MSTed: The Seven Stars, Chapter 2 (Part 1 of Many)

[Kevin Mowery]

[Interior of the SOL. CROW and TOM are sobbing uncontrollably. MIKE
is throwing a noose over something overhead, maybe a rafter.]
TOM: Oh, Mike, it's *horrible*.
CROW: It's worse than Ratliff.
TOM: It's less coherent than an X-Files "dream sex" fanfic!
[BOTS sob some more. Mike tests the pull on his noose. GYPSY enters,
stage left.]
GYPSY: What in the Heck Ramsey is going on here?
CROW: It's this "Seven Stars" thing. It's sucking our will to live.
GYPSY: And what are you going to do about it?
TOM: Well, we thought we'd cry and hope Pearl took pity.
[MIKE points at noose.]
GYPSY: No! You're going to go back in there and make fun of this
story like you've never made fun of one before. Didn't you survive
"Red Zone Cuba"?
CROW: Yeah! We did!
GYPSY: And did you let "The Thing That Couldn't Die" get you down?
TOM: No, we didn't!
GYPSY: And weren't you able to laugh your way through "Monster A
Go-Go"?
MIKE: Well, actually, I wasn't--
GYPSY: Hush! [light starts to flash] You've got Bad Game Fiction
Sign! Now get into that theater, you maggots! Hup! Hup! Hup!
[MIKE and the BOTS rush into the theater]

I Was Me, But Now He's Gone...

"Where are you now, Silverdancer?"

TOM: <singing> Hold me closer, Silverdancer.

Soul-scream. Then, the lying silence of cold rain drizzling outside.
"Samantha?" I finally managed to choke out. But my lady, my love, was
far away, and my silken sheets were cold with my own sweat, not hers.
An occurrence most common as of late.

CROW: I'm prayin' it's just sweat.

To sleep, perchance to have nightmares that scare the hell outta you
and whoever's in bed with you... If only Ol' Bill would have known the
current irony of his words, he would have gone swimming in the Thames
with a ton of bricks. "Perchance to dream" my ass!

MIKE: Isn't there a law against bringing Shakespeare into this?

Cursing the benefits of my so-called college education, I took a peek
over at the nightstand,

TOM: So-called nightstand.

hoping that I wouldn't see what I thought I'd see. Alas
(thanks, Ol' Bill),

CROW: "To sleep, perchance to dream" and "Alas"--the two most famous
lines from Shakespeare.

my vintage Rocky and Bullwinkle alarm clock betrayed me. Its
baleful red LED glow read 4:44 AM, the precise time of my previous
nightmares. Et tu, Bullwinkle?

TOM: Yes! Bullwinkle stabbed him! <'bots do a happy dance>
MIKE: Oh, no, wait. There's more.

Well, at least I was consistent in my madness. Three nights in a row
now. Same time, same Bat Channel.
As quietly as I could manage, I got out of bed, then staggered over
the hardwood floor until I made it to the bathroom. Once there, I
closed the door, hit the lights—which I instantly loathed—and stared
at myself in the mirror. A faint twinge of something blue arced across
my eyes, a bloom of electric blue light, and this subtle threat to my
even more subtle sense of sanity caused me to look away. For a brief,
terrifying moment, I was totally alone.

MIKE: Then I slipped back into a dream.

Then, my soul shaking, I was back in the here and now, and I was
forced to consider what had only so recently seemed to become my focus
of existence.

CROW: Beanie Babies!

One hell of a nightmare. Again. Three nights in a row, the same damn
dream. That did not bode well. Superstitions and Old Wives' Tales
speak of horrible fates for such poor, doomed fools.

TOM: They will be forced to read The Seven Stars....

Superstitions? Dreams? Omens?
Sure, let it be an "Omen." Damien Thorne—Antichrist or not—didn't
scare me one bit. I'd happily shove all seven knives of Megiddo into
him and not even bat an eye while doing it.

MIKE: I feel the same way about the author.

But that reject from Creature Feature—Lord... Valthrustra, was it?—now
that was an entirely different matter. Just thinking about that name
made me shudder all the way down to the small of my back. As I rubbed
my temples, trying my futile best to rid myself of another migraine, I
noticed that the throbbing in my head was in perfect synchronization
with the crash and bang of the approaching thunderstorm, which had
begun to announce itself with a gathering ferocity. Leave it to
musician's habit:

TOM: Heroin!
MIKE: That's a little dark.

always in time, no matter how bad
things around became. I thought about taking out my contacts, which
had been in for about a week,

MIKE: He's had his contacts in for a week, and he's surprised he has a
headache?

but I quickly decided against anything that had to do with looking
into my own eyes.

CROW: Which is the same reason his girlfriend left him.
TOM: <singing> Do you ever wake up in the morning with a zomby woof
behind your eyes?

I'd just as soon let them rot out—contacts and eyes—before I was
forced to cross that electric bridge again.

MIKE: Truly the cruelest form of capital punishment.
TOM: Freedom lies just over the bridge.... ZAP!

Besides, a handful of Ibuprofen from my convenient economy-sized
bottle of generically-labeled "Ibuprofen"

CROW: And washing them down with Coke from a can labelled "Coke"....

would knock the pain out about
as well as a Quaalude. Sort of. However, since Luther wasn't here at
the moment, I was stuck with taking the generic over-the-counter
"good-good."
Hmmm...
"Good-good." That's what Luther Gates, Rastamon Supreme, called all
species of reality-blurring substances, legal or not.

TOM: Ibuprofen as a reality-blurring substance? What kind of winpy
musician is this guy?
CROW: While his friends are off trashing hotel rooms, our hero goes on
a week-long children's chewable vitamin jag.

Too bad this candy-assed version of the "good-good" was legal.
What I really needed was some prescription-strengthed medication. And
the "prescription" part didn't matter as much as the "strength" part
did, boyo! I knew Luther would forgive me this one slip, though.

MIKE: <Luther> What's wrong with you, taking legal drugs?

Considering the day's possibly supernatural circumstances,

TOM: A nightmare....

it would be the least that he could do. Besides offer me some real
"good-good," that is...
"C'mon, mon! We gotta go kill de Bad Guys..."
"What? Luth—"
I did a double-take. Avoiding eye-contact with the mirror, I gave the
bathroom a thorough look-see. No Luther. Nothing. No one.

CROW: Not even me.

Feeling totally paranoid, and now somewhat silly, I
laughed once, nervously. Hollowly. Possibilities stumbled through my
mind. It had definitely been Luther's voice that I had heard.
Definitely. But Luther wasn't here. No way you could hide a seven-foot
one-inch monster like that in my little bathroom—even from an idiot
like me. Luther definitely wasn't here. But Sammy... Had it been only
Sammy, messing around with me or something? Some tape-recording, or
digitized sample of Luther's voice, channeled into the bathroom in
some lunatic Sammy-engineered way—say, perhaps, like through the
toilet bowl? No, not even a Total Loon like Sammy would have...

TOM: Mike, why was that capitalized?
MIKE: I dunno. Maybe it's an official title like Poobah.

TO BE CONTINUED....

--The MST3K characters are copyrighted by Best Brains, Inc. The text
of the novel is copyrighted by Nova Eth publishing or Todd King or
whoever. No infringement is intended.