‘DEATH TO ALL PEDESTRIANS!’ boomed out of the speakers. Stuart was completely mad and no one had even noticed.
Let’s face it,
thought Mervyn wildly,
If you’re mad and you hang around sci-fi conventions all your life, who would ever notice?
The Styrax reached the edge of the car park and was about to turn into the open road. Mervyn was standing on the lip of the hard shoulder, surveying a sea of concrete and tarmac. There was nowhere to go where the Styrax couldn’t follow.
Mervyn had no choice.
He deliberately feigned exhaustion (not that that was a hard act—his legs felt as if they were ready to drop off), wilting and slowing, staggering like a runner 15 miles into a marathon. He waited until the Styrax was almost upon him and dodged to one side, haring back to the relative safety of the hotel. The Styrax pirouetted like an angry bull and roared back the way it had come.
If he could just get back into the hotel…
Mervyn could see the Styrax very clearly now, its huge wedge-shaped bonnet distorted a hundred times over, reflected in the windows of the hotel. Running back here had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now Mervyn wasn’t so sure. Stuart didn’t care about concealing his crimes any more; in his present state of mind he could see him crashing the Styrax right through the fascia of the hotel and ploughing into the reception desk.
He staggered about (not acting now) half running, half crawling to the glass doors that revolved invitingly. He was half hoping there would be steps up to the doorway, Styrax didn’t do steps. But no, it was just a flat plain of flagstones; there was nothing to stop Stuart pursuing Mervyn up to the doorway and beyond. His addled, panicked brain cursed all disabled and wheelchair users for their insistence on removing all impediments to the menace of the Styrax.
Disaster. His shoe caught the edge of a paving stone and he went sprawling, flat on his belly, the tips of his fingers brushing the edge of the revolving door as it swept past his head. His mind immediately switched from wheelchair-hater to that of injured victim, concocting a plan to sue the hotel for their dangerously uneven flagstones. He cursed his brain for dwelling on such nonsense in the last seconds of his life.
Someone was standing over him. He craned his head up…
It was Roddy Burgess, gun in hand, staring at the Styrax. It was bearing down on them both, lights flashing and guns unfolding from its carapace. From the look on Roddy’s face, it seemed that all his worst nightmares had come true.
‘I knew sooner or later you’d come for me, you robot fiend.’
He levelled the gun, and pumped every bullet it held into the Styrax Superior. It veered, hit a potted palm and hurtled into the air, colliding and landing on a BMW and a Mondeo. Mervyn hoped they were owned by the bastards who had been revving their engines the other day. Finally, the Styrax came to rest, teetering upside down on the BMW.
Mervyn didn’t know what Bernard had done to the Styrax Superior to ‘augment’ it, but it must have been something flammable.
Because it burst into flames.
Roddy and Mervyn were engulfed by a tidal wave of
Vixens
fans, running and screaming past them. Some of them saw the gun in Roddy’s hand, but ignored him as they rushed to save the most priceless piece of
Vixens from the Void
memorabilia ever.
But it was too late. The last of the Styrax was no more.
It is said by many experts that in the event of nuclear armageddon, the only thing left would be cockroaches.
But if those experts also survived the impending holocaust, crawled out of their bunkers and examined the eight-foot tall cockroaches lumbering around the remnants of civilisation, really looked at them closely, really,
really
closely, and looked through the little hole in the mouth…
…They would find a science fiction fan sweating away inside the costume. Because fans survive.
Stuart survived. He was thrown clear. His face and body were horribly burnt, and it took several months in hospital, but he was finally given a new face by the doctors. He called the doctors his ‘restoration team’. Stuart was delighted with the results, and proclaimed his new face ‘much improved’.
Mervyn attended the trial, of course. He was a key witness.
It was one of the more interesting murder trials. Nicholas’s lawyer was very creative, and soon got all of the murder charges against the ex-Producer dismissed. Moreover, he argued that the lesser charge of ‘attempted murder’ did not apply because simply thinking about murdering someone, having a half-hearted go and just giving up was hardly a criminal matter—otherwise every hen-pecked husband who bought rat poison, briefly considered sprinkling it on his wife’s food before dismissing the notion and using it to kill rats should also be in the dock. It wasn’t Nicholas’s fault that someone came along after and ‘finished the job’. All charges against Nicholas for the deaths of Simon, Smurf and John the Stalker were eventually dismissed.
There was the matter of Sheldon’s death back in 1987—and even Nicholas’s wily lawyer could not get around that. But he could helpfully point out Sheldon’s willingness to work on the show, knowing full well the risks to his health. Sheldon was hardly an unwitting participant in his own demise.
Nicholas was charged with criminal negligence and sentenced to six months in prison—which he’d already spent inside, waiting for the trial to start. He emerged blinking in the sunlight to waiting
Vixens
fans, baffled at finding himself released but incredibly glad to be free to start writing his memoirs.
To tell the truth, Nicholas’s wily lawyer was considerably helped by Stuart.
Stuart insisted on attending the trial in costume. He also insisted on taking the credit for all the murders, much to his lawyer’s despair. He claimed that, even though the initial ideas had been down to Nicholas, the success of the murders was down to him. He was sentenced to 30 years.
He had already been asked by Morris if he could attend a future convention and share some anecdotes about his murder spree. He had been pencilled in for ConVix 45.
The book about the serial killer at the science fiction convention—called
Geek Tragedy
—had sold extremely well. It eclipsed the sales of Vanity Mycroft’s autobiography, outselling it three to one. It hovered on the outer fringes of the WHSmith bestsellers chart for a good year and a half, made the author a lot of money and gave him a stepping stone to a successful writing career, creating dramatic accounts of real-life murders.
The only trouble was the author happened to be Andrew Jamieson.
After the dust had settled and the murderer convicted, he’d seen an opportunity, and in a rare burst of energy actually produced a book in six weeks, handing it into the publishers well before the deadline.
Mervyn had a feeling he should have done that. Better hurry up and finish his novel.
Nevertheless, Andrew’s book had made Mervyn a minor celebrity. He’d enjoyed being the centre of attention for a change. He’d done some talks, got interviewed by Radio 4 arts shows and even went on Alan Titchmarsh. This time it was
his
photo staring out of
The Telegraph
media supplement, leaning on a (fake) Styrax with ray gun in hand.
Inevitably, however, the media’s attention started to turn elsewhere; to other murders, other scandals, other books. The interviews and speaking engagements slowly dried up. All except
Vixens from the Void
of course.
Vixens
was eternal.
Surprisingly, he didn’t mind one bit. Perhaps it was the fact that fate had granted him a rare spurt of good fortune, but what seemed claustrophobia-inducing a year ago was now a reassuring corner of continuity. The eternal devotion of the fans.
CULTFEST O9
TIME SEGMENT TWO (VFTV)
4.00pm
EVENT: MERVYN STONE, Geek Tragedy—Remembering Convix 15
LOCATION: Excelsior’s Shrine (Main Hall)
AUTOGRAPH PANEL—VANITY MYCROFT, ROGER BARKER, PETRA DE VILLIERS
LOCATION: Medula’s Throne Room (Room 4B)
DIRECTING VIXENS—Ken Roche, Guy Hollis
LOCATION: Daxatar’s Workshop (Room 4F)
‘FUGITIVES FROM SPACE’—Episode Screening
LOCATION: The Arena of Magaroth (Room 12J)
WHY ‘VIXENS FROM THE VOID’ IS BETTER THAN ‘DOCTOR WHO’ (PANEL) with Graham Goldingay,
Fay Lawless, Craig Jones, Darren Cardew
LOCATION: Hyperion Engine Room (Lounge Bar)
Another place, another time…
Another convention.
Cultfest ‘09 to be exact. In Birmingham. Or was it Stoke?
Mervyn was on stage, being interviewed by a bespectacled man. He’d just been asked a question from the audience. He was enjoying himself. He was also trying not to glance towards the female steward, who was looking murderously at him from one of the exits. Oh dear.
‘Well, I think I first suspected something was afoot when I found the second suicide note on the floor of the Styrax. I think it’s somewhere in the first third of Andrew’s book…’
‘Chapter 14,’ someone in the front row blurted out. There was a spasm of laughter from the crowd.
‘Yes… Thank you for that. Of course, that was Stuart’s first mistake. He thought that Nicholas was so shoddy he hadn’t even bothered leaving a faked suicide note, so he obligingly wrote one for him, not noticing Nicholas’s own terrible effort lying under the seat.’
‘Unfortunately you forgot about it.’
‘Oh yes!’
There was more laughter.
‘But that was lucky in a way. If I had chosen to mention my discovery to Stuart, he might have realised his elementary mistake, decided the game was up and that he couldn’t play detective with me any more. He would have cut his losses and my throat in the process.’
The interviewer scanned the darkened hall. ‘Any more questions?’
A hand shot up. ‘Who’s got the suicide notes now?’
Mervyn shrugged and looked helplessly at the interviewer. The interviewer leaned in to his own microphone. ‘I believe they were sold at auction to Graham Goldingay. Any other questions?’