You Guys Are Out Of Here!

I ran like crazy to escape the wall of flames. My fellow firefighters had long ago become blackened corpses. There was a cave in the canyon wall ahead, I squeezed out a superhuman burst of adrenaline and barely made it, diving into the entrance and landing on my belly before the air filled with white hot flames and orange sparks. As I lay face down on the slimy floor, I thought of the billionaires with their private bunkers deep in earth’s bowels. What did they do down there?

The rock near the mouth of the cave was beginning to melt, so I turned on my torch and ran down the muddy slope into utter blackness tripping over stalagmites as I stumbled along. Then, I saw ahead of me, a faint light; it was coming from under a gigantic wooden door. I knocked and an impossibly old woman, with dark reptilian skin, opened. I found myself, surprisingly, in an oak paneled rounded space, quite large. The sole illumination was coming from a bluish fire in the middle of the chamber which crackled and writhed weirdly under an iron caldron. The old woman introduced herself; “I’m Hecate.” She pointed at two other women in the cavern, “That’s Lilith and that’s Sycorax. We’re witches - naturally. And we were about to perform the spell we call The Apotheosis of Beelzebub.” And indeed, from some chamber off to the side, I faintly heard what sounded like the buzzing of a billion bumblebees, punctuated by intermittent growling.

“I suppose your’e one of those heroic men who think they can do something about these fire hurricanes the earth’s been having these days.” I had to admit that that was indeed my purpose in life.

“You men!” Grumbled Sycorax. “You always think you can fix what you’ve fucked up. What a pathetic joke! And now the planet’s almost dead and you keep being egotistically overweening with you stupid expertise! And you keep being show-offishly heroic Well, it’s time for you males to go!”

“What do you mean, go?” I asked trepidatiously.

“I mean we three witches are about to completely eliminate you males from the planet!” They all laughed.

“Impossible!” I exclaimed.

“As fun as it might be to immediately eliminate them one by one, beginning with you, it would be way too much work; and we witches are totally averse to work!” All three again burst into prolonged, hysterical, laughter.

When this had ceased, Hecate spoke; “No need for excessive corpses - what a stinking mess; you guys have produced way too many of them anyway; no, our spell will simply give women the option of cloning themselves. In other words they won’t need you males around anymore.”

“And, given your track record of unmitigated disasters, wars, pollution, climate change, mass extinctions and more wars, why in the name of Venus would they even consider keeping you around?”

“Our charm?” I ventured. The cavern erupted in an explosion of giggling; this was soon joined by the squeaking and fluttering of innumerable bats that had flown in from some upper entrance. Large groups of them landed on each of the witches heads producing a writhing wig of beady eyes membranous wings and savage teeth.

“Well Sycorax, did you bring the iron-heart-locket up from the mushroom cellar?”

“I did,” said Sycorax, and she and withdrew from her ebony robes an elaborately decorated locket, very large, in the shape of a heart. “The mushrooms growing on it were loth to give it up; every time I scraped them off more would grow in their place. I had to sprinkle them with general’s blood to get them to go to their corners and resume laying eggs.”

“I never could consciously admit to myself that it would come to this,” said Lilith sadly. “But when we shrunk the Founding Fathers’ heads, and put them in that locket, I had a feeling that we would lose that bet with the Banshees and have to give them up to the caldron.”

I stood appalled as Sycorax opened the locket and out onto the dank floor tumbled the carefully shrunken heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. One of the witches had even artfully crafted little wigs from black widow silk to give them a proper flair. Hecate picked up the paternal pates and proceed to juggle them as Lilith poured the ingredients from several flasks into the caldron.It began wildly churning, so hard that the bubbles, now a luminous green, began floating up to the ceiling, sparkling on the innumerable dripping mantles of quartz hanging there.

Then, one by one, Hecate tossed in the heads. There was a rumbling from the stainless steel side door, and all at once Beelzebub burst like an erupting volcano through flying shards of metal. She hovered for a moment in all her fuzzy yellow glory over the caldron then uncoiled her watch-spring tongue dropping it into the bubbly liquid. She sucked and sucked and sucked - very hard. Her body began swelling and her wings began beating ever more ferociously as she drained the caldron entirely, at which point she rose up into the mantles of crystal, her wings now transformed into the rotors of a helicopter. When her rotors struck the mantles of crystal she disappeared in an explosion of shimmering fragments as the mantles of crystal became pulverized into sand which began building up on the floor.

Sycorax rushed to the door and opened it. This for some reason created huge gusts of wind and these gusts carried the sand outside. Sand in increasing amounts continued raining down from the ceiling, and the wind, which kept getting stronger, blew it all into the outside world. Apparently it had buried the fire alive, as it now seemed dark at the distant cave entrance. Suddenly I became aware that the sand, as the wind swept it across the floor, was turning into tiny eggs in all colors of the rainbow.

I ran outside and saw curtains of these tiny eggs being wafted up into the clouds. “Whenever one of these lands on the head of a woman,” explained Sycorax. “She will be given the power to clone herself; to reproduce parthenogenetically. She will become aware of it too - thanks to the spell. And you, young man! You’d better turn on your charm to maximum brightness. You’ve got a lot going against you! Your expertise has become utterly buffoonish, and it is constantly belied the the behavior of reality. So give up your silly show of scientific tail feathers and concentrate on your charm - and though I give it little chance of succeeding, at least it will fare better with skeptical young women than knee jerk displays of imaginary superiority. Good luck young man, good luck.”

I shouldered my shovel and headed back towards town, pensive. What would I say when I got home?