Love Me Tinder

 

Follow the yellow brick road.

Sizzling Hot Coincidences

  

Sizzling Hot Coincidences 

By Vince Stadon 

 

Night Stalker: Episode 4: Burning Man 

First published in Inside Out Trusts No One

Editor Stacey Smith

 

 

Every word of what follows is true. Well, sorta/kinda.  

Burning Man, the fourth episode of Night Stalker, is the single most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen. It is not just the fourth episode of a rather dreary short-lived US television show - it is, for me at least, a mind-blowing, life-altering experience. Because everything that happens in Burning Man happened to me. Only sexier. And with better special effects. 

Let me explain. And bear in mind, please, that my hands are trembling as I write this, and that Scully - the sleepy old ginger cat flopped out on my lap - is snoring so loudly that my brain is rattling in my skull. I’m not in good shape.  

When I say that everything in Burning Man happened to me, I should clarify that I don’t mean absolutely every single thing. For instance, seventeen minutes into the episode, a wealthy and happy man climbs out of his luxury swimming pool, kisses his swimwear model girlfriend, and then eats Mexican takeaway food. At eighteen and a half minutes, in an abrupt turn of events, the man is burning to death in his swimming pool, and it’s highly doubtful that he’s still happy. Clearly this has never happened to me because I’ve never been happy, and I don’t eat Mexican food. Not that I don’t like Mexican cuisine - on the contrary, I find it delicious; it’s more that my doctor has advised me against noshing down spicy foodstuffs because it raises my blood pressure and makes me grumpy. But I digress. 

Let me lay out the key facts. 

Burning Man: A dogged reporter investigates a series of murders. My Life: When I was thirteen, I contributed to the Lockleaze Gazette - Lockleaze Comprehensive School’s hard-hitting quarterly journal. I wasn’t a reporter, I was a cartoonist (my cruel yet accurate caricature of the headmaster as Mussolini was the hot topic of many a school dinner), and though I didn’t technically investigate a series of murders I’ve never lost a game of Cluedo (it’s pretty much always Mrs White, in the study, with the candlestick: trust me on this). And I’ve never been described as dogged, but I did have a dog… named Bernie. Burning Man, Bernie the mastiff. Coincidence?  

The victims are burned to death. My Star Wars action figures - including the rare Han Solo variant with the small head - were melted into a gooey pool of stinky plastic by a vindictive school bully named Ash for reasons he never disclosed. Coincidence? 

The victims were sent tiny red wax figurines. Two days ago, I awoke at noon to a hammering on my door - an insistent courier wanted me to sign for a mysterious Amazon Prime parcel. I scribbled a fake name (Carl Bernstein - I’m cycling through famous reporters, and last week it was Clark Kent), and was puzzled and unnerved to discover that the box contained several packets of coloured wax crayons! How strange, I thought. How unsettling. Was this some kind of message? A warning? From whom? Then I remembered that my wife had ordered them as a present for our niece. Her name? Blaze. Coincidence? 

Kolchak refuses to rule out supernatural forces. I daily place the blame for all the things that annoy me on terrifying uncanny manifestations. Netflix doesn’t have the film I want to see? Gremlins at work. Can’t find my good pair of socks? Malevolent Poltergeists have thrown them into the gates of Hell. Salad again for lunch? My wife hates me.  

Kolchak seeks help from a retired FBI Agent. A week ago, I asked a random Welsh stranger for directions, and he kindly supplied them… along with reams of information about himself (which frankly I didn’t have time to listen to, but I was being polite, and there was something haunting about his eyes), including the fact that he used to be a temp cleaner at the BFI (British Film Institute) before he retired with a dodgy knee.  FBI, BFI. Don’t tell me this is all just coincidence. 

There are other examples. In Burning Man, Kolchak has a habit of saying something moodily pretentious, and then leaving the room. I used to do that, until someone threatened to punch me in the face if I didn’t cut it out. Burning Man is forty-two minutes long: precisely the time it takes me to take all my anti-anxiety medication. Night Stalker co-stars a charismatic actress named Gabrielle Union-Wade, who was in Bad Boys II - a film I watched by mistake last year. Kolchak’s editor is named Vincenzo - I am named Vince, and my wife calls me Vincenzo in moments of high passion (coincidentally, her ex-boyfriend is named Vincenzo).

I could go on (I have several file cases filled with documentary evidence and unopened divorce papers), but I think I’ve done more than enough to convince you all. And judging from the ferocity of the bites on my leg, my cat is clearly very hungry. I will, though, leave you all with one final thing. My wife has left me for a man named Carl, and they are planning on attending a summer festival… called Burning Man. 

 

 

 

 

Vince Stadon lives anxiously in England… coincidentally the very same tiny island that Kolchak actor Stuart Townsend comes from. What are the chances of that? 

Batty: Tom Baker as Doctor Who vs Giant Space Vampires... in a book!

 Batty 

by Vince Stadon 

 

Doctor Who and the State of Decay by Terrance Dicks 

 

Bristol, UK 

 

Favourite Doctor Who book: The Writers Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook 

First published in You on Target

Editor: Christopher Stone

 

Wednesday 25th May 1983.  Sunny. 

 

When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be an immortal alien vampire with a fruity Welsh accent who could summon at will all the bats in the world to attack people, just like my dad.  He also wanted to be an immortal alien vampire with a fruity Welsh accent who could summon at will all the bats in the world to attack people, rather than to continue to be what he was, which was a rather melancholy foreman of a ragbag crew working for ICI, who were endlessly painting the Severn Bridge the same dreary shade of grey.  He told me of his dream to switch jobs from boss painter to unearthly immortal bloodsucker over breakfast one morning, directly after he'd told me not to read Doctor Who and the State of Decay by Terrance Dicks, at the table.  “Put your book down, son,” he'd said, “You're not in a sodding library.”  I put the book down, and spooned-down a gloop of soggy Shredded Wheat.  “I remember that Docteroo,” added my Dad, after a gulp of strong tea, “there was a bloke with a fruity Welsh accent who kept all them bats.”  I nodded, even though I knew that Aukon – the vampire we were discussing – didn't actually keep bats, in the way smelly Old Man Richardson up the road kept unhealthy looking carrier pigeons on his roof, he just had dominion over them, in much the way that my mum did over my dad. “Easy life, that, lad,” sighed my dad, as he folded up his Daily Mirror to carry under his arm when he walked to the bus stop, “'avin' Welsh bats do all the graft for you.  Fair play to the bloke, we'd all of us jump at the chance to 'ave all them bats do the graft for us if we could.”  I don't know why Aukon's bats had suddenly become Welsh – could bats squeak in a Welsh accent? Did they form male bat voice choirs? Did they squeak on and on about Rugby matches? – but I let the matter slide.  My dad trudged wearily out the door, and I watched him head down the garden path, ungainly sidestepping around my younger brother's discarded Raleigh Tomahawk, following the maneuver with a depressed shake of the head.  I fancied I saw him look up to the skies before he walked out of my view.  Perhaps he was musing on what it would feel like to be in command of an army of bats.  Though bats are of course nocturnal (“They come out at dusk, you know,” says the Doctor on page 19; and they make a “high-pitched chittering sound,” according to Terrance Dicks), so he would have a hell of a time getting an army of bats to do anything at seven-fifteen on a sunny May morning.  Unless the bats were still out on a seriously late night bender, and were on their way back to their bat-caves, feeling considerably worse for wear... rather like the way my highly-strung Auntie Evelyn from down Devon would often do when she came to stay with us after she'd been dumped by her latest bit-of-rough boyfriend.   

I gulped down the last of my Shredded Wheat sludge, and then picked up my copy of Doctor Who and the State of Decay by Terrance Dicks.  I stared again at the cover.  The cover featured a quite baffling illustration by Andrew Skilleter.  Dr Who seemed to be wearing some kind of baggy black smock with massive, off-white coloured triangular shirt collars, and Aukon, the immortal alien vampire with a fruity Welsh accent who could summon at will all the bats in the world to attack people, seemed to be balancing a giant vampire bat on his thumbs.  I was 93 pages into the 125 page book, and there had been absolutely no mention whatsoever of Aukon balancing really big vampire bats on his thumbs, not even in Chapter 4, “The Messengers of Aukon.”  I shared Dr Who's suspicions that there was something horrible hiding under the sinister Tower (“What monstrous creature stirs beneath the Tower, waking from its thousand-year sleep?” ponders the blurb on the back cover) and I wondered if it was a cave filled with massive vampire bats, and that maybe Dr Who, Romana, K-9 and some irritating stowaway kid named Adric would confront Aukon (and the other two vampires, who were a bit dreary) and Aukon would amaze the time-travelers by balancing a big bat on the tips of his thumbs.   

I was big on bats when I was twelve.  Batty about them.  I'd watched some Dracula films, with a variety of dapper Counts turning into a variety of flappy bats (the best one was the tall, thin black-and-white Dracula with the pencil moustache and the top hat, who had morphed into a bat during a brilliant fight with Frankenstein and the Wolf-Man).  I had The Surprising World of Bats by Christian Dietz on permanent loan from Horfield Library (along with Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke, which I could never finish reading, for some reason, even though there were some really good bits in it).  I had several toy rubber bats of various sizes and quality, including one that made a squeaking sound if you punched it really hard on the back of the head.  I had munched through dozens of packets of bat-shaped crisps called “Bats,” which were a new variety from the Smiths Crisps “Horror Bags” range (there was also “Claws,” and “Fangs” –  which featured on the packaging scary-looking artwork of a gruesome character who seemed to be a terrifying fusion of Count Dracula and Jack the Ripper).  I was always doodling bats on my school exercise books, and I had actually copied the big bat that was balanced on Aukon's thumbs onto the front of my English homework book, but I'd drawn the proportions slightly wrong so that it looked like it had a head several times bigger than its body, like Mr Trenchard, who taught French.  The same English homework book had on its rear cover a drawing of the poster of The Return of the Jedi, if The Return of the Jedi poster had lots of bats on it, which it didn't, unlike my drawing of it, which did, and was therefore much better.  All sorts of things could be improved by adding lots of bats.  That was pretty much the extent of my world-view, when I was twelve: things could probably be improved if you added lots of bats.  Certainly the best bits of Doctor Who and the State of Decay were the bits with lots of bats, and Doctor Who and the Space War would be considerably enlivened by having a new bit with the Draconians being savagely attacked by giant vampire bats, on the moon.  I hadn't seen The Return of the Jedi, but I had no doubt at all that Darth Vader could kick some serious Jedi arse if he had an army of giant space-bats at his command, possibly giant robot space-bats that could shoot laser beams out of their eyes.  Mr Trenchard's tedious French lessons would definitely be much more interesting if he was forced to teach masculine noun endings converted to the feminine form to a class of bored twelve-year olds whilst fending off an attack by an army of angry bats (le chauve-souris). 

At dusk, my dad came home, wolfed down a plate of bangers and mash, flopped into his favourite armchair, and fell asleep.  He smelled of tobacco and paint.  As always on a school night, I went to bed just before 10pm, after the BBC evening news. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother who was invariably already sound asleep by the time I went to bed, and I didn't want to wake him, so I would read by torchlight, hidden under a makeshift tent of pillows and blankets.  Under the bed covers, I finished reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay.  We had been right to be suspicious of the Tower, Dr Who and I: there was indeed a giant monster vampire bat slumbering underneath it.  Disappointingly, Dr Who killed it before it took wing and started to wreak bloody havoc throughout the universe, but Dr Who was always killing monsters, so it hardly came as a surprise.  I switched off my torch, cuddled into my bed, and I drifted off to sleep listening to the faint sounds of International Golf floating up from the television downstairs, and I dreamed, I think, of K-9 speaking French to Aukon, the immortal alien vampire with a fruity Welsh accent who could summon at will all the bats in the world to attack people.