Shaniqua Khan: Colossal Witch: Chapter 6

Normal for this town

Kelly held her collar up over her nose to keep out the stench of rotten steak and wet manure. Instead, she could smell her own sweat and feel her turtle-neck sweater rubbing against her braless chest. Her breasts were still tender from the night before. She’d already noticed the specks of dried blood trapped in the hyponychium of her nails.

‘Ma’am,’ one of the specials nodded as Kelly dived under the blue and white tape. She peered over the ditch and noticed the headless mammal laying in a lump and sinking in the ever-rising bog. A light shower began to pour.

Someone handed Kelly a flask full of steaming hot instant coffee. A photographer was recording the scene and a constable was taking notes from an angry farmer who stood by an antique Land Rover, engine running, and a trailer in tow, ready to dispose of the bull. ‘Some twerp’s only gone and killed one of me sheep the other day and now this!’ he shouted as the constable tried to scribble in time.

‘Fuck me…look at the balls on that thing!’ Kelly’s partner quipped as he approached from behind her.

‘Bigger than yours,’ Kelly replied sardonically. Her partner’s lip was still split from the night before and Kelly concealed a smile when one of the specials asked if he was okay.

‘Krav Maga,’ the partner lied.

‘Who the fuck has nose bleeds during sex?’ Kelly thought. She wondered if she’d been too rough with him.

‘Oooh…get your rune book out,’ Kelly said, noticing the bloody marks written on the grass in the verge above the bull.

‘Cause of death?’ Kelly’s partner wondered, stupidly.

Kelly rolled her eyes and replied coldly, ‘Hard to tell when there’s no head’.

Her partner took a few steps into the ditch and observed the way the neck had been hacked. ‘He didn’t use a guillotine, that’s for sure. Looks like he used a bloody bread knife, it’s such a mess’.

‘Oi…you!’ Kelly barked at the photographer who was standing idly by. ‘Have you photographed these?’ she asked, pointing at the runes.

The photographer shook his head apologetically and leapt up to the grassy verge and began clicking at the bloody runes.

‘Do you think they mean anything?’ Kelly’s partner asked.

‘I doubt we have an expert in ancient languages in our midst,’ Kelly replied. ‘But we’ll send these down to the university to see if someone can decipher them anyway’.

‘What do you think?’ her partner asked, squinting and wiping rain from his muddy face. ‘Teenage satanists?’

‘Might explain all the animal killings,’ Kelly replied.

In the space of a few weeks, her team had dealt with stolen kittens, most of whom were found washed up on the mooring in the canal; a dog attack outside a 7-11; sheep ritualistically killed in a field; and a church break-in, where there was no damage apart from an unidentified sperm sample left on the forehead of the statue of Mary. She guessed it made a change at least from the usual cases of tasering domestics, performing CPR on doomed accidental hangings and scraping body parts off motorway tarmac.

‘Well, we’ve got everything we need. Let’s post this online and see if the public saw anything,’ Kelly suggested.

‘Ah! Inspector!’ someone running up to the crime scene called, just as the inspectors were ready to leave. Kelly rolled her eyes before turning around with a fake smile. It was an oily slick of a man whose electricity meter was paid for by the local rag. ‘What have we got here then…bugger me…have you seen the size of those bollocks?!’

‘We’re just going,’ Kelly said drily to the journo.

‘Anything for the newspaper?’ the reporter asked, shoving his phone on record close to Kelly’s mouth.

‘The scene speaks for itself,’ Kelly’s partner replied for her.

‘Found the head yet?’ the reporter asked excitedly.

‘I’m sure it’ll turn up,’ Kelly replied.

‘Any suspects?’ the reporter asked, whilst taking a couple of photos of the runes and decapitated bull.

‘Just blame it on asylum seekers,’ Kelly suggested. ‘That’s what you do with every other crime in this town’.

The reporter smirked, ‘the Mercury only reflects what our readers want to hear’.

Back at the roadside, Kelly leaned on top of her partner’s car before he was about to get in on the other side. ‘If you do see any of the locals walking around town with a decomposing bull skull on their head, you’ll know what to do, right?’

‘Normal for this town, ain’t it?’ her partner jibed. ‘Lunch at the station?’ he said getting in behind the wheel.

Kelly shook her head. ‘Got to do an assembly…a Year 7 is in hospital with fourth degree burns after some dickhead hid acid in the hand dryer of the gents’ loos,’ Kelly replied as she made her way to her Mondeo. Why ever did she transfer here? All she wanted was less stress than the Met and to find a submissive bumpkin who could donate sperm towards her biological clock.

‘Shani!’ Aunty screamed soon after the doorbell had roused Shani from her slumber.

Shani tossed in her bed. She shoved one of the cats off her.

‘Shani!!’

‘Oh…what?!’ Shani yelled back, wiping her eyes awake. It was late morning and she had overslept, having returned home late from the funfair the previous night.

‘You’ve got a parcel!’

Shani flung her arms up in the air. What was the point of waking her up on a Sunday for that?

Shani walked into the front room, ignoring Aunty’s partner’s hungover moans, and swiped the cardboard box package off the dining table.

She couldn’t remember having ordered anything. She tipped the easy-peel strip of card on one side of the box and unfolded a few flaps before gasping.

Aunty’s partner peered over the arm rest of the sofa he was sprawled across and groaned, ‘Post on a Sunday?!’

Shani ignored him as he made a remark about online shopping and privatised delivery services. Careful to conceal the contents of the package, Shani rushed back to her room.

Once safely inside her bedroom, Shani tipped the contents of the box onto her bed. Dozens of banknotes of various denominations heaped in a pile on the duvet. She had never seen so much money before. Shani turned to make sure no one was looking and then dusted the banknotes back into the envelop and hid it in her underwear drawer.

Shani slid her laptop out from under her bed and logged back onto Ogre Oblivion. Her avatar was a pregnant, big-boobed, hentai elf named Aphrodite. That was Steel’s idea.

Shani used the arrow buttons to take Aphrodite to Ye Olde Brothel where she had to pay a goblin security guard 10 coins for entry. She found Lord Scraper talking to female troll. An exclamation mark appeared above Lord Scraper who duly turned around and wandered over to Aphrodite. The female troll wandered towards another punter. The Ogrelogue chat bar appeared on screen.

Lord Scraper: your talking to me nwo then?

Aphrodite: wtf…where did you get all that money?

Lord Scraper: I told you id pay you back for mum last year. Wiv interest as well

Steel’s mum was a boob-tube, petite, peroxide, Hawaiian sunset, stick of a woman. It was true that Shani had covered her a month’s rent last year. Shani had had to pretend to Nono that she was going on the France trip in order to pay for it. She still felt guilty about that.

Aphrodite: how did you get it?

Shani knew Steel didn’t work. He didn’t believe in work. He’d once explained to her that society should be structured so that a superior race shouldn’t have to work and everyone else did. She’d said that sounded like slavery. He said Hollywood had exaggerated slavery. He said slavery wasn’t that bad. Anyway, what he was suggesting was that a small proportion of the population shouldn’t work at all because they were superior, but everyone else should be a slave. Shani suggested that wasn’t that much different from today because the super-rich don’t work. He replied that the super-rich are a liberal elite and celebrate effeminateness and weakness. Shani didn’t think Steel was as clever as he thought he was. It reminded her of the Dunning-Kruger effect. She wondered how many people there are in the world who go through life constantly over-estimating their abilities. She felt it was a lot. She also knew that Steel stole things because he used to send her videos of him pinching things off shelves. Usually just baseball caps.

Lord Scraper: if I tell you, you’ll get angry

Shani didn’t know why, but she began to blush bright red.

Aphrodite: tell me

The attachments section of Ogrelogue pinged. Shani clicked on it, fearing the worst, and froze when she saw the photos pop up on screen. They were screenshots of Shani’s webcam when she’d spoken to Steel (he always kept his camera off). She recognised them from a few weeks earlier when he’d made her straighten her hair, do her makeup like a twelve-year-old and pose topless.

Aphrodite: wtf…you told me you would stop doing this

Lord Scraper: calm down. It’s nothing.

Aphrodite: you sold my photos? >:(

Lord Scraper: u look like a boy in those photos. But I know mugs on the dark web who pay good money to see things like that. I don’t care if they’re paedos. Anyway, I’ve paid you back ent i

Shani’s heart began to beat fast. Steel could be such a prick. What made him think he had the right to sell images of her online? She shuddered at the thought of strange men in basements all over the world masturbating over those images of her – although it was more likely to be seemingly ordinary men who did it, rather than the types you’d expect. What was even more surprising was that anyone would even want to masturbate over her in the first place. She thought she looked like a shipwreck. She was glad to be getting the money back, but really it was Nono’s and now he was dead. Shani suddenly remembered Steel’s other con last year: to set up a crowd-funding page for Shani to get a boob job and promising that one of the donors would be first to have sex with her post-op. Shani never knew what had happened to the funds for that. She certainly never got a boob job. Steel was obsessed with her getting plastic surgery. She was fed up with thinking about it all the time. What was true was that she did look like a boy. And if it wasn’t for Steel, no one would love her.

Lord Scraper: do you still love me?

As Shani was typing her reply, she thought about the fact that the laptop she was typing on was one that Steel had forced her to upgrade to so that the processor could cope with Ogre Oblivion. He had warned her that if she really did love him, she’d buy the top-of-the-range device, and that, if she didn’t, he would be forced to dump her for someone who was willing to invest in their relationship. She had to pay for his upgrade too.

Aphrodite: you wouldn’t do those things if you loved me

Lord Scraper: bitch!

Lord Scraper was typing some more.

Lord Scraper: tell me you love me or the next thing I send you will be a video of me cutting muyself and it will be on you because im on my own in this flat and no one will know if im dying.

Shani didn’t even know where Steel lived. So, she knew she wouldn’t be able to call an ambulance for his address if he did do something as stupid as killing himself. All she knew was her had a thick Northwest accent.

Aphrodite: I love you

Shani knew Steel was depressed. But Steel didn’t believe in depression. They say a quarter of people suffer from depression. Steel said the other three quarters are lying. And, if they’re not lying, then they have shit for brains because how can you live on this poxy planet full of extinguished dreams and people screwing each other over for four-score years and then some without wanting to end it all? Not just end it for you, but for everybody else. And pronto.

Lord Scraper: just keep the money. I said I was good for it. put it towards a boob job. Or lip filler. Or something. Anything to make yourself looka bit more woman.

Shani hated how much Steel rabbited on about plastic surgery. He’d read a book once – the only book he said he’d ever read – about how to convince your girlfriend to get a boob job. And now it was all he ever talked about. He was obsessed. Shani knew that any self-respecting woman would dump him over that. But, then again, she knew he was right because she really did want bigger breasts. She still lived in the hope that they would grow eventually. There was still time. She knew the femininazis would be dead set against that kind of thing, but Shani was of the opinion that those against breast augmentation were in denial about how great big boobs look. That, or they have naturally big boobs themselves anyway.

Aphrodite: those photos of me are now all over the internet. What if anyone I know sees them?

Lord Scraper: who do you know? Don’t kid yourself. Your just one of thousand sof images online. Men will wank over you and then just forget about you. No one will search fro you twice. Anyway, just don’t wear makeup out and people wont recognise you.

Aphrodite: people will recognise me. Imagine it happens at school. Or if I have a boss one day who sees it?

Lord Scraper. Then they’ll just want to fuck you. Who gives a fuck?

Steel had on many occasions informed Shani of his desire to watch her having sex with other men.

Lord Scraper: and don’t rpetend you don’t like it secretly. Remember, I know the real you.

Shani spent the rest of the day hiding in her room and battling orcs with Steel on Ogre Oblivion. They stopped chatting on Ogrelogue and instead switched to head- and micro-phones where Shani listened mostly in silence as Steel screamed racist abuse and went on neo-Nazi diatribes, whilst she watched Lord Scraper use his magical abilities to blast fantastical creatures into tiny pixels.

Then sleep hit Shani in the early hours of Monday morning and Steel eventually let her go. It wasn’t until her head was on her pillow that her attention turned again to the pile of money hidden under her mattress. She’d counted it over and over – it was indeed much more than she’d lent Steel’s mum. And then something made her jolt upright in bed. Hadn’t that mad woman, Myrtle, cast a spell to help her get rich the night before at the fair?

She had only just made the connection.

Shani smiled excitedly and then shook her head. It was a coincidence. Not magic. Anyway, she wasn’t rich. She just had enough for driving lessons now. But it was a strange coincidence. She settled back down under her covers.

Suddenly, something made Shani open her eyes wide again. And it snapped her out of her tiredness and made her wide awake. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear a familiar wail in the night.

‘Maxwell! Maxwell! Maxwell!’

It was Mad Mystic Myrtle. And Maxwell had escaped again no doubt.

Ninety seconds later, Shani had donned some apparel, crept out of her window and was already running towards the bungalow she had seen Myrtle standing outside of two days earlier.