Creators / Copyright: Woody Evans
Jenny Creation Date: October 16, 2003
Original Source: Juked (work has been removed)
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John Dee, Renaissance Magus and Polymath, revisits tango and learns to scat jazz. Night now, out clubbing in Stoke-on-Trent, he leans on his buddy, young Ed Kelley, and breaths vodka mist on his neck. “I am tired,” says Dee.
Kelley’s been watching Dee dance, with longing, from some distance in the blacklight. Dee’s trainers are stitched with silver, and they glow like lost feathers from Hermes’ ankle-winglets.
Dee’s throbbing toward a girl, jumping like a Bantu across the duct-taped dance floor. She’s flowery and black, in mean little blue biker-shorts with orange and angry dayglow devil horns on her hips. Jenny Everywhere is dancing with Dr. Dee. And loving it.
Recognizing him as a dangerous mage, mathematician, and (not least) villain, she retreats. Dee dives for Kelley’s table, taking a long pull off a tall, hot, black beer, he spins out the emergency exit and pukes onto a small nest of rats, burning a cub with his belly acid and enraging the mother. He quickly returns to the bar, ordering water, ephedrine, two condoms, a taser gun and six vodkas. Back to dancing. Someone finally makes him stop.
It’s Kelley. “Come with me, Deedee. Let’s get out of here.”
Dee grabs Kelley’s crotch and squeezes. Kelley gasps and wrenches free, falls out a window onto the nest of rats. Dee lifts his taser gun and begins a long slow stalk across the club.
Jenny senses the danger. She passes her hand before her face; nanotech monsters make her look like a mix of Carson McCullers and Sonia Sanchez with neon green eyelashes and a hair-lip. She is hidden, or believes she is.
Dee is slo-mo stepping across the floor. His vision is blurry and the music has become time-travel, tracers trailing every tusked smile, every wave-glancing jiggle of every shining nipple stuttering forward and backward, incongruous by slivers of seconds, lost in a frothy and splattered stream of drugs.
Jenny has forgotten to remove her devil-hips, and Dee sees these first. Her horned pelvis calls him closer, her purple and feathered pubic hair forming a sort of goatee, from his perspective, through her glassy skirt.
She realizes her mistake, the failure of her half-disguise, as Dee raises his weapon. He sees his hands spinning, tries to aim.
But Jenny knows Enochian. Her face reverts to standard form as she screams out the names of six angels, the names surfing down to heaven over the rolling Drum n’ Bass. And Kelley, hurled back through the window by a blackly scintillating seraph, lands on Dee’s shoulders and shoves an angry rat down his dashiki. Dee taps the trigger and the electron bolt goes wild, glancing off a strobe in the rafters. Wasps pour down to eat the people.
A club-wide fight erupts. Kelley ruins Dee’s face. Angels pull their demon buddies through the event-horizon of Jenny’s Enochian chants. There is some suffering. Much fun is had with flesh, much wet and red sliding, orgasms had in throats, nanobots jumping the blood-brain barrier with schadenfreudeisch glee. Wasps laying eggs in dance-boot blisters.
Jenny steps through the emergency exit, skips through the garbage and ducks beneath the reach of an angel passing through the willow trees.
She catches a bus to Hanley, picks up a small bottle of ouzo, and rides on to Keele in a cab, to call on an old friend for a late-night banishing rite. The nanites are itching her worse than crabs now, and the dark wind douses her with cold mist as she leaps puddles and staggers toward the small stone house.
