Starbreaker: An explosion of classics

4. Live Undead

   'Groovy!' cried Austin, adjusting the silk cloth tied to his neck and covered his chest; and his foolish grin, exposing his yellow buck teeth, evinced that Dana Scully had bewitched him. 'A red head!'

   A likewise profound impression was the one that Ethyl, the benumbed lass, made on Fox Mulder and Constrictor. On touching the skin beneath her rags, Mulder proclaimed that Ethyl, in accordance with her own theme, was frigid as an Eskimo Pie—and confessed to Constrictor in a whisper that, since his career as a groupie had flopped, he would not be able to find out if the following line of the song was also true (whether she had to be good in bed since she was dead); and this elicited a guffaw from both of them.

   'Ethyl is another classic, Scully,' Mulder remarked one she managed to bail herself out of her date with the international man of mystery. 'A classic off Welcome to my nightmare.'

   'Where were you in 75, Dana?' blurted Cons, astonished at the perplexity reflected in Dana's countenance, for it was extraordinary to Constrictor that someone who had been an adolescent in those years had not caught the frenzy unleashed by that Alice Cooper album (Welcome to my nightmare contained the song "Cold Ethyl", about a dead girl that Alice kept in his fridge and with whom he has an affair; a classic inasmuch as the efficacy of its formula lies in the fusion of the macabre and the humorous). 

   Nevertheless, during her adolescence Dana Scully was immune to the virus that infected Cons three decades after the original outbreak (since Constrictor, born in 86, became an Alice Cooper fan in the autumn of 2003 through Adrian Flodden's intervention, as narrated in STARGAZER Book I).

   'Big irony, Scully!'

   'I know, Mulder,' she replied and turned towards Constrictor. 'From the manner in which you spoke, young lady, anyone would think that we went to high school together.'

   Still, the irony that Mulder pointed out concerned another aspect. As she well knew, Mulder had consulted ancient records of voodoo rituals, yet none of those records cited a prodigy such as the one that Austin Powers, by means of his charms, provoked. Whereas Ethyl revived and departed from her residence in the album she belonged to because of the attraction that the international man of mystery, through no wiles whatsoever, held over her—Mulder pondered aloud—, Dana Scully had rebuffed Austin Powers' harassment doggedly. There was the irony.

   'Are you insinuating that more emotions are harboured and stirred in a corpse than in my person, Mulder?' she retorted, offended.

   Quite cheerful, on the other hand, Crimson and Spade did not resist Austin Powers; that is, they yielded to the temptation of a holiday with him in a perfect place to put the tricks he had imparted into practice. And even though they did not let out any hint as to what their destination was, the last song they played on Spotify before starting on their trip unveiled it: "Planet of women" by ZZ-Top.

   Constrictor's irritation and disappointment abated quickly as she discerned how convenient Crimson's and Spade's oversight proved after all, since thanks to their poking around had she learned that Dr Stein, Herbert West and Dr Moreau were taking refuge at a beast-infested fortress (in order that they stopped fiddling with his collection of mystical artefacts, Mumm-Ra showed them in his cauldron where those three rogue scientists were stationed, and then prompted his visitors to get along on the pretence of turning such information to their advantage and fall upon the conclave by surprise).