A Slow Dance With The Morlok

Brace yourselves; it's time to don protective clothing and go for another paddle in the gene puddle.

Yes, it's Sharon's fiftieth birthday party in The Village Of The Damned.
Actually, this time we are just up the coast from that evolutionary dead-end and are sequestered in a rather nice hotel on the verge of the real world, where people walk upright and punctuate their primitive grunts with the occasional intelligible word; all of which comes as a relief until I realise that there is no available kitchen for Rod and me to hide in; I am stuck in a large room with the Morloks.
My only hope is that they won't recognise me as new genetic material for their terrible breeding programme. That hope is dashed as soon as I walk in the door and realise Shazza forgot to tell me it was fancy dress. Dressed as Dive I stick out like a sore thumb … or more accurately like fresh DNA in Morlok territory.

For those that don't know about this inaccessible and inbred little community, just click the "Gene Puddle" link at the bottom of the post and read the lower posts to appreciate my sense of creeping dread as I enter that room.
I home in on Sharon, looking radiant in a gorgeous ball gown and easy to spot as one of the only two recognisably human life forms in the room other than myself.
We do the kissy, huggy, squealy thing and then Rod comes over, for some reason dressed in immaculate navy whites like he never cottoned on to the screaming gayness of Top Gun. Suitably protected by one on either arm I head to the bar to lube up and to anæsthetise my brain against the inevitable.

The musical entertainment for the evening is being provided - inexplicably - by a Meatloaf tribute band, the lead singer of which is fat, hairy, sweaty and actually astonishingly good.

As I turn to face the room things start to get scary.
Over the years I have come to know quite a few of the inbred denizens of The Village and they flock to me now.
You remember I first described these occasions as "Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on"? I cannot possibly improve on that description as they slowly shuffle and lurch toward me with arms outstretched.
First up is lovely little Kimberley. She is dressed as a heavily pregnant nun and it is only when we are greeting one another that I discover the heavily pregnant bit is not part of the costume.
Kim is eighteen and this is her second sprog, which is very, VERY slow going for The Village.
Next to slobber over me is my beloved little friend Claire, who grew up overnight and is already on her second husband and tonight is a heavily pregnant Little Red Riding Hood, a very disturbing image for somebody I've known and loved since she was a little girl.
It doesn't take much glancing around to confirm that the theme for the evening (much as with any evening in this little anthropological nightmare) is the race to have as many babies as you can before you hit twenty and turn into your mother.

Allow me to recap: The girls in The Village are uniformly gorgeous (Kimberley was a successful underwear model at fourteen) and from the ages of twelve to twenty they squirt out as many sprogs as is physically possible in some awful race to breed a bigger tribe than their next door neighbours.
At twenty - like butterflies in reverse - they emerge from their beautiful cocoons as saggy, haggard, embittered caterpillar women. A lot of them suddenly inflate like Americans yet they continue breeding at a prodigious rate; there are very few mothers here with less than six or seven kids haring round the dancefloor and shrieking.

Thousands of years of total isolation (the sea on one side and impenetrable marshes all around) has unfortunately resulted in a genetic apocalypse in The Village, and sat around the edges of the room are the sad results: the wheelchairs of the "vegetable kids".
The worst of these is S___'s youngest. This poor little boy has been in and out of hospital for all of his short life and has had every major organ replaced at least once; every one, that is, except the severely damaged brain that is his genetic inheritance. S___ie himself is the typical Village male; slow and heavy, yet remarkably cheerful for someone with seven kids, two of whom are little more than decorative plants. He used to roadie for me way back when and is a pretty good mechanic. Though his methods are his own … when the engine management computer went blooey on my car one night he simply nodded (slowly) and drove off to Grockle Hell (the tourist resorts down the coast), returning with a nice new part stolen from some poor sap's car. He's done the same with a wheel, when I got a puncture, and most of the band's bus was rebuilt with parts stolen from coach parks.

The tragedy of The Village is that the inbred denizens seem Hell-bent on producing as many children as they can. The room is full of them, screaming and fighting and bashing into tables and the parents sit around like blancmanges, idiot grins plastered across their faces. A frighteningly high proportion of the kids have genetic disorders, which is why the women are always so glad to see me with my fresh DNA.

The stream of Dive-greeters continues for some time and every one has either a new pregnancy or a new sprog to show me. It is truly heartbreaking as I have grown to like a lot of these people rather a lot over the years.
Scariest of all is little Maz. She is so happy to see me and kissy and cuddly and wriggly as any sixteen-year-old should be, yet she is pregnant with her third baby, by three different men in the Village. It is so awful I can barely stand it.

And then the Morloks move in for the kill; those allegedly female abominations belched forth from the gaping, sulphurous stinking maw of Gehenna and greedy to extract my genes from my jeans.

One of them from Maz's tribe, who goes by the name of K___i and who I know is in her twenties but who looks my age, drags me out onto the floor for a slow dance.
Brr … I'm shuddering even now as I recall the horror.
Let me describe her:
K___i is still pretty and was obviously once beautiful, yet the Morlok uniform does dreadful things to a girl.
She is dressed in the height of Morlok style and sophistication; the denim microskirt and strappy high heels worn with hideously long false nails with stupid sparkly scribbles on them (her fancy dress consists for some unfathomable reason of a fluffy boob-tube and matching rabbit ears). Her hair is platinum blonde, straight from the bottle, with an inch of mousy roots on display; she has caked enough make-up onto her fake-tanned orange face to delight a transvestite army, and she has been dipped in a fœtid, reeking "parfum", the stench of which burns my throat and makes my eyes water.
You know my views on the denim microskirt; the most disgusting and loathsome passion-killer in Satan's Spring Collection. Well K___i's is pressed hard against me in such an unerotic, grunting-animal fashion that I feel it would send even Bill Clinton running for the scissors to cut his cock off.

Oh, K___i … Where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

Like most of the Morlok women, K___i is an unmarried multiple-mother and now she's after more. All I can say is thank God for the Meatloaf tribute band. They know very few slow-dance numbers (and actually surprisingly few Meatloaf numbers) and I am rescued by their launching into a monstrously incompetent version of Motörhead's "Ace Of Spades".
K___i immediately starts to perform a bizarre bouncing "dance" that has her spilling out of her boob-tube in every direction at once. I make the universal sign of the drink and run for the bar where I can hide behind Rod and Sharon.

This goes on for some time. Morloks are pretty tenacious beasts and K___i makes several attempts to climb up me during the evening, the reeking result of which saw all of my clothes get flung straight into the washing bin as soon as I got home.

As soon as was socially acceptable (always look for the first family to take their kids home to bed and leave with them) I do the huggy, kissy with Rod and Sharon and head for the door, where one last horror awaits me.

As I cross the lobby I see Maz standing outside in the cold, sucking hard on a cigarette in the hope that the nicotine might damage the inbred cells of her unborn child and cause it to be born normal.
However, the doorway is barred by a gorgeous girl apparently in her late teens, dressed in what - had it been a foot longer - should have been a 1920's flapper dress but was in fact a teeshirt with frills on.
"Hiya Dive! You don't get out without a kiss."
I would gladly comply but for the fact that I recognise her.
"You're one of S___ie's girls, aren't you?"
"Yeah. So?"
"How old are you now? It doesn't seem ten minutes ago that you were toddling round the dancefloor."
"I'm twelve!" She thrusts her hip out defiantly as if twelve is above the age of consent. Which unfortunately in The Village Of The Damned it all too often is.
"Does your dad know you're out here?"
"Yeah."
Oh, well. She's not going to let me past so I lean down to give her a friendly peck on the cheek.
At which point she grabs my head and forces her slobbery tongue into my mouth.
I break free and back off quickly.
"God! You bloody kids grow up way too fast these days." I protest as she giggles and shrieks with mischievous glee.
At which point Maz reaches round from behind me and gives my balls a - mercifully - gentle squeeze, before laughing at me and pouting "You're no fun any more."
Fucking Hell!
This whole village is just one big rut.
I reach the safe cocoon of my car and look back to see the girls still giggling and waving and "flapper girl" lifts up her dress and flashes her knickers at me in farewell.
I just know that the next time I see her she will have joined her sisters in the race to make vegetable babies.

On the news as I drive away is yet another report on the evacuation of hundreds of women and children from a polygamous sect's compound in America, where pædophile allegations have been made against some filthy old perverts.
Come to rural Norfolk and live the dream.

Give me a couple of weeks and I'll be able to laugh and joke about The Village Of The Damned again. But right now I am shaken and somewhat disgusted and no amount of showering and hairwashing seems to be able shift the lingering reek of K___i.