Lizard World

by Terry Richard Bazes

  He had managed to walk maybe twenty yards beyond the sleeping creatures, almost to the dusky corner of the cellar where the portcullis hung by heavy chains and thick algae slurped out beneath its rusted teeth, when he heard something drop behind him. Of course he had never expected that Darrell would be stupid enough to follow him.

  What he saw in that fateful split second was the fallen lantern, the waking creatures and Darrell beside them, his hand outstretched, his mouth contorted in a horrified plea for help:

  “MISTER!”

  Despite all his unhappy summers at Camp Tecumseh, Smedlow had never really learned to dive, a fact which was the source of annually renewed humiliation. Because a camper who could not dive was doomed to remain a Minnow and because every summer last year’s Minnows graduated into Trouts, in time he had become simply the largest, fattest Minnow in the pond -- subjected to the misery of jeers, belly-flopping, and water-up-the-nose which he tried in vain to alleviate by the false bravado of cannonballs. Therefore at this moment Smedlow didn’t dive.

  He jumped.

  Chapter III.

  In which hope is born.

  Already panicking for breath, kicking wildly, holding his nose, he felt the sudden sickening fall, saw a glimpse of bloodshot sky -- and then splashed down into the muck below. When at last he came up for air, the first thing he saw was a floating tire. The second thing he saw was a water-snake wending its way among floating Coke cans and green bubbles. The waterfall trickled from the prison above him, making more bubbles which drifted among the trunks of vine-choked trees.

  I’ll show those goddamn yokels, he thought. What pinheads, what idiots they were to mess with him! The euphoria of escape was only slightly diminished by the absence of dry ground, forcing him to wade out into the swamp despite the growing dark, the menace of mosquitoes and the constant threat of floating eyes. Birds hooted at him -- and a pallid moon peeped down through the leaves -- while he smacked at bugs and stumbled into deeper water.

  Smedlow isn’t finished yet, he now told himself, resorting to the vocabulary of personal heroics (half propaganda, half pep rally) he often used when egging himself on to a particularly difficult task: you’ve just gotta outsmart the enemy, that’s all, never drop your guard. Warily he trudged on into the night, which the drifting of clouds across the moon made even darker, making it all the more difficult to watch for lurking eyes and snouts -- and to see which low-hanging boughs might offer him some refuge from attack. But so far he had only seen danger in the distance -- moonlit eyes glimmering in the mist -- and was beginning to feel confident that if he always waited for the moon to clear and always looked for trees he could climb, he could make sure the water ahead was safe before wading from one tree to the next.

  “Www-wuff! Www-wuff!”

  You gotta be kidding. A dog? A light (too bright and big to be a star) beamed through the mesh of distant boughs. Maybe some hick’s headlight -- or some kind of lousy little shack. His hopes suddenly soaring, Smedlow stopped wading, squinted, held his breath, and listened: splash, splash. And then he saw the two snouts swimming quickly toward him -- and the horror of reptilian eyes.

  “Www-wuff! Www-wuff!!” went Blitz again, knowing that that was what was expected of him and smelling something across the water which he knew, from experience, was human. The problem was that he also smelled the stink of gator, and it was this fact that now made Blitz whimper slightly, a high whinnying sound which he still couldn’t help himself from making, though he was careful quickly to amend by a bare-toothed, low-pitched “Gr-r-r-r-r.”

  As the motor whirred and the foredeck jumped, the warm, moist wind brought Blitz another noseful of that scent -- tangy, salty, worthy of his drool. Blitz growled thoughtfully and sniffed again: oh yeah, that was a human smell, all right, a very scared, sweaty, human smell -- and though Blitz was smart enough not to mess with those particular humans who smacked his nose with a stick or kicked him in the belly with their boots when he’d done wrong (and who threw him a hunk of beef fat and patted his head when he’d done right), there was nothing in the world he liked better -- not even raising his leg against a barn door or sniffing at a fragrant tail -- than growling and biting at a human reeking with the smell of fear.

  “You smell somethin’, don’t ya, fella?” said Lemuel Lee, turning the wheel hard to the right so they were heading toward the moonlit cove where Blitz’s nose was pointing -- and thinking that ole Blitz here was maybe, just maybe, the only real friend he had, seein’ as how everyone else didn’t do a goddamn thing but dump shit on him all day long. You’d think, wouldn’t ya, that after drivin’ three days straight to pick up that old English geezer -- just exactly like he’d been told -- that they’d maybe a given him one whole big hour so he could drink some brew and snooze awhile and watch TV, instead a orderin’ him out again lickety-split -- like it was really his fault that goddamn prisoner escaped. It wasn’t such a big damn rush to find him: there wasn’t no more than one way that was shallow and it wasn’t like he coulda gotten far. You’d think, instead a bustin’ his balls like that, they mighta cut him just a tiny bit a slack -- or maybe even actually mighta said “You done real good, Lem” for makin’ a round trip to the Big fuckin’ Apple and babysittin’ that snarlin’ old fart.” Now he wasn’t sayin’ that the geezer wasn’t havin’ his physical problems, like old folks do. And he wasn’t sayin’ that he wasn’t gonna do his bit to fix him up now that his parts was goin’ sour. But someone sure as hell coulda said thanks, cause babysittin’ the damn geezer (puttin’ up with his whinin’ and wipin’ up his goo) wasn’t exactly his idea a jolllies neither.

  “Well, lookee here,” he said, the searchlight’s beam revealing, some fifty yards away, a prone plump figure on a bending bough -- above four eyes glimmering with primeval patience. Hot damn, he’d know that big keester anywhere!

  “Gr-rrrrrr,” said Blitz, some dark recess of his mind remembering the day he was kicked like hell when he was just a little pup, when he he didn’t have his teeth and had to suck hind teat.

  “Well, fella, looks like you an’ me is goin’ home to snooze,” said Lemuel Lee, throwing down his cigarette and pulling out the throttle, while Blitz hunched forward on the bouncing deck and exposed his yellow teeth. For though Blitz couldn’t make fancy talk and blow smoke like goddamn humans, it belonged to the economy of his sinews that there had to be some payback.

  “I got you now, sucker,” said Lemuel Lee, taking the trouble to shine the searchlight right into Smedlow’s eyes -- who was so blinded by the glare that he still had cause for hope. Could it be, he wondered, some kind of swamp patrol -- some hick cop in a boat?

  “Gr-rrrrrr,” said Blitz again, while Lemuel Lee cut the motor and let the boat glide in nice and slow beneath the overhanging bough.

  Cautiously, Smedlow lowered down his leg -- and Blitz, unable to resist one second longer, bared his teeth and sunk them right below the cuff into the glimpse of mud-smeared shin.

  “Blitz don’t like you much,” said Lemuel Lee, yanking him down into the boat, cuffing his wrists and sealing his mouth with duct tape.

  “Don’t make no mistake, mister. If you’d a-been bit real good by a moccasin or chowed down by them gators, I’d a-thought that was just fine and dandy -- if there wasn’t better uses for yer meat.”

  Chapter IV.

  In which the Frobey Debt is paid and more than a molar is extracted.

  “Hold ’im down, Lem, and I’ll go get the needle,” the woman said, rubbing her back as she walked away toward the brick walls of the ruined factory, her polka-dotted rump vanishing through the doorway between the moonlit Sphinxes. A moment later she was coming back again, her yellow face suffused with chronic pain and malice, her right hand holding the upright cylinder of an oversized glass syringe. “Hold ’im down good,” she managed to say, producing a vial from the pocket of her housedress, jabbing the vial through its cap, and sucking out its insides with the plunger.

  “Keep ’im still! Can’t ya keep �
��im still? I need a vein.”

  “I can’t help it if he’s wrigglin’.”

  With his wrists cuffed behind him and that weasel Lem sitting on his chest, the most Smedlow could do was to kick and try to lift up with his legs -- while he twisted and turned his neck to make a moving target for the needle.

  “His head, Lem! Hold his head!”

  The palm smacked him painfully on the nose, and the fingers grabbed him by the eye socket, as he felt the needle stinging in his throat.

  “Let him be, Lem,” said the woman and almost at once he was on his feet again, running away from them, unable to fathom his good fortune. A sense of well-being such as he had never known before started coursing through his veins, accompanied by a growing lack of feeling in his limbs. He made it as far as the heap of broken bottles when he fell.

  He had known the delirious roar of five vodka gimlets -- but he had never been so drunk. He had known the deadness of Novocain -- but never that it could spread so far. As he saw the broken bottle in his arm and the pulsing of his blood, it was through an ecstasy of anesthetized delirium -- and somehow it didn’t seem so bad.

  “You don’t feel nothin’, do you?” said Lemuel Lee, kicking him in the side.

  “Bring him to the bottle room,” said the woman, and as he drifted off he saw her lift her skirt and plunge the needle in the blue vein of her flaccid thigh.

  When he woke up again he could hear them talking.

  “What you bring that damn dog in here for?”

  “Can’t I give the little pieces to Blitz, Uncle Earl?”

  “Don’t you worry about the little pieces, you goddamn moron. Just gimme the scalpels and the gauze.”

  His eyelids were so heavy and it was so very, very nice to let them fall, if only it didn’t mean that . . . that letting down the blinds like this suddenly made it so dark here . . . in his eighth grade classroom where . . . where the chalk letters on the blackboard said “pithing” . . . which meant it was fine, just fine, it didn’t hurt the frog a bit, as Mr. Eisenberg, his science teacher, poked the large needle in its spine -- sliced the creamy skin of chest and tummy -- and peeled it back to expose . . . its breathing lungs and the fragile beating vileness of its heart! But no, it couldn’t be fine, it couldn’t be . . . and maybe if he . . . if he . . . lifted the blinds again, he just might be able to stop it: but his eyelids were still so very, very heavy that it took all his strength to lift them up.

  “Goddamn, he’s woke up again! Should I give him another needle?”

  “He ain’t goin’ nowhere. You just shave the Englishman first, like I told you.”

  He had an uneasy feeling that something bad was going to happen to someone, but in his sleepy stupor he couldn’t imagine what or to whom. Since the only resistance he could offer was to lift his neck enough to see that his arms and legs had been strapped down -- not that he could feel them or move them even slightly when he tried -- it just seemed much easier to let his head fall back down again. But then the weight of sleep became so great that it was nearly impossible to keep his eyelids open -- much less make any sense at all of the hacksaw and the scissors and the cotton, or of the shrouded figure on the bed beside him, or of the more familiar body on the other bed, lying facedown in a green surgical gown, open behind to expose the swell of jaundiced buttocks.

  “How am I supposed to shave him if I don’t know where the razor’s at?”

  “The cabinet, you little jackass, the cabinet,” said Uncle Earl, who couldn’t help feelin’ kinda testy and just a trifle frantic -- making sure for the third time now that he had all his saws and scalpels on the surgery table and, just in case they was needed, the extra bags of blood and plasma in the fridge. But hell, it wasn’t no wonder he was nervous: he didn’t have no help but this idiot nephew of his and here he was about to slice up his only sister and plum rebuild this English fella’s engine. Not that he hadn’t knowed it was a possibility all along. But his daddy, though he was favored with the gift, had never once been called. And his granddaddy had only replaced a coupla fingers and it wasn’t since Hezekiah’s time that there was any kinda problem with the feet.

  “I was thinkin’ maybe first I oughta cut the big hairs with the scissors.”

  “Fine, fine, you do just that,” said Uncle Earl, stepping toward the Englishman and pulling back the sheet: of course them toenails was brown as cardboard, but the feet themselves didn’t look like they was in too bad condition, considerin’ their old age and the fact that they was spliced.

  “And when you done that, you can also shave this here prisoner -- and don’t forget his needle.”

  He did his best to pay attention to the voices and to the sound of snipping scissors. But the tremendous weight of sleep kept pulling down his eyelids, although for some reason that he couldn’t quite remember he kept fighting with all his strength to lift them up. He was so very, very drowsy that he could hardly make himself struggle to avoid the needle -- and then sleep became much too voluptuous to resist. And though he tried to shake himself awake and to break through sleep by screaming, he was sucked down at last into the terror of his dreams -- in which he hid in caves and ran through twilit catacombs, but couldn’t escape the vile suspicion that someone had begun to saw his head.

  Chapter V.

  In which Doctor Fludd’s memoirs are continued.

  The dissection of the head having been, long ere this, completed, my professors had no great need to keep the teeth. The surgery being dark, save for my lantern, and all my fine and prosperous classmates having made off to their warm suppers, I could ply my melancholy trade unseen. And they were indeed most excellent ivories, as I had first remarked, some five months since, when I had been summoned to observe the canker on the young man’s tongue.

  For though it was true, as I have told, that it had been my occasional good fortune to happen upon some mournful service in a humble church, which allowed me at my ease to collect my specimen full soon as it had rested in the earth, nonetheless I could not prudently entrust my livelihood to such fickle gifts of chance. Therefore, it had long been my Sunday custom, which well accorded with my duties as a doctor, to make a round of visits among the sick and feeble of the poorer parishes, giving my especial care to those most urgently in need -- to those, in fine, not dead but who should soon be so. It was on such charitable visits, as when I tendered this unfortunate young man, that I contrived to furnish my professors with a sufficient quantity of specimens. But never was this reluctant business more than adequate to supply my meager fare and defray my surgical studies.

  Indeed, some months having passed since I had first rendered service to his Lordship -- bringing him the harlot’s feet, as it had been my regretful charge, but never seeing him again thereafter -- I had all but despaired of my advancement. Happily there was then, among my fellows, a lively, albeit quiet, trade in teeth. For scarce a fine lady past childbearing had a round dozen in her head and there was at this time, among the better sort, a genteel dislike for the commonness of wood. So it was, upon this evening, that I drew out poor Asa Stubbs’ splendid teeth and concealed them in the pocket of my waistcoat.

  Now there was in Drury Lane, at this period of which I now relate, a godless old pinch-penny of an apothecary named Jeremiah Quince, who finding that tuppence for a vomit and threepence for a glyster were not like to make his fortune, had contrived to turn a profit by trafficking in costly ivories. ’Twas thither upon this evening that I now betook myself -- and the short of the matter is that I had no sooner brought this Quince my ivories, pocketed his miserly pittance and thereupon taken my leave, than I beheld, among the riffraff of the street, the very same footman who had besought me, that winter past, to procure a female carcass for his master.

  As if the sight of this footman -- this Simkyn Potter -- were not sufficient occasion for surprize, what now was my astonishment when, shirking my gaze and jostling me aside, he hies him to the same apothecary whom I myself had but lately quitted.

  Those who hav
e not suffered the indignity of penniless misery and bitterly despaired of preferment will doubtless find some small diversion in my plight. Indeed, how should they begin to understand my frantic hope at the sight of this mere, lowly footman? For my one thought was to get employment in his master’s service and how to perswade this dull knave to my purpose. For some minutes, in this assuredly laughable predicament and praying for guidance, I awaited in the street. Far better would it have been had I fled in fear as from the very gates of Hell. For at length, tho’ I am ever loth to pry, I could no more forbear to look into that thieving druggist’s window.

  What now, alas, did I chance to see but this Quince, this apothecary -- amongst the clutter of his jars and alembicks and other suchlike gim-cracks of his trade -- smiling most damnably whilst he brought out upon his counter the very ivories for which he had vouchsaf’d me but one crown and three paltry coppers. But I scarce had occasion to swallow down my loss. For straitway this footman had given him a guinea and made off again into the darkling street.

  I could not chuse but follow, though as yet I had no certain notion how I might contrive to inlist this churlish footman in my cause. Indeed I had nought but these few coins in my waistcoat and with these I had purposed to quell my now importunate hunger. This footman, howsoever, hastening before me amongst the throng of passersby, was like ere long to have vanished from my sight -- and with him all my fond hopes of preferment. I had, in fine, now come to such a desperate pass that I could conceive of nothing better than to haste me after him and, with a great show of hardy fellowship, clap him on the back as though we had been bosom friends parted long ago.

  At the first, so anger’d were his eyes, it seemed he might have bit me for my forwardness. But playing the good-fellow still and showing him my coins, I urged him to company me to a gin-shop which lay hard by betwixt a drapery and a bawdy-house. Thinking better of it, this cur gan now to warm to my entreaties -- so excellent much that ere long, owing to my bounty, a pint of gin had loosed his foolish tongue. To be sure, he had far liefer have prated of his gaming and his whores, but ever and again I brought him, by dint of drink, to betray some small secret of his lord’s strange malady. Since that night when, at this knave’s entreaty, I had supplied his master with the harlot’s feet, I had oftentimes brought to mind the leathern vileness of his Lordship’s claws -- though from what manner of hideous disease this affliction had arisen I was, as yet, unable to conjecture. But now, whilst I plied him with his gin, this footman touched upon other curious symptoms of this noble earl’s distemper -- most particularly the shedding of his Lordship’s teeth, the pustulous inflammation and sloughing of his skin, and periodic lethargies succeeded by sudden fits of abominable appetite and violence which ever ran the risk of a discovery.