Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  "So you see," the big fortune-teller continued, "your safety is temporary at best and ephemeral in the long term."

  I repeated.

  >Reader's Digest.< Mama Samm mindwhispered. >"It Pays To Increase Your Word Power." You should subscribe. I'm particularly fond of "Life In These United States."<

  "What do you suggest I do?" Lupé asked quietly, looking about as if to gauge our present level of privacy.

  "You can start by talking to the one person who cares about you beyond your political value as a hostage or a science project. You can stop punishing the man for something you imagined he did and find out what really happened."

  "She knows what really happened," chirped Deirdre's voice from the other side of the curtain. "She's just not finished running her tests."

  I echoed as Mama Samm wrenched herself up and out of her dual chair arrangement.

  Three long strides and the curtain was swept aside to reveal two faces leaning forward to eavesdrop.

  Every face to face (to face) encounter with Deirdre and Theresa since our return from Dr. Mengele's Rocky Mountain fortress was a fresh shock to my sensibilities. The fact that I hadn't seen her/them for nearly six months didn't help. Neither did repeated viewings of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—the Mark Wing-Davey 1981 incarnation of Zaphod Beeblebrox, not the Sam Rockwell performance from '05, that is. There's something about a pair of heads sharing a single body that is just so wrong on so many levels. And that's before we even get to the aesthetics. Trust me on this one, the old saw is wrong: two heads are not better than one!

  Deirdre looked suitably embarrassed, her face blushed scarlet, nearly matching the arterial red of her hair. Theresa's face was pale in marked contrast to her coal-black locks. Her present pallor had nothing to do with surprise or fright, however. Chalk it up to a prior Goth lifestyle and a more recent condition as a headless corpse. Or a corpseless head. In any event, she wasn't embarrassed. The only thing I'd ever known to embarrass this bad-news brunette was her failure to achieve full-blown monster status during the "Lilith Affair." Not—I thought as I considered the place where Theresa's neck was fused to Deirdre's shoulder—that she was entirely out of the running now.

  "You ladies," Mama Samm said, pronouncing the word as if she wasn't completely sure of it, "need to go lie back down and let peoples have their private talks. Your turn will be coming."

  "Don't blame me," Theresa whined with a contradictory smile, "I'm just along for the ride."

  "You look tired," the juju woman said abruptly. "Why don't you take a nap?"

  Theresa's head suddenly dropped forward, her chin falling on Deirdre's chest. Her mouth lost its subtle sneer and began to emit gentle snoring sounds.

  "Thanks," Deirdre said. "You don't know how much—"

  "You need a nap, too," Mama Samm interrupted. "But I'll give you another ten seconds to get back into bed, first."

  Deirdre turned and fled. Mama Samm reclosed the curtains. Turned back to Lupé. "What you think you testin' for, child? To see how much rejection your man can take? By the time you have your answer, you'll be alone and he'll be that much further away. Is that what you want?"

  Lupé started to speak, then stopped and closed her eyes and shook her head.

  The fortune-teller turned couples counselor repositioned the two chairs closer to the bed and repositioned herself upon them. "Then talk to him," she said, settling back. "I'm tired. I think I'll take a little nap, myself."

  Her eyes stayed open but I had the sudden impression that I had been left alone in the cubicle with the mother of my unborn son.

  "Lupé . . ." I tried through thicker, wider lips.

  Her ears pricked forward. It seemed impossible that human ears could move in such a mannerr but the impression was unmistakable. "What . . . ?"

  "It's me."

  "It's you?"

  "Chris. I'm . . . inside. Riding shotgun inside Mama Samm's head."

  She stared at me, her eyes widening.

  "I bloodwalked." Well, technically Mama Samm pulled some kind of juju move but this was confusing enough without getting into specific details.

  "Chris?" she whispered. She glanced around as if expecting an undead Allen Funt to appear.

  I tried nodding the fortune-teller's head. The result was a perilous wobble.

  Lupé crept out of bed cradling her swollen belly. "What are you doing here?"

  "I've come to see you. You won't take my phone calls, answer my letters. Marie Laveau has forbidden me to come in person. What was I supposed to do?"

  "I don't know. I didn't know. Someone must have interfered—" She crouched down to look in our eyes. "Are you really in there? She let you inside her head?"

  "Yeah. She made up a guest room and everything."

  She frowned. "How do I know it's really you?"

  I tried shrugging Mama Samm's shoulders. All around, these days, I really sucked at shrugging. "I guess we should have agreed on a code word or phrase," I said, "just before you ran away. Too bad I left my wallet in my other pants."

  "Well, you certainly do sound like him." Her mouth was hardening into a straight line.

  "How about telling you something only I would know? Like that sound you make when we—"

  "All right! All right!" she said, covering my mouth with one hand and awkwardly embracing me with her other arm. "You're him. You. Chris."

  "I'd better be the only one who knows the sound you make when we—" The hand went over my mouth again.

  "Do you want us to take you out of here?" I asked when the hand was removed a second time. "Say the word and Mama Samm and I will lean on Mooncloud and we'll pack your bags right now."

  Lupé glanced at the screens on either side of her cubicle—toward the bed containing the body on life support, then toward the alcove where Deirdre and Theresa were sawing twin logs. "Not yet . . ."

  "Why not . . . yet?"

  My once-and-hopefully-future fiancée leaned closer and murmured: "She's working on a process to neutralize the silver in your body." She reached out and touched Mama Samm's face. "Your other body. How can we ever . . . be together . . . until you're clean again? Laveau needs more time. And she has promised Theresa her new flesh tonight. If I leave before then she might renege on her promise and hold her and Deirdre as hostages. If we take them with us now—" She shook her head. "I don't think Deirdre can stand it much longer."

  I stared back at her through Mama Samm's eyes. "And you say she's ready to move Kellerman's head to her new body tonight?"

  "She's already prepared redundant donor bodies. All she lacks is some kind of powerful artifact or key ingredient. I think she went out to fetch it early this morning."

  Since that seemed to jibe with Irena Pantera's account of her stepmother's disappearance, it looked like we might be closing in on some closure with Theresa Kellerman, at last.

  "All right," I said. "I'll give it another twenty-four hours. Then we blow this fallout shelter and head back to West Monroe with or without Pete'n'Repeat."

  Lupé shook her head. "You wouldn't seriously consider leaving them here."

  "I wouldn't want to but family comes first," I said, feeling sick at the thought of leaving Deirdre behind.

  "Yes," she said, taking Mama Samm's hands and tugging us to our feet, "yes, it does." She led us back to the divider and pushed the curtain aside. "I know you fear for our son as much, if not more, than you fear for me. But you have your unborn wife and daughter to think about, as well . . ."

  I looked through the parted curtains because Lupé clearly wanted me to see something. But all that was immediately evident was the hospital bed and nightstand that served as spartan furnishings for Deirdre's and Theresa's cubicle. And Deirdre and Theresa, of course: sprawled across the rumpled bed in careless repose where Mama Samm had just sent them for their conjoined naps.

  Then I saw what I had not noticed before: the strained pajamas ac
ross the convex curve of their mutual belly. Third trimester well begun!

  "Oh, what fresh hell is this!" I groaned.

  Mama Samm's mind roused, flared in the darkness adjacent to my own. She took in the same tableau and processed the evidence more swiftly than I.

  >The plan was always to provide surrogate wombs for the cloned embryos of your late wife and daughter, Christopher.<

 

  >Why not Deirdre? Would you rather a stranger—?<

  I fumed.

  The curtain on the other side of the cubicle was swept aside. Mooncloud and Pantera stared at me. "Is there a problem?"

  The two-headed surrogate stirred in their sleep and rubbed their belly with their left hand. "Mommy take . . . good care . . . you . . ." Theresa murmured dreamily through a sly smile.

 

  Chapter Eight

  Irena Pantera seemed particularly desperate that her stepmother be found before her father awakened at sunset. Whether it was out of concern for him or for herself, I could not tell. Even those familial bonds that survive a "turning" are never really quite the same. How can it be when the person turned loses their humanity? Whichever her motivation—dutiful daughter or daddy's little thrall—it was the leverage Mama Samm needed to get us admitted to the "holy of holies."

  I asked as we were let into Marie Laveau's chambers.

  My physical host loosed a mental snort. >You s'posed to own a detective agency. So, start detectin'.<

 

  "Please do not disturb anything," Irena said as she turned a switch on an external lighting circuit. "My stepmother would be very angry if she thought I had come in here. I don't know what she would do if she discovered that I had brought outsiders into her peristyle." Bare bulbs nursed reddish sparks to fully whitened glows, illuminating the cavernous room.

  Tapestries softened the harshness of the stone-block walls but couldn't diminish the effect of the room's vast dimensions. Laveau's furniture would have been ornate in the parlors of old New Orleans' historical houses. Down here in this echoing, warehouse setting they took on the appearance of cheap, dollhouse furnishings.

  There was a bed—no need for the comforting confines of a coffin so far underground—and a row of armoires, some containing clothing, others serving as organizers for relics and apothecarial supplies. Being limited to the use of Mama Samm's eyes, it was hard to examine much in the way of evidence when her head kept swinging this way and that.

 

  "There's an altar," she announced abruptly. Irena stared at her. I would have, too, if there had been any way to take a couple of steps back. For all of their history, Marie Laveau and Sammathea D'Arbonne had never met anywhere but on neutral ground. "Somewhere near by!"

  She cast about like a dog attempting to pick up a scent.

  And we saw it together: large tapestries covered the walls to our left and right as we came through the door. But the wall on the opposite side was a curtain, not a tapestry.

  Mama Samm approached it with her arms out, hands extended, and palms forward.

 

  >Oh, hush up! You sound jus' like them bad movies you always watchin'.<

 

  >Like what?<

 

  >Mmm hmm. And, of course, don't get naked to take showers or have sex in creepy old houses, or wear nighties with high heels in case you have to start running.<

 

  She shook her head as she reached out to touch the heavy, dark curtain. >First of all, Cséjthe, there ain't much chance that we are going to split up. Second, I ain't taking no shower nor wearing no nightie and I sure as hell ain't running—in high heels or anything else, for that matter.<

  I argued, as she pulled the edge of the drape aside.

  >This is a curtain, not a door,< she snapped, as she pulled the split open wider.

  The monster was on the other side of the curtain.

  * * *

  Call it a Sigourney Weaver moment.

  Or maybe not.

  The actress who inhabited the role of Lieutenant Ellen Ripley in the first four Alien movies was mercifully absent in the fifth Alien vs. Predator installment. In other words, she wasn't around—cinematically speaking—to see the intergalactic trophy hunters take on the face-hugging, chest-bursting, acid-blooded, extendible-double-dentifriced denizens of LV-426.

  So, lacking the reference points for those particular close-encounters-of-the-third kinds, she certainly wouldn't/couldn't imagine the flipside.

  I'm talking about the other kind of "close encounter."

  Despite the unlikely biological gestalt, my first impression in looking at the thing that reared up on the other side of Laveau's false wall, was that at least one "Alien" and one "Predator" had eschewed the polemics of their peers and slapped Make Love, Not War bumper stickers on their respective spacecraft. More than that, they had made the two-backed star beast.

  Performed personal docking maneuvers.

  Linked life support, engaged thrusters, ejected a payload or two—spawning the thing that lurked on the other side of Laveau's curtained divider.

  Bad enough either species might have the bad taste to reproduce. The thought that they might cross-pollinate and produce a love child twice as hideous? Well, a single glance at Junior here was enough to guarantee the passage of any extraterrestrial miscegenation laws that the rest of the universe might want to legislate.

  In theory, that is, because our particular monster was a statue.

  Fortunately.

  Because nothing that hideous—that appalling—could actually exist outside of a seriously twisted imagination.

  Except . . .

 

  >Ah . . . < There was a moaning sound far back in the depths of Mama Samm's mind. >I was afraid of this . . . <

 

  I felt the double take without her actually moving her head. >What?<

 

  I mean it was pretty simple to figure out. Laveau was hardly the type to go in for movie collectibles. And this thing didn't quite match up to the aforementioned creature features. The first glaring dichotomy was that someone had replaced this thing's head with a mutant octopus. After that anomaly, other bits—like the scaly body and the long, narrow wings that emerged from its shoulders like an ill-fitting Burberry trencher—were evidence that Moby Squid, here, had nothing to do with either Hollywood franchise. In fact, the prodigious claws on its hind and fore feet seemed almost quaint after taking in the tentacled face for the third or fourth time.

  And, while I'd never laid eyes on such a diverse collection of grotesqueries in a single critter, there could be only one pseudopod Pinnochio on the suspect list . . .

  Except . . . >This is not a graven image of Nyarlathotep, Cséjthe.<

 

  >No.<

 

  >Don't you know?<

  I ventured.

  >What? No!<

 

  > <

 

  >I do not know why I even asked.<

 

&nb
sp; >I was testing to see if a link had been established.<

 

  > <

 

  >Stop making up these ridiculous guesses!<

 

  "What is it?" Pantera asked.

 

  "Child . . ." Mama Samm turned away from the grotesque carving in green stone and stared blindly back at the door on the far side of the room. ". . . we gots to find Marie Laveau soon as possible! Her life is in great danger!"

 

  >Yes,< she answered me with uncharacteristic grimness. >We got to kill the Vampire Queen of New Orleans before she can bring about the end of the world!<

  * * *

  Irena went to work searching for any clues that might help us locate her stepmother, totally unaware that Mama Samm was plotting Laveau's murder. While the stepdaughter combed through her personal effects, the juju woman concentrated on Laveau's tools of the trade. Me? I was just along for the ride.

  The statue stood upon a crude altar against the stone wall just ten feet beyond. By now I had seen a few voodoo shrines and altars but the collection of trinkets, offerings, and spell components weren't like anything I had run across in illustrated books much less up close and personal. But then I doubted Marie Laveau would practice any form of Voudon like anyone else.

  Above the arcane workspace—above the statue that reared over us as we approached—cryptic symbols were scratched and clawed, like a mad etching from some meaningless alphabet:

  La mayyitan ma qadirun yatabaqqa sarmadi

  I observed.

  "That is not dead which can eternal lie," Mama Samm intoned, staring at the eerie inscription. "And, with strange eons, even death may die!"

 

  "What does it mean?" Irena asked.

  "They are the words of the Mad Arab."

  <"Osama bin Laden?>" Irena and I asked together.

  "What? No! I speak of Abdul Alhazred, the madman! He who brought forth Al Azif from the Nameless City in the wastes below Irem and in his final days in the cursed sector of Damascus, during fell days of the eighth century!"