Zod Wallop

by William Browning Spencer

  Surely the gas was dispersed by now. He supposed he could open his eyes and remove the mouthpiece with impunity. He wasn’t, however, 100 percent sure on this count, and it did no harm to simply wait. Patience, he had learned, was a great virtue.

  He passed the time by imagining the slow, painful death he would inflict on the man responsible for this. There was no doubt in his mind as to the identity of this person.

  When the door was finally opened and Blaine’s rescuers poured in, he was, for a moment, unaware of their arrival, so lost was he in reverie, so involved in his own powers of invention, so pleased by the imaginary screams of Dr. Roald Peake.

  Chapter 19

  HARRY CALLED FROM a pay phone. “Helen,” he said when she answered, “I don’t know if they have tapped your phone or not. I want you to meet me where we celebrated after Sneeze was sold.”

  “Harry, are you—”

  “Leave right now, Helen. We’ll talk then.”

  Harry watched her enter the restaurant, obviously disoriented by the interior’s gloom, older and frailer in her confusion.

  Raymond was outside, watching to see if anyone were following her. No clear plan had been formulated if Helen were, indeed, being followed, but Harry thought that such surveillance was unlikely.

  Harry watched her enter from where he sat at a far table in the gloom of Benny’s Continental Club with Emily and Rene. Emily was sleeping, her head back, her mouth open. Rene was in a sulk, having argued with Raymond over Allan who, she felt, was in need of immediate rescuing. Raymond had vetoed this.

  “The Frozen Princess is waking!” he had shouted, causing the cabdriver to turn his head sharply and glare at Raymond.

  “The Frozen Princess is waking,” Raymond had repeated, with no discernible lessening of volume. “We must get the Duchess and head south immediately. I am sorry about Allan, but if we fail to find the Duke and our destination, Allan’s sacrifice will have been for nothing. Our fortunes can only be decided at the Ocean of Responsibility, and if it all unravels too soon, it will be meaningless in this unmagical realm.”

  Rene was not satisfied with this reasoning, and took particular umbrage with the word sacrifice, which suggested that Allan had already been written off, abandoned as it were.

  “Allan will be all right,” Raymond said. Rene was not convinced.

  Now Harry watched Helen turn myopically in the dark restaurant and move slowly toward them. Harry got up, went to her, and embraced her.

  “Harry, are you all right?” she asked. Her eyes studied his own anxiously. She wore a tan suit, and the scent of roses that met him conjured images of their shared past (other celebrations, Jeanne with him, laughing, saying, “Call me Zelda.”).

  “I’m okay, Helen. I’m fine, actually. But we’ve got to go to Florida. I need you to come with me.”

  In the end, she agreed to go, but it was not the eloquence of his arguments that made her acquiesce. It was, he knew, concern, pity, a conviction that he had lost his mind and needed a caretaker.

  And perhaps he did. Certainly, when he heard himself speak, he sounded less than rational. He sounded, in fact, crazy, and this was with some serious editing, without mentioning Gorelords, levitating princesses, or Ralewings.

  “Raymond says we have to go to Florida. There is someone there we have to meet, and Raymond is convinced we’ll need you when we do.”

  She had leaned forward then, caught his hand. “Harry, you said yourself that Raymond was…well, deluded. Why would you listen to him now?”

  That had been hard to explain. He had refused to look at it straight on. Saying it might kill it, somehow. Nonetheless: “Helen, things are different.” He produced the postcard of Amy on the beach, let Helen study it at length without speaking, then tapped the pink hotel with his forefinger and said, “This is the St. Petersburg Arms. It’s where this Duke is. It’s where Raymond says we must go.”

  Helen looked up, blinked without comprehension.

  “Helen, Amy was never in St. Petersburg.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He had let it out then, showed her the hope. Raymond had told him that there might be a way to change it back.

  “Change what back?”

  “Amy,” he had whispered, his daughter’s name a small, pink rose in his mouth.

  “Oh, Harry,” Helen said, squeezing his hand. “Harry.” He could not look at her face.

  “She was never in Florida,” Harry insisted, still looking away. “And things are happening that I can’t explain, things…” It was a sickly thing, this hope, and Harry felt it dying in the air, unable to survive even his own poor scrutiny, and he pulled his arm away from Helen’s hand and stood up.

  “Of course I’ll go with you,” she said.

  She had brought Arbus with her—he was waiting in the car—and when Raymond saw the monkey, he whooped loudly.

  “This is a good omen, my Lord,” he said, bouncing the monkey in his arms. “This reunion suggests that Blodkin smiles upon our cause.”

  “Just what is our cause?” Harry asked.

  Raymond had raised his eyebrows. “Why Lord Gainesborough, you jest. Our cause is to Return the Light, of course. We are to stop the Freeze, overthrow the Encroaching Darkness, and Return the Light.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Harry said.

  “We are tall-hearted,” Raymond said, and Harry thought he saw the bright stars and happy faces of a wizard’s robes.

  They drove south into the night, stopping finally a little north of Richmond (the exit sign off 95 said Ashland) and getting two rooms in a red brick motel called The Pines.

  Harry and Raymond stayed in one room while Helen, Rene, and Emily occupied an adjacent room. The bedspreads were dark green, the walls only slightly lighter. In Harry and Raymond’s room, a slowly rotating ceiling fan—Harry could find no way of disabling it—made the light in the room shimmer unpleasantly. Sitting on one of the twin beds, Harry felt as though he had been dropped into an immense neglected aquarium. Raymond, still dressed and already snoring on the other bed, seemed to rise and fall as though lifted by watery currents—an illusion produced, Harry was certain, by the choppy light, the long hours of driving, and whatever drugs still rode his bloodstream.

  On the drive down, Harry had filled Helen in. He found that he could not tell this story without including its fantastic elements, and at first he hesitated. “Some of this will sound crazy,” he said.

  Helen said, “Maybe I should tell you that I have seen one of your Ralewings—the size of a house, it was—destroy a helicopter. And I saw the corpse of another impossible creature, a Politer, that Raymond’s mother showed me. I’m… I’m acquiring some tolerance for the fantastic. Do you want the details?”

  Harry did, so Helen talked first, speaking of the arrival of Gabriel, the Storys, and finally Roald Peake and his men. She spoke of Peake’s phony concern for Harry and his companions who were, in Peake’s words, “at grave risk” thanks to an unauthorized drug experiment. She spoke in great detail of the Ralewing, reliving her horror, the fear its black shape had engendered even before, consciously, she had identified it as an impossible creature, hideously magnified. She told how Ada Story produced the mummified Politer from the trunk of her car, and the story of Raymond’s summoning it.

  When she was done, Harry nodded. “You see,” he said, “anything is possible.”

  “Amy’s dead,” she said.

  For a moment, he hated her, this old woman with her own losses, resigned to every awful thing.

  “I know that,” he said. He let his anger go and talked, telling her everything, hallucination and truth, not bothering with disclaimers.

  When he finished, she was silent.

  “Well?” he had finally asked. It was dark by then, and he could tell nothing from her profile in the passenger’s seat.

  “I don’t know, Harry,” she said. “I don’t know what any of it means.”

  Who did? Every journey was a strange one. Hadn�
�t Chesterton argued that strangeness suggested some comparison, something more normal and reassuring? Some alternate world.

  Outside, Harry could hear the hiss of long-distance trucks, sporadic at this late hour, a sound that would have been soothing had he been less keyed up, less primed for sinister fancies. Now every sibilant passing brought with it the image of a monstrous Swamp Grendel, rubbing its scaled hide against the motel’s brick, its gray-green eyes glowing faintly from the luminous microscopic organisms within.

  Harry lay back on the pillow but found that closing his eyes brought with it instant panic, vertigo, nausea. He reached over to the end table and clicked on the bedside lamp. A steady circle of light appeared, comfortable, unwavering.

  All comfy at the bottom of the aquarium, he thought. He smiled, thinking of Scoundrel Flowers, a children’s book that had been singularly unsuccessful, perhaps because he had tackled a big theme, the nature of evil, and discovered that neither he nor his art had anything happy and certain to say. Happiness and certainty were essential qualities in a successful children’s book.

  Here in the underwater motel, Scoundrel Flowers had come to his mind naturally—for there was a scene in the book in which two goldfish, Ed and Alice, fight.

  Alice says, “I’m out of here,” and she proceeds to jump higher and higher until she has cleared the side of the aquarium and landed on the table where, of course, she begins to experience extreme discomfort.

  “I can’t breathe!” she screams. “I’m dying.”

  Ed rescues her by elaborate means and, repentant, she tells Ed that she has discovered she cannot live without him.

  Ed, honest to a fault, tells her that it is the absence of water, and not his presence, that nearly did her in.

  Alice, angry again, declares that Ed is the most unromantic lout she has ever known and again leaps out of the aquarium. This time Ed resolves to let her dry out and wither away—unless a small girl or boy, reading the story, feels that Alice is still worth saving. A list of Alice’s good qualities follows, in which her beautiful orange coloring and large blue eyes are featured, and most little boys and girls (Amy, for instance) vote to give Alice another chance, and so the story continues with an even more elaborate rescue mission from the daring and passionate (if unromantic) Ed.

  Harry had dedicated Scoundrel Flowers to Jeanne who had said, “It’s about time I got a dedication. I mean, first your parents, then your sister, then I think it was your friend in North Carolina, and then even your agent, and I was about to say something.”

  The dedication had read: This book is for Jeanne, who is air, water, and fire and who loved the scoundrel flowers into bloom.

  Scoundrel Flowers was Jeanne’s favorite book.

  The impulse to call was instant, and he had given the operator his telephone credit number before looking at his watch. It was almost eleven.

  She answered on the first ring.

  “Jeanne,” he said. “It’s me, Harry.”

  “Harry! My God, Harry! Where have you been? Are you all right? We’ve all been crazy. Helen—”

  “Helen’s here too,” Harry said.

  Jeanne said something Harry couldn’t make out.

  “What’s that?” Harry asked. Then he realized she was talking to someone else in the room with her. Harry could hear a man’s voice. She was shouting at him. He shouted back. Then she was back on the line.

  “Sorry. That was Mark. Where have you been, Harry?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. The man in the room had thrown Harry off.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Virginia. I’m traveling with some friends. We’re driving down to Florida. I’ve been in a hospital and—”

  “You are all right, aren’t you? You didn’t—”

  “I’m fine. I can’t go into details now. I guess I just wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking about you…a lot. I wanted to call and let you know I was okay, see how you were doing too. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Look, what were you in a hospital for?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t a real hospital. We were being held against our will. Fortunately—”

  “Is Helen there? Can I speak to her?”

  “Helen’s in the other room with Emily and Rene and Arbus.”

  “Arbus?”

  “Lord Arbus. Not a person, actually. A spider monkey.”

  “Oh.”

  “What I called for, what I wanted to say was I’m in the middle of something that could be very important, for both of us, something strange, fantastic, and I wanted to say…I don’t know, just to tell you I’m all right and that I’ll keep you posted.”

  “You’re sure you are all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sound sort of weird.”

  “That’s probably the residue of the drugs. They had us on lots of medication. And I’ve been driving for hours; you know how that will wind you up.”

  “Yes. I understand. Could you go and get Helen? I just want to talk to her for a minute.”

  “I expect she’s sleeping right now. I could have her call you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Please. Don’t forget, Harry.”

  “No, of course not—”

  Harry heard the man’s voice behind Jeanne. Harry could make out none of the words, but the tone was angry. “Just a minute,” she said.

  “I’d better go,” Harry said. “I just wanted you to know I was okay.”

  “Harry—” The man was still talking behind her, a querulous rumble.

  “I’ll tell Helen to give you a ring.”

  “Give me a number where I can reach you and—”

  “We’re leaving in the morning,” Harry said. “I’ll get back to you later. I love you. Gotta go.” He hung up.

  The conversation had not gone as planned. He had, he realized, contracted some of Raymond’s enthusiasm for the adventure, and he had wanted to communicate that to Jeanne, and all she had sensed was the craziness, her voice full of that exasperating walking-on-eggs concern.

  “I might not be crazy,” he sighed, newly aware of how very tired he was. He lay back on the pillow without turning the bedside lamp off. He closed his eyes and the panic didn’t rush him. Instead, he fell instantly and dreamlessly into sleep.

  As Jeanne hung up the phone, Mark came from behind, caught her other wrist and pulled it back. She heard the snap of the cuffs as the metal band encircled her wrist.

  “Hey!” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “No?” he said, leaning down and running his tongue up the side of her neck to her ear. “I figured your chat with the ex probably got you hot. Still got a thing for him, don’t you?”

  “Give me the key,” she said. She leaned back and looked him in the eyes. He smiled down at her.

  The handcuffs had been his idea. In a weak moment, when he had looked his most boyish, a playful imp, she’d agreed that it might be fun.

  It hadn’t been, actually. But she had learned something. She did not trust Mark, did not know him. When her hands were locked behind her, she felt fear. He could do anything. He might hurt her.

  The handcuffs had brought this knowledge to the surface, but still she hadn’t left him. To leave would have required energy she lacked.

  Now he had slipped up behind her and hooked her wrist to the bedpost.

  “Come on, give me the key,” she said, ice in her tone.

  He tossed the key on the bed, muttered something. She heard the door slam. He might be gone all night now. That would be fine. More likely he’d return at three or four, wake her up, tell her he loved her, try to peel her nightgown over her head as proof. She might let him—the easiest solution if she were muddled with sleep—or she might tell him to get lost and then how it went would depend on just how drunk he was.

  Thinking about it made Jeanne weary. Whatever.

  She got up and went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Harry’s phone call troubled her. Was he going nuts again? It soun
ded that way. Maybe Helen was trying to get him back in some psych ward. God bless you, Helen.

  Mark and Harry were two different species, and the way Jeanne felt about them was utterly different. In the comparison, she could admit that she was beginning to dislike Mark. He was not a man she would have chosen, and he had entered her life because she had been lax, had left the door open, indifferent to burglary.

  Harry. She loved Harry and so, when he disappeared, when he withdrew into vagueness and alcohol, she had despised him passionately.

  But he still seemed, to her willful heart, like her friend, her confidante, and when she heard his voice she still felt that quickening, that feeling that here was the one meant to receive the news of her life, her dreams, her fears.

  Often when they had made love, she would talk, regaling him with the events of her day or some thought she had come upon and wanted to share, and her casual words would not destroy the erotic impulse but would ride upon it, and she’d see, in his eyes, an intensity of pure listening and delight.

  It was a hard habit to shake.

  If Mark hadn’t been in the room, she would have told Harry about the postcard. Perhaps, tomorrow, she would tell him. When Helen called…

  She walked to the dresser and took the postcard out from under several folded white blouses. Was she hiding it from Mark? Perhaps, but why?

  The postcard had arrived two days ago, and since then she had studied it at length. It was a photo of a large, pink hotel, flanked by palm trees, white cumulus clouds billowing in the distance, the emerald ocean tranquil in the foreground. A number of elegant, antique cars filled the parking lot. The back contained no typeset description of the hotel—no name, no location, nothing. The card was postmarked St. Petersburg, Florida, and someone had written, in a childish scrawl that could have been Amy’s: “Mommy—Please don’t let Daddy get lost. Don’t be so mad at him. He is very sad and misses you.” Who would send such a card—and why?