The Lu-Yuppie A Tale of Gothic Horror Copyright 1989-1995 Ted Holden A white, frozen world; a giant landscape. Giant mountains, and snow drifting endlessly from them into the tundra and the river valley below. The eternal problem of communications. Gray Ralph pointed his muzzle towards the heavens and attempted to explain the strange malaise which had befallen him in a low, piercing howl which gained volumn as he raised the pitch an octave or so in drawing the sad tale out sufficiently to allow it to be carried over the system. Leagues away, other muzzles pointed skyward and repeated the tale, and others still further in a kind of a relay, until several hundred miles away, Ralph's uncle Henry heard the tale. And, three nights later, the relay set to carry messages back the other way, Ralph received Uncle Henry's reply. "Uncle Henry says he's got a girl for me, neighboring pack..." Ralph explained to his two brothers, and set outward. The distance to Uncle Henry's territory was not a terrible problem in and of itself. There was a problem with the OBSTACLE, however. At a point about two thirds of the distance to Henry's domains, a travellor would have to cross something which had only come into existance in the white world very recently; the dream of Dwight Eisenhower and Detroit, a four-lane highway. Ralph had never seen such a thing prior; an endlessly long river of smooth stone, ground into particles and sealed into an eternally frozen surface, striped lines painted both ways into the distance, and giant vehicles roaring along at huge speeds. Ralph had to cross it. The two-year-old wolf actually made it across without damage, other than to the five cars which were left piled up in a kind of a jagged heap; it was on the return trip with Gretchen in tow, that he began to experience difficulties. Gretchen was a kind of an air-head and a natural klutz, and the lights and the roar of the trucks and cars frightened her straight out of her senses; she couldn't look. Ralph managed to get Gretchen across the monster highway without harm but left himself in an untenable position in so doing. An 18-wheel tractor trailer had skidded partially onto the enbankment and cars were swerving violently to get around it, three of them spinning out and facing oncoming traffic in the far lane, thus forcing cars into a kind of a gauntlet. Ralph was trapped in the middle. The ultimate yuppie machine in the world, a BMW 730i was bearing straight down on top of Ralph and it was too close to altogether avoid. Ralph bared his teeth and tried to psych it; no dice. At the last possible instant, Ralph dove out of the path of maximum damage, the Michellin steel-belted radials rolling only over his tail; Ralph yiped in agony, and the sight scared the cars in the near lane into complete panic and a skidding halt. Ralph somehow made it out of the nightmare and back onto the tundra. In the weeks which followed, Ralph appeared outwardly to be taking up the routines of married life in a natural enough way, hunting with the pack on occasion and alone with Gretchen at other times. But he began to be troubled inwardly. He began to have odd cravings, strange and unnatural dreams: holding company board meetings, leveraged buyouts, high-risk bonds, SCCA rallies and jet flights, champaign and women, HUMAN women. Ralph saw himself in these dreams not as Gray Ralph , but as RALPH GRAY, chairman of the board. An MBA ensignia hung from the wall. A box of Havanna cigars sat on the desk. The two secretaries in the outer office were straight from one of Hugh Hefner's clubs. The two gentlemen in the office looked skeptical. "I'm telling you..." Ralph Gray blurted out, "that three hundred miles of highway through an empty wilderness can be looked at as boredom or it can be looked at as opportunity. That's three hundred miles of major highway access which nobody's usin'. All you gotta do is drive pilons into that tundra and you can build anything on it..." Ralph woke up with a start, his ears standing straight up. He trembled and shook himself, trying to break up the eerie pall of apprehension, but it was no good; something was wrong. There was an inescapable feeling that the natural harmony and order of the world had somehow inexplicably been shatered, and that it was not going to be easy to put it back together. Ralph walked down to the fast little stream, found a section which was not frozen over, and stared at his own reflection in the water. Nothing unusual... same old Ralph. "Maybe I just can't see it..." he thought. The two other wolves looked at Ralph like he was insane. "NO, you're just an ordinary wolf, and kind of a goofy-lookin' one at that!" one of them was saying. The third wolf was giving Ralph a kind of a wolf equivalent of a full medical examination and, again, after some fifteen minutes, was forced to announce that he could see absolutely nothing unusual. "You know," mused the second wolf with a kind of a far-off look creeping over his face, "...there IS one kind of a thing which I've HEARD of, but I've never actually seen it... kind of a thing I always figured to be some kind of a wive's tale or something. But, then, you never know... let me see your paw!" Ralph raised his right forepaw in a kind of a handshake gesture. The third wolf seized it in his teeth, turning it over, and the second wolf began to examine it. Then, both of the wolves recoiled in abject horror. Graven on Ralph's paw with unholy and indelible art, was a circular ensignia with four quadrants, two white, two blue; the unmistakable emblem of Bayrische Motor Werke; the mark of the Lu Yuppie. The dreams began to get worse, particularly towards the last days of the month, the times of the full moon.. The interminable business meeting was over; Ralph Gray and two of his associates were unwinding from the day's hardships and tribulations in the computer room, with the fruits of the vinyard and the varied fruits of man's fertile imagination, decade of the eighties variety: pac-man, alien-invaders, chess-master... the REAL raisons d'etre for the machinery ostensibly justified by the sundry databases, wordprocessors, and spreadsheets. Respite for the harried yuppie. John, the veep, was the worst off, and was on the verge of passing out, staring at the chess pieces on an orange monochrome screen. Mike, Ralph's round-faced legal counsel, was involved with a joy-stick and an accelerator button as an alien terminator team persued a lithesome blond across an 800x600 super VGA screen. Ralph had gone back to looking at spreadsheets. "The world's on the verge of chaos" he said, talking mostly to himself, "and it's getting harder every day to do anything about it. The tried and true methods just aint gonna' work on this deal... the day of the junk bond is over. Milken's in slam, we're going to have to devise some utterly new way of raising vast sums of money. Ralph glanced over at John, who was now quite definitely out of it, his normally impeccable suit disheveled, a star-struck look on his face as two of the moons of Jupiter revolved across the amber screen before him, turning slowly. "Would'ya look at that!! The frickin' dummy hypnotized himself!" exclaimed Ralph. And then, "That's IT!! Hypnotism!!! Nobody ever did that on a computer before, did they!? Mike turned and looked, and John somehow managed to pull his mind back into his body, and into the present. "Gentlemen", exclaimed Ralph, "the old order is about to be shattered, and a new day of financing is about to dawn. There is going to be a new form of computer software in this world, and everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY who ever sees it, is going to begin sending money to us! ALL their money!!" Gray Ralph awoke with a start. "This is definitely getting out of hand!" he thought, trembling. By this time, the evidence of collateral damage from Ralph's dream problems was reaching a point which nobody could safely ignore. Large sections of forest lay clear-cut, and massive building programs, financed by the ill-gotten proceeds of computer hypnotism, phony municipal bonds (COPS, or Certificates of Participation), and every imaginable diabolical device were in evidence: high-rise buildings of various sorts, hotels, casinos, condos... The wolves knew that whatever was going to happen needed to happen fast. The time of the full moon was again drawing near, and several of the pack members approached Gray Ralph. "Kill me! At least lock me up!!" shrieked Ralph. "I'll jump into the smoke cave and you can roll a big rock over the opening, and let me out in three days... ANYTHING, just don't let me have any more of those dreams!!!" A number of the younger wolves were for tearing Ralph apart on the spot and having done with it, but cooler heads prevailed, and a number of the pack elders set off, Ralph in tow, on a trip far up into the hills, to the spirit mountain. Once within the lifetime of any living members of any pack, under circumstances of direst emergency, it was permitted for representatives of a pack to visit the spirit mountain, and the abode of Akanga, the witch wolf, and seek his council. Akanga was terribly, terribly old for a wolf, some said 50 or 60 years, while others said he was immortal and had simply always been there. "If this ain't direst emrgency..." said old Orf, the leader of Ralph's pack, "it's gonna' hafta' do until the real thing comes along." . The lonely journey carried the five wolves far into the distance and completely out of touch with anything resembling normal wolf habitats or wolf communication systems and into increasingly high territory and finally into the hills and mountains which led to the spirit mountain. Five days after they had set out, cold, hungry, and disheveled, they stood on one of the high terraces of the Spirit Mountain in front of akanga. "It's fortunate you brought this young wolf to me rather than kill him.", said Akanga, shaking his head. "Otherwise, any control we might hope to have over this situation would have been lost." "What do you mean?" replied one of the other pack members. "We kill the dufe, and the problem's over, an' the only loser anywhere in the picture is him, an' that don't change nothin'; he's been a loser all his life..." "You frickin' dummy!" replied akanga, "What do you think you're gonna' do, have the Lone Ranger ride in and shoot Ralph with a silver bullet, an' you think that's gonna' make all of those construction sites go away?" You've been readin' too many fairy-tales. Ralph Gray is a real person and he's somehow or other gotten linked up to Gray Ralph here in the dream plane, possibly by running over his tail." "These stupid dreams are the only handle we have on Ralph Gray, and we'd damned well better make good use of it. Ralph here has gotta' get back to dreamin' some more, just that he's gotta dream the right kinda' dreams!" "NO!!!, Please!!!" shrieked Ralph, "I don't wanna' dream no more, I can't even get to sleep no more causa' them damned dreams, anything but don't make me dream no more!!" Akanga motioned the other wolves into his cave, which opened onto the terrace. The old shaman-wolf instructed the others to wait in the large opening in front of the cave while he went off into a narrow defile towards the back, and returned shortly with a number of very strange looking items. "This is a sleeping potion." he explained, handing Ralph a bottle with a picture of a crow on it, and the name on the label. "Take two or three sips, careful, slowly or it'll make you choke... that's it, easy..." Ralph took several sips of the tequila and somehow managed not to choke or barf and, finally, forced a kind of a sweaty smile, while the other wolves looked on disdainfully. Now", said Akanga, motioning Ralph towards the truly exotic item which he had retrieved from the deep recess of the cave, "Look into the center of this stone." The other item which Akanga had returned with was what appeared to be a very large quartz crystal, and yet clearer than any piece of quartz which any of the wolves had seen previously. Ralph stared into the stone, fixing his gaze as wolves do in searching distant horizens for movement, and the cold interior of the stone appeared murky at first, and then, movement, and a strange drama began to unfold within the icy heart of the crystal. There appeared to be a storm, and a mighty river, lashed by winds and swollen by storm waters, and a bridge, the center part of which had been swept away by the storm waters. A sign, reading had been there to warn drivers of the peril, but a pack of wolves could be seen pulling the sign down and trotting off with it, and an endless line of yuppies, all driving BMW's and Volvos could be seen driving out onto the bridge and, finally, off into the raging waters. Ralph smiled. "I want you to try to count the yuppies!" said Akanga, starting from 100 and counting backwards, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94......... Ralph drifted off intoa deep sleep and, after a certain time, the other wolves noticed that he was not sweating and fidgeting as he had been while sleeping for the past months but, rather, he was smiling. In fact, Gray Ralph's dreams began to get better, and Ralph Gray's dreams began to take a turn for the worse. It began with little things, the 5.2 Mustang blowing the doors off of Ralph's Beemer, and the door factory having relocated into the formerly communist part of Germany and a seven month wait. And then there were the idiot financiers who insisted that the new resort include a golf course, and didn't want to hear about the realities of taking divots in permafrost; Ralph had broken three of his irons before giving up in disgust. And then there were all of the lunatic promotions, including the yuppie-biting contest for the sled dogs at the Iditerod. Ralph woke up in a cold sweat from that one; some of these dreams were showing alarming tendencies to merge into waking reality, and he was seriously interested in preventing that one from so-doing. More and more, Ralph Gray's dreams began to include wolves in various capacities, and he began to notice an eerie tendency for metamorphoses associated with the full moon to involve automotive as well as biological forms. One such event occurred towards the end of a particularly bad month, when Ralph had parked his Beemer in the driveway of one of the stately old mansions in Newport Rhode Island to fetch his date for the night, a 26-year-old daughter of a friend of his mothers, newly graduated from the Harvard Business School. "You know, Ralph..." the girl's father was saying, walking the couple to the door, "I've been thinking about getting a BMW or a Porsche of some sort for myself some day soon here... never owned a foreign car before. Mind if I take a look at yours?" "Certainly by all means!" replied Ralph, and the three of them walked out past the rose bushes and forsythias and onto the horse-shoe driveway where Ralph had parked the Beemer and, lo, there where the Beemer had been, was a beat-up looking old 1958 ambulance, painted in a black and gold checkerboard scheme, with the smiling face of a gray wolf painted on the hood. The window drapes were pulled back enough to reveal the purple sheets and pillow cases which added to the ordinarily plain decor of the ambulance bed. The doors were fields of white with Maltese crosses, like the Baron Von Richtofen's Fokker. The insignia "I'm Glad I'm Bad" in Gothic letters could been seen on one side, and the insignia "Pussy Wagon" on the other. The license plate still read "Yuppie-1", as it had prior to the change. "Uh, Ralph..." the girl's father started, his eyes rolling back somewhat, "Where were you planning to take my daughter in your, uh, pussy wagon?" "That's a cute wolf on the hood!" said the girl, unable to keep her face entirely straight. "I'm sure there's some rational explaination for all of this..." muttered Ralph, "and it's probably got something to do with that frickin deal up in alaska again..." he thought to himself. Ralph and Jennifer drove off in the ambulance while Jennifer's father walked back to the mansion shaking his head. "Do you get lots of pussy in this old ambulance, Ralph? asked Jennifer, covering her mouth to keep Ralph from seeing her snicker. "Not lately.." replied Ralph. "Been too busy havin' bad dreams..." "This crystal is amazing!" Gray Ralph was saying to Akanga. "But, the funny thing is, all we've really been seeing in it are small scenes; would it be possible to get a look at some sort of a really big city or something like that?" "I never thought about it." replied Akanga. "Let's all stare into the crystal and see what we can conjure up". The five pack members and Akanga all stared into the quartz crystal for a number of minutes, and nothing out of the ordinary appeared to be happening at first and, then, out of the mists in the frosty crystal, the skyline of New York City began to materialize, first from a great distance as might be seen from a ship pulling into sight of the city and then closer, until the awsome massif of the Gray Tower could be seen in a dizzying panorama, first from the bottom and then from the top, with the penthouse atop the 274'th level, the humble lair of Ralph Mortimer Gray, Yuppie #1. "That park to the left of the skyscraper is big enough..." said Gray Ralph. "You're right!" replied Akanga. 'If it fell right there, nobody other than yuppies would get hurt..." "How many wolves do you think it'd take?" "All of them." replied Akanga. The five pack wolves stared at eachother for a brief moment, and then lifted up their muzzles to the full moon and began to howl, and the sound which they made by rights should not have been able to carry back to where other wolves could hear it since Akanga's lair was, as noted, too far from ordinary wolf habitats; but the wind carried the howling, and other wolves began to howl up and down the network in Alaska and then in Canada and across the Bering Strait into Siberia and Russia and, finally, into every part of the world in which wolves lived, including the big zoo in New York city. Telekenesis. All of the wolves in the entire world set their minds to the purpose ordered by Akanga. The strange crystal began to glow, and the wolves could feel heat emanating from it. Akanga and the five pack wolves stared into the crystal again. Again, there was the massif of the Gray Tower but, this time, there were tens of thousands of wolves, all digging a gigantic hole under one edge of the massive building in something like the manner in which a lumberjack cuts a wedge in a tree on the side towards which he intends it to fall. "Rock an' Roll!!!!!" howled Akanga. Ralph Gray, Yuppie #1, dropped his cigar and his copy of "What Color is Your Parachute", put on his real skydiving club parachute, and jumped for it, and was thus not counted amongst the casualties, but was least seen headed South in a black BMW, having sworn never again to set foot in any place North of the Carolinas, the Alaska project thus obviously also having been abandoned. "I liked this car better when it was an ambulance..." said Jennifer. "It was sort of cozy." "No problem... the next full moon's in about 23 days." replied Ralph.