by Anne Rice
Gabe blinked. “Angela? But she’s … I mean, didn’t the papers….”
“I’ll be frank, Gabe; we tried to sign her up, but we couldn’t get hold of her. She wouldn’t talk to us. Now, if she’ll talk to you … well, we’ll see.”
Gabe stared.
He hadn’t seen any obituaries, he realized. He had been concentrating on the movie reviews so much that he hadn’t noticed anything else, but he hadn’t seen any obituaries. None of the reviews called her the late Angela Denham, and surely they would have mentioned her passing.
Hadn’t Mrs. Dumbrowski told anyone? What about her million-dollar insurance policy?
“Um … let me get back to you on that, Felix,” he said.
“They wouldn’t pay,” Mrs. Dumbrowski explained, her voice trembling with righteous fury. “They said it was suicide! Said nobody could take that much Seconal by accident.”
“Oh,” Gabe replied, understanding bursting upon him. The insurance people might even be right; Angela hadn’t exactly been cheerful. “So no million dollars, right? But then, why didn’t you….”
“I didn’t want to explain where she’d been all this time, either,” Mrs. Dumbrowski said. “So I figured maybe she could … well, anyway, I tried giving her orders, like you did, but she wouldn’t move.”
Gabe nodded. “Dan took the spell off,” he explained. “We figured it would be better that way.”
“Can he put it back?” Mrs. Dumbrowski demanded.
Gabe leaned back comfortably and shifted the phone to his other ear.
“Hi, Felix?” he said. “Listen, I’ve got Angela Denham interested, but there are a couple of conditions.”
He smiled at Arbender’s reply; when the protests and quibbles had run down, he held up fingers and ticked off the demands.
“First, I produce, solo, and we get back as many of the people from Just for Love as we possibly can.
“Second, we have a real budget this time, and we don’t have your people looking over our shoulders about how we spend every penny.
“Third, a closed set—no outsiders.
“Fourth, Angela does no interviews, no talk shows, no public appearances at all—she wants to really play up the mystery woman angle. In fact, she won’t even be signing the papers—her mother’ll do that, as next of … I mean, as her agent.
“Fifth, we hire my brother Dan as technical advisor, pay all expenses and union scale.
“And finally, Felix ol’ pal, Angela and I are tired of these romance pictures. This next one’s gotta be horror—I’ve optioned a script called Queen of the Zombies….”
THE POTABLE ZOMBIE
LARRY TRITTEN
FOR MICHELLE, BARTENDER NON PAREIL
IT was a slow night in the bar. Only a few customers had been in, all of them alone, as everyone always was. They had all drunk either whiskey or wine except for a couple of gargoylish-looking trolls who mixed gin with doses of the mucopurulent discharges and phlegm and lachryma of beautiful women. Whatever you might say about trolls, it had to be admitted that they were serious drinkers.
For the moment the bar was empty and Abū was temporarily alone with his thoughts. He poured himself three acromegalic fingers of whiskey from a bottle with a picture of a witch fellating a werewolf on the label and perched on the stool he kept behind the bar. He tried to remember why he had been sent here. They had made him a bartender as a penalty for some un-Jinnī-like gaffe, but whatever he’d done had slipped his mind. It was in there somewhere, of course, as a deceased Freudian psychologist had assured him one night when he dropped in for a beer—but repression was keeping it in the psychic shadows. The one thing Abū felt sure of was that what he’d done had something to do with his sense of humor, because that had gotten him into trouble for centuries before he came here. Someday it would come back to him. In the meantime, his punishment was hardly exacting since he enjoyed tending bar. He liked to mix liquor, to invent drinks. He had invented the Jinn Fizz (a natural for him), the Faithless Angel, and the Bloody Murray (his Semitic influences were considerable).
Whenever he was alone, Abū often scanned the world with his mind like a motion picture camera, keeping up with what was happening. He did that now, picking up several interesting items: the funny-looking Austrian who had come into power in Germany was making all kinds of interesting trouble; the United States was still deep in its Depression and a song called “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was popular, but nobody was dancing to it; a couple of Britons named Bertrand Russell and Robert Briffault were producing some very provocative books; and the little motion picture machine called television, which he suspected would end up changing the world, was coming along quite well in its development.
Abū was world scanning when the deadbeat came in. That was the word he used to describe zombies. While it was a fact that his customers were for the most part dead, it was not the case that their conversation necessarily followed suit. He’d had some of the most lively talk in his life with a variety of the dead, ranging from ordinary people to monsters like vampires and mass murderers. But zombies had almost nothing to say and invariably said it in a torturously slow monotone.
The zombie selected a stool and looked at Abū with eyes as pale as clam flesh. Abū started to ask what he wanted, but a perverse impulse made him instead stare fixedly at the zombie in a subtle parody of zombie demeanor. As the two stared at each other, Abū guessed that the zombie would finally ask for rum, and if he was the sophisticate his white linen suit indicated, he might request 151-proof Demerara, the special dark rum that had been coming from British Guiana, distilled from sugarcane molasses grown along the Demerara River.
Abū waited expressionlessly while the zombie indicated an intention to speak with several premonitory twitches of his lips.
“M—M—M—M—M …” the zombie falteringly began.
Yes? Abū thought expectantly. His gaze remained blank.
“Ma—Ma … ke …”
Abū nodded in anticipation.
“… me … a … dri—ink,” the zombie finished.
“Sure,” Abū said, noting with surprise that the zombie, who he pegged as Haitian, was speaking English instead of French. A drink, he thought, and snapped his fingers. And immediately thought, Uhoh … Snapping his fingers released a floodgate in his mind and a memory poured forth. And in the next moment the memory was validated as he turned back to see the zombie gone and a drink sitting on the bar.
“You’re a drink,” Abū wryly confirmed, then grimaced as he recalled the time when the schlemiel who had become his master made his first wish, “Make me a malted.” Abū, an inveterate joker, had by reflex granted the wish literally, snapping his fingers and saying, “You’re a malted!” That was why he was here. The Powers That Be had made him an infernal bartender as punishment. He remembered how quickly word of the incident had gotten around in the world and that it became a staple joke among Jews, although nobody realized that the source of the joke was a true story.
Wondering what he had created, Abū picked up the drink and tasted it.
Wham! Abū smacked his lips. This was some drink he had inadvertently created. He tasted it again, analytically. His refined palate told him it contained three kinds of rum … light Puerto Rican, dark Jamaican, and … the pièce de résistance—the wonderful 151-proof Demerara: the soil along the banks of that river surely yielded some incredible sugarcane! He also detected in the drink curaçao, grenadine … Abū picked up a pencil and notepad and wrote the following recipe as he intermittently sipped the drink:
2. oz. light Puerto Rican rum
1 oz. dark Jamaica rum
½ oz. 151-proof Demerara rum
1 oz. curaçao
1 tsp. Pernod
1 oz. lemon juice
1 oz. orange juice
1 oz. pineapple juice
½ oz. papaya juice
¼ oz. grenadine
½ oz. orgeat syrup to taste
Mint sprig
Pineapp
le stick
Mix all ingredients, except mint and pineapple stick, with cracked ice in a blender and pour into a tall, chilled Collins glass. Garnish with mint sprig and pineapple stick.
Abū put down the pencil and concentrated on enjoying the… Zombie. The pun made him chuckle, then he realized that it was the perfect name for a drink, for this drink. Zombie. Moreover, the Zombie was too good not to share with the world. But how should he introduce it?
Abū made himself another Zombie, this time in the linear rather than magical way, actually mixing it. Half of the way through the second Zombie, and after ten minutes of world scanning, he made a choice. There was a restaurant in Los Angeles, California, called Don the Beachcomber, whose owner fancied himself an inventive mixologist. Abū would give him the recipe in a dream. He felt certain that within a year Zombies would be enlivening palates and jading cerebrums all over the United States … the world!
The Zombies were so good that Abū had been temporarily distracted from the thought that The Powers That Be would no doubt now slate him for a new punishment. How would they punish him? Something along the lines of the task Sisyphus had been stuck with? Translating James Joyce’s formidable novel, Ulysses, into languages like Chinese, Aztec, pidgin English, and pig Latin? He tasted the Zombie again. The world would owe him for this, he thought.
NOT ALL THE GAY PAGEANTS
JOHN BRUNNER
THE blow had long been expected. When it fell, though, it was not the less brutal.
Having finished breakfast before Neville joined him, Leo sat smoking his first gasper of the day while he perused the morning post. Not looking up, he said, “Bunny Soames has invited me to his Christmas house party at Le Touquet.”
About to sip the oolong tea he had poured in preference to coffee, Neville braced himself for the rest.
“You’ll be going to your mother’s, I suppose, same as last year?”
Without waiting for—without expecting—a reply, Leo crushed his cigarette into the kedgeree before him, which Neville had not yet had a chance to sample.
“Well, I have to be in court in an hour,” he sighed as he pushed back his chair, and left the room to shave and dress.
The room with the Louis Quinze escritoire, the marble, the chintz, the cloisonné, the slightly risqué Rowlandson, the willfully incongruous cocktail bar with its huge chrome-plated shaker, mirror-polished …
Left.
Last year spending Christmas with his mother had been approved as a proper elevation of duty over pleasure. This year—!
Neville Jeffries cursed under his breath.
Shaving in the bath after Leo had departed by cab for the Strand, he stared into the steamy mirror resting on the bath-rack. Pitiless, his reflection reminded him that he was twenty-eight. A glance at his belly confirmed that since the age of eighteen he had eaten and drunk exceptionally well. He had chosen his life. He had resolved that when this day came he would do the right and rational thing, and intended to stand by his decision, for those like him who clung to the past became ridiculous. He had done his share of mocking such people. He didn’t want the same to happen to him.
Yet he could not help feeling deprived—worse, aggrieved. What that ghastly old queen Jimmy Jimenez had said the other day held true: to have been kept for nearly two years by Leo Frost was quite a feat, for the longest previous had been a bare six months. Resigned as he was to the breaking of his luck, his intention had been to take a graceful though regretful leave, designed to make Leo feel he had made a serious mistake. The bastard, however, had forestalled him. It would be a sensible idea to spend the morning making him pay for it.
Unfortunately, he was too late. The shirtmakers, the tailors, the bootmakers, all confessed in deprecating tones that while they fully appreciated his need for their products with Christmas drawing near, they had been instructed to require Mr. Frost’s personal validation of all orders charged to his account …
Scowling, Neville wished them the compliments of the season.
After making his point (and he had seen it being made, read it in Neville’s eyes) Jimmy had gone on to promise that as and when—
No. That belonged to the past. Time now to keep instead of being kept. It was a shame that he was compelled to set out from so inadequate a financial base, a few hundred pounds scrimped by shillings at a time. For his young friends-to-be it must be Brighton rather than Deauville, the Chop Suey rather than the Café Splendide, but to someone born in Bermondsey or Bootle they were much the same. There would be no lack of “volunteers.” And after breaking them in he could sell them on to richer companions the way Henry Haines the art-dealer had sold him to Leo (he was sure of it, though it would never be admitted) and build up a bit more capital …
That, though, was for later. As things stood at present, he was indeed condemned to Christmas with his mother. Berkeley Square, Clarges Street, Half Moon Street—they were going to be out of reach for a long while. But his mother was elderly and frail and the great gray pile she lived in must be worth a quid or two. Could he force her into a flat on health grounds? Some factory owner enriched by the War might be conned into buying. That would be small enough compensation for showering the countryside with smuts and soot year in, year out.
Oh, but he hated the place where he’d been born, that stark harsh coast that some called stern or handsome or romantic! He called it awful, and did not mean what Wordsworth would have meant. And it was, would be forever, part and parcel of his image of his mother.
Having many young male friends, he had met many mothers since his move to London, via Oxford. He had marveled at women of forty, fifty even, who laughed and danced and (whisper) had affairs! What he would not have given that his own—!
But then, he wouldn’t be where he was, nor doing what he must. And chief among the “must” at the moment was making sure his mother did not disinherit him. She was so disdainful of his friends and way of life, even though for official purposes he earned his living by introducing customers to car dealers in Great Portland Street, receiving a commission when they closed a sale, which even by her standards surely must be classed as work.
Did she realize the nature of his relationship with Leo, and those who had preceded him? Probably not. Did she suspect? Conceivably. Living alone in the back of beyond she had little else to occupy her time. Would she upbraid him about it? Not in a million years. That would be to admit the existence of acts she refused to countenance. He had often wondered how his father had managed to impregnate her, even whether he was the fruit of the sole occasion.
Last Christmas had been pretty bad, but he had had the prospect of New Year’s Eve at The Carillon to keep up his spirits. This one …
Well, he had no choice. Where was the nearest place that he could send a telegram?
A Clyno that he recognized as belonging to Dr. Chettle stood before the grime-dark house. Throwing half a crown to the carrier who had brought from the station him, his cases, and a Fortnum & Mason hamper, he marched into the hall. Dr. Chettle was descending the stairs, medical bag in hand, followed by Mrs. Peck the housekeeper, twisting and tugging her lace-edged apron.
“How did you know?” the doctor demanded, halting in midstep.
“Know what?” Neville countered, unholy premonitions dawning.
“To come today, of course.”
“But I’m here to spend Christmas with my mother, the same as last year … Mrs. Peck, didn’t you get my wire?”
The housekeeper raised a horrified hand to her mouth.
“That must have been what the boy brought this morning, just after the mistress took ill! I was that mithered, all I could think of was that he was my chance to send for Dr. Chettle.”
Neville didn’t wait for more excuses. “Doctor, what’s happened?”
Gruffly: “A heart attack.”
“Is she … ?”
“Yes. It was mercifully quick.”
Neville put his hands to his head, swaying a little. “Excuse me,” he whisp
ered. “I feel faint. I must sit down.”
“Here, sir!” Mrs. Peck pushed a heavy black oak chair toward him. He dropped into it, staring at nothing.
Oh, but what a stroke of luck!
People he didn’t know came to the funeral, along with one that he did: his mother’s lawyer Mr. Strickland, carrying a black leather portfolio that no doubt contained her will. He kept a suitably grave face during the service and the subsequent burial, but it was hard.
Under gray cloud shedding intermittent sleet the sexton proffered a silver trowel and a salver of earth. Bearded, melancholy, he wore an elderly Prince Albert and a top hat lacking most of its nap. Muttering thanks, Neville duly spilled earth on the coffin, returned the trowel, moved away. The other mourners followed by turns, uttered insincere compliments about the wreaths, then either took their leave, voicing equally hollow condolences as they shook his hand and nodded to Mrs. Peck, or, if invited, waited to be led to the house for tea and potted meat sandwiches and the all-important reading of the will.
From the lych-gate he glanced back. Assisted now by a boy in a long black coat with a scarf wrapped around his head against the chill—his son, perhaps—the sexton was already filling in the grave. As he worked he whistled a lugubrious tune. For a moment Neville wondered whether he should remonstrate on the grounds that it was disrespectful to his mother; then he realized that it probably belonged to a hymn. To the vicar he murmured, “Is that a hymn your sexton is whistling?”
“I suppose so,” was the answer. “Captain Hopper, though—it’s a courtesy title, obviously: he spent much of his life at sea but he’s hardly officer class—he’s not of our persuasion. He’s a Baptist. And I am of course not familiar with the dissenting liturgy.”
“You have a Baptist acting as your sexton?”