Planet Of The Elvises by Ben Fitts

Planet Of The Elvises

By Ben Fitts

“We’re picking up signs of life on the planet’s surface.”

Heather forgot to breathe for a moment as she heard those words. They had finally done it.

“Alright, let’s land,” she instructed. Tom, the ship’s pilot, nodded and adjusted a series of knobs, dipping the spaceship towards the planet.

Many had doubted the life detecting technology when it was first developed, claiming that it had been built essentially to detect terrestrial life and that there was no guarantee that it would be able to detect the alien life forms it was invented to find. The critics stated that the technology relied primarily on thermal signals consistent with life on Earth and that it was unlikely that extraterrestrial life forms would give off the needed signals.

A government funded mission to find alien life almost thirty years earlier that had not only been unsuccessful but also vanished without a trace had not helped to quiet the detractors, but evidently they were wrong.

Heather could hardly control herself as the small vessel plummet towards the gray planet. aShe was not alone in the feeling. Her sparse crew all fidgeted and trembled as they worked the controls needed for landing and her bright eyed assistant Hugo giggled with excitement. None of the crew were the government scientists or military personal who normally embarked on such trips and understandably lacked the professionalism one might have hoped for in humanity’s first interaction with alien life.

Heather was a top journalist for The Solar Times, the leading news publication in all the inhabited planets, embarking on a quest to do that which the government had so far failed to achieve: find alien life. Other than Hugo, her companions were a freelance crew hired by The Times to chauffer her around the unexplored parts of the galaxy to try and find that which the expensive government mission had missed decades ago.

She had sold her editor on the idea by arguing that even if she failed to discover new life, the journey around the unexplored parts of space would make for a remarkable article on its own. She didn’t have to bother explaining what it would mean for the publication if her expedition was successful.

“The atmosphere appears breathable,” announced Stacy, the ship’s technician, from behind a series of monitors as the ship drew closer to the planet’s rocky surface. “It’s actually pretty similar to the atmosphere of Earth. You’ll be safe just walking on the planet’s surface as you are.”

“That’s amazing,” said Heather, whipping out her tablet and creating a new file for notes, instinctively switching back into her journalist’s mindset. Dragging a digital pen across the screen, she scribbled Planet’s atmosphere is nearly identical to Earth. Extraterrestrials might be more like us than we thought.

“How come this planet hasn’t been colonized?” she asked.

Stacey shrugged. “It’s off in the middle of nowhere, far from any inhabited solar system. I guess it isn’t close enough to anything to be worth it. For all we know, we might be the only humans to have ever come through here.”

She turned to look at her assistant and two hired crew members. “Do you all want to be part of human history?” she asked.

The four of them set foot on the planet’s craggy ground, their boots kicking up little clouds of dust with each step. The planet’s air was thin, causing them to run out of breath quickly, the sky was slimy shade of yellow instead of blue and a strange purplish, fruit-bearing bush jutted out of the ground every few feet, but other than that Heather could almost forget that they were not back on Earth. You could not walked comfortably walk across a single one of the inhabited planets without being trapped beneath a thick suit feeding you oxygen, but here you could.

“The signs of life are coming from over here,” announced Stacy, following the screen on a handheld version of life detection technology aboard the ship. “The nearest one is close. Very close…”

She trailed off as the four of them stared at the figure approaching them. Heather felt her heart sink. It was human.

The figure was a young man, maybe in his mid-twenties and disarmingly handsome.

His dark hair was slicked back and a striped shirt peeked out from underneath a glossy black leather jacket. The man looked oddly familiar and after a moment Heather placed where she recognized him from. It was a face she’d seen on old black and white photographs and on the covers of those big black disc that people used to listen to music on and were now on display in museums. The man was Elvis Presley.

“Well hello, pretty mama,” said Elvis.

Heather felt herself blush. Embarrassed, she cast a sideward glance at her crew to see that Stacy and Hugo were both as flushed as she was at that moment. Only Tom seemed unfazed by The King’s magnetism. The Elvis before them was a young Elvis, from before he got fat, started wearing tasseled jumpsuits and decided he’d rather be a movie star. The golden years of Elvis.

“You know, you look a lot like that historical singer Elvis Presley,” said Tom, breaking the dazed quiet that had fallen over the group.

“That’s because I am Elvis,” said Elvis. Heather wanted to dip a spoon into his signature southern drawl and slurp up his words like honey.

“Oh wow, is your name actually Elvis?” Tom asked, chuckling. “That’s an amazing coincidence.”

Stacy elbowed Tom in the ribs. “It’s not a coincidence, idiot. Look closely, that’s the real Elvis!” she whispered loud enough for everyone to hear clearly. Tom stared at her as if she had tried to convince him that Santa Claus was real.  

“Elvis Presley died almost a thousand years ago.”

“Well, that’s true,” said Elvis. “I did die a while back, but now I’m here.”

The four of them stood in an uneasy silence as they tried to process what the situation. Elvis broke the quiet.

“Where are my manners?” he asked, extending a big hand and giving each of them a hearty shake. “The name is Elvis, Elvis Presley.”

Each of them stammered an introduction of their own while Elvis waited patiently.

“Elvis, do you live here on your own?” asked Heather when they had all finished, her fingers posed over her tablet with a new note file open.

She wasn’t quite sure what she had found, but there was a thin chance that it would make an even more interesting story than the discovery of alien life. People had been dismissive of claims that Elvis was still alive only a decade after his supposed death, but a confirmed sighting an entire millennium later? That sounded like a headline to her.

Elvis shook his oversized head. “Nah, pretty mama. I live in town with everyone else.”

“Town?”

Elvis nodded. “Let me show you. Follow me”

Without another word, Elvis spun on his blue suede shoes and began trotting away from them. The group exchanged quick glances and trailed after him.

“We’re in rock and roll heaven,” whispered Hugo as he crept beside Heather.

“What?”

“Rock and roll heaven,” he explained patientally. “Where all the great rock stars go after they die. Elvis is going to lead us to Buddy Holly and Janis Joplin and Ricky Silver, you just wait.”

“All those people died young. Elvis too, technically. Do you have to die young to get into rock and roll heaven?”

“No,” said Hugo slowly. “I guess they’re just the first names that came to mind when I thought of dead rock stars. It’s probably because they’re all famously dead and not just ordinary dead.”

“Come on guys, really?” asked Tom from beside them. “You know this can’t actually be the real 20th century historical figure, right? It’s just a guy who happens to have a similar bone structure who found himself a leather jacket and a tub of grease.”

Hugo stuck out his lower lip. “Uh-uh. Look at him. That’s the real Elvis. Can’t you feel it?”

Heather knew that Tom’s words made sense, but as she watched the leather clad young man leading them across this barren planet she could sense that Hugo was right. The man exuded something, something that felt like magic. Something that felt like Elvis.

If Elvis had heard any of their conservation, he gave no sign of it and just kept leading them onwards.

“You know, Elvis,” she said, approaching him. “I’m a journalist with The Solar Times and I’d really like to know more about how you got here and what you’re doing here. Really anything you could tell me would be great, I imagine there’s quite a story here.”

“That there probably is,” agreed Elvis. “But don’t you worry, everything will be clear once we reach town.”

Heather pestered him with more questions as they walked, but failed to get any concrete answers from him and nothing that illuminated exactly what a long dead singer was doing alive on an alien planet.

Before too long, the group arrived at a series of small ramshackle structures that appeared to be built out of salvaged machine parts. People flooded out of the structure to great the party as they approached.

“Yeah, sure seems like rock and roll heaven,” Tom said snidely.

“Hello, Elvis,” said the crowd amassed before them, almost in unison.

“Well hey there, Elvises,” said Elvis back to them.  

Everyone in the town was Elvis as well, but not quite in the same way that the Elvis who had led them there was.

While that Elvis was the spitting image and physical embodiment of everything Heather had imagined the king of rock and roll to be, these folk seemed to just be ordinary people in cheap Elvis costumes.

There were maybe a couple dozen of them, male Elvises, female Elvises and androgynous Elvises, tall Elvises and short Elvises, pale Elvises, dark Elvises and every complexion in between. Their ages all seemed to range between mid-fifties all the way to their eighties, every last one of them older than the real Elvis had ever made it to while on Earth.

“These good people landed here in a ship,” said Elvis, gesturing towards the group. The crowd of old people dressed like Elvis nodded with interest. “They’re interested in learning more about us, so I figure maybe we could take them in for a little bit and let them see what we’re all about here.”

The crowded all nodded again, this time with enthusiasm. The shoddy tassels on their costumes swayed as their heads bobbed. If the Elvis who had led them there was the ghost of Elvis Presley’s prime, these Elvises were visions of the Elvis that the world was spared from ever having to witness. Something about them felt burnt out, like a dead man who just hadn’t died yet.

One of the Elvises stepped forward from the crowd, an ancient woman who looked as if her skin was in danger of falling off her skeleton.

“There is an empty home of the end of the block, mama,” she said, her bad Elvis impersonation sounding extra ridiculous when coming from her timeworn lips. She punctuated the statement with a dramatic hip shake and twirl of her short cape. “These new fellas can move in there while they stay here.”

“Great idea, Elvis,” said Elvis.

***

“They’re called Elvis impersonators,” said Tom. “It’s an old American tradition that they still do sometimes at millenial fairs. My dad took me to those sometimes when I was a kid.”

Hugo agreed glumly. “Yeah, I think he’s right. When I was working as an intern for The Planetary Post we did a story on them. You know, about how it was a fading cultural tradition and that without it we’d be losing another part of our history and all that usual stuff.”

The four of them were stuffed into the tiny vacant building that the Elvises had let them stay in. The walls were sheet metal and the only furniture appeared to be repurposed passenger chairs, cut and sewn back together to form makeshift beds and a couch. Tom and Stacey had both wanted to spend the night back in the comforts of the ship, but Heather had insisted that she and Hugo stay where the story is and that Tom and Stacey could chose to be a part of things or to miss out on whatever they discovered. Eventually they both begrudgingly decided to stay.  

“So you’re saying that’s not the real Elvis?” asked Stacey.

“I know it feels like he is,” answered Hugo. “But yeah, I don’t think he is anymore. I think he’s just some guy who happens to look a lot like the real Elvis and be very good at the whole impersonating thing.”

“Thank you!” exclaimed Tom, extending his arms out towards the ceiling.

“Even if that’s not the real Elvis,” Heather chimed in, “this is still really weird, right? These people seem to take impersonating Elvis a bit further than anyone else ever has.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” agreed Hugo.

“So we might not have found alien life or the long dead king of rock ‘n’ roll, but there is still certainly a story here. Probably a pretty good one, at that.”  

Her crew agreed with that statement.

Heather collected her coat and tablet from the pile of belongings she laid out by the makeshift bed she had claimed. “I’m going to do some quiet investigating on my own,” she announced. “Please let me do this on my own.”

Being solo in the field to do some investigative journalism was Heather’s favorite thing to do in the known universe, and she felt herself come alive as she drifted into the town square where the Elvis impersonators milled about. They were no longer gathered together, putting on a show for the outsiders, and Heather felt Jane Goodall must have when the chimpanzees acted naturally around her for the first time.

The Elvis impersonators made repairs to their makeshift homes, every motion made in character with plenty of flourishes and hip shaking. Those that were not working chewed the purple fruit that littered the planet’s surface and practiced their Elvis moves. A couple houses over, a few impersonators sang an a capella version of “Heartbreak Hotel” in shaky three-part harmony.

Heather approached the nearest Elvis impersonator, a heavy set man who she guessed to be in his sixties in a white bedazzled jumpsuit that looked like it might have been made from bedsheets.

“Hi there,” she said, giving the same warm smile that had opened many doors for her as a journalist over the years.

“Well hey there, pretty mama,” said the old Elvis impersonator. The greeting didn’t have the same effect on her that it had coming from the first Elvis she had met.

“My name is Heather Greenfield and I’m a reporter with The Solar Times. Can I ask you some questions?” she asked, readying her tablet.

“Sure, baby.”

“What is your name?”

“Elvis.”

“I mean your name when your not Elvis,” she said, frustrated. “The name you use when you’re not in character.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” said the man, furrowing his brow. “But my name’s Elvis all of the time, and has been for as long as I can remember.”

“Elvis as in Elvis Presley? The king of rock and roll?”

“Yes, mam.”

Heather stared at the man, dumbfounded. After conducting enough interviews over the years, she had gotten rather good at spotting a liar and this man seemed to truly believe that he was in fact Elvis Presley.

“Is everyone here Elvis Presley then?”

The man scratched the back of his balding head. “Well, I guess so although to be honest I’d never really looked at it like that before. Whoa mama, that really makes you think, doesn’t it?” he said and wandered off.  

Heather pulled other Elvises out of the crowd, to much the same results. Each one of them seemed to think themselves to truly be the 20th century singer Elvis Presley, and whenever asked what they were doing living on a foreign planet with a couple dozen other versions of themselves they all grew visibly confused and abandoned the conversation.

After each iteration of the same interaction, further frustration  swelled in Heather’s gut like a tumor. Defeat haunted her. For the first time in her illustrious career, she felt unable to crack the story, but as she felt close to slamming her tablet down onto the planet’s rocky surface, she saw something that revived her hope. It was Elvis.

Not these zombified faux Elvises, but the younger sauve Elvis who had first greeted her when landed on the planet. The Elvis that she still thought of as the real Elvis, despite Tom’s contradictions. He was different that the other Elvises on this planet, even if Heather was not quite sure how. But she was sure that he would have answers.    

He was off in the distance, his blue suede shoes kicking up dust as he walked into the largest of the makeshift buildings. Heather trotted over to the building he entered. It was another rough sheet metal structure, just like every other in town except that there was what looked like a serial number printed sideways in red beside the makeshift door. She knocked, rapping her knuckles against the cold metal door, but after receiving no response she pushed the rickety door open herself and gasped.

The thing inside was not Elvis.

An amorphous, cyan colored blob wriggled across the ground. It slithered towards her, and then suddenly it was Elvis again. Heather did not see it transform, it simply became Elvis all at once.

“Hey there, pretty mama,” said the thing pretending to be Elvis.

Heather tried to respond, but no words came out of her mouth at first.

“What are you?” she stammered eventually.

“Well, I doubt you’d still believe me if I told you I was Elvis,” the thing said, grinning. “So I’ll be honest with you. I am that which lived her before your kind landed here. They were terrified of me at first, even though I was exactly what they said they were looking for, so I became something more acceptable to them.”

“Elvis Presley?”

The thing nodded. “I peered into their collective minds and became something familiar to them. Something larger than life itself for them. I could have become someone that inspired them,” said the creature, suddenly transforming in a civil rights era Rosa Parks. “Or someone that they feared,” it said, transforming into Adolf Hitler in an SS uniform.

“But instead I chose to be that which you worshipped. It’s funny how some entertainer from a thousand years ago was your most universally adored figure. All of your religious and political figures were too divisive, but everyone loves the king of rock and roll. The effect was bit stronger than I would’ve guessed,” it said, gesturing outdoors towards the town. “Your kind tends to imitate that which it worships, and I guess my kind has a peculiar mental effect on you as it is. Before long, they all started thinking they were Elvis too.

“But I’m not one to complain. I’ve got a whole town of humans following my every whim, so I guess everything worked out.”

“But why are you telling me all this?” Heather asked, wondering how much of this current conversation she should actually believe.

The creature shrugged Elvis Presley's shoulders. “To be honest, it’s nice to have someone mildly intelligent to talk to again. You’ve seen how those people out there are. They’re not quite themselves anymore and they make for poor company. You’re still you, at least for now.”

“For now?”

“Well yes, for now. You’ve seen the effect I had on several dozen highly trained explorers. Why would you think that you’d be any different?”

***

“Her last transmitted signal came from this planet,” said the ship’s technician.

“And we’re getting signs of life from this planet,” said another crew member. “Seem to be human as far as I can tell.”

“Well, certainly seems like this is where her ship ended up,” said Bram Ishiguro, a freelance ship captain. The Solar Times had offered rather decent reward money for their top reporter’s safe return, enough money for Bram to pay his crew for several months while still managing put aside a fair amount for himself.  The ship landed on the planet’s gray surface and the crew disembarked.

“I’m not picking up any signals for their ship, but there are signs of life nearby,” said the technician. “Wow there’s one very nearby. It’s moving right towards us, in fact.”

The party all looked up at those words, and spotted a figure moving towards them.

“I think that’s her,” said the ship’s first mate, comparing the figure to a photograph she pulled up on her tablet. “But what’s she wearing?”

Heather Greenfield, the top investigative journalist of The Solar Times was wearing some sort of cheap, red jumpsuit with hand-sewn tassels trailing from her sleeves. Her hair was slicked back and she moved with an odd swagger that seemed a tad unnatural on her.

“Well hey there, pretty mama,” said Heather.

This story was originally printed in Issue #3. Get the whole issue here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/631267104/the-rock-n-roll-horror-zine-3

See more of Ben Fitts' writing here: https://doomgoat666.wixsite.com/benfitts