by Brian Hodge
"You laughed at me and told cheap jokes. Some guide. I would have done better with an interactive virtual bootleg Baedeker's."
"I helped you just as you needed. You fought your way through from beginning to end. What more could any storyteller ask?"
"But why did you do it?"
"Your stories had been getting old. You had been living in the same universe for far too long. So I sent you an invitation and you answered. You invited me into your world and I showed you a little of mine. I colored your life and I gave you style."
"You painted my office with blue monkey dung."
"That?" Anansi said. "It was nothing. Here, I'll give you the blue-light special."
Anansi waved one leg. It was kind of like watching an eight-legged stool attempt to conduct an orchestra. A wave of blue light radiated from each of Anansi's eight legs. Just that quickly the office walls seemed to buckle and inhale and everything was back as it had been.
"You raped my wife."
"I cleared her mind, and yours. Your writing had grown stagnant. I showed you there are other ways to look at life. I ought to send you an invoice for editorial services. Anansi, book doctor and prankster to the known and unknown universe, you know I like the sound of that."
Anansi laughed so loud that his mouth nearly swallowed his head. He was laughing so hard that he didn't even see the great shadow that swam over him as Maggie waded into a monkey-dung rubber boot and stomped the spider-god flat.
She looked down at him and grinned.
"You eight-legged ass-fucking son of a spear-chucking bitch," she said in a voice that was usually reserved for fumbling husbands, a voice so cold and tough that it would have run a shiver down Clint Eastwood's backbone.
She wiped her foot on the floorboards.
There was nothing left of Anansi but a stained blue memory.
"You can mop that up later," she said to Bobby. "Right now you're buying me breakfast."
"You've got it, babe," Bobby said.
"But first there's something you need to clean up."
She handed him the broom. He took it from her and sheepishly swept down the ceiling lamp cobweb. Then he returned the broom to the corner.
"That's better," she said.
The two of them walked out of the room.
Five minutes later there was a stirring in the corner where Bobby had placed the broom.
From out of the cobwebs in the corner that Bobby had neglected to sweep, climbed Anansi.
He giggled to himself and clambered onto the desk.
Then, straddling the keyboard with six of his legs, he began to type.
Hello good friend. In all heart I write to you, offering you this chance in one of your lifetimes. E-mail me here, at hanuman.org/con for an opportunity your eyes will fall out to believe. Drugs, all kinds, you will want everything. Gods will it, sending soon. All you have to do is ask.
ARdeth99.
"One story ends," Anansi said. "And it's time for another to begin."
And then Anansi reached out for the send button.
Get ready…
Gnarly Ho-Tep Hoedown Two-step
The thing I like best about Angus Thibault is that I can talk him into darned near anything I can think of. Malleable, that's the word for him.
Angus Thibault is easy to manipulate.
"Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and his nibs makes seven," Angus started to count, tolling off the numbers like a mystic incantation.
Angus is my best friend which counts for a lot in this old world. He's big hearted and big boned and unfortunately he's about as dumb as a room full of de-tongued mimes. He's what you might call a free-associative thinker, one of those fellows who has always definitely Macarena-ed to his own kind of beat.
And most importantly of all Angus will do whatever I tell him to.
"I'm assuming that we're still playing poker here, which is how we started out tonight." Fishhook Finnegan said. "Either that or I've lost my mind and being crazy like we all know I am, I'm anteing up six more salt and vinegar Ripples."
We were playing poker for potato chips, on account of no one in Empty Harbour had that much money to go around these days. The cod crop had been failing and the forests had taken on a kind of unwholesome color that you just couldn't find in any box of Crayola crayons, and the blueberry bushes were festooned with gellified newt eyes where the berries should have been growing.
Some folks were talking end of days and some folks were talking global warming but I just figured it was nothing more than a case of Nova Scotia shithouse luck, so why the hell should I worry about it?
"We are playing poker, Angus just forgot for a moment," I confirmed, looking over at Angus.
Angus hadn't always been this way. Once he'd been pretty bright, as fishermen go, until I talked him into climbing about twelve branches too far up a shaky-breaky jack pine. As near as I can figure the impact of the fall must have knocked about half of the synapses loose in his skull and he's never been quite the same since.
"Angus," I said. "You've got to stop playing crib."
That's what's different between me and Angus. You see, I'm what you'd call a thinking man. I don't worry much about worrying because I figure I can figure my way out of any situation you can care to imagine.
"I like crib," Angus said, staring at me with those greasy fry-pan eyes of his. I gave the whole thing up as a lost argument. We were playing together, and in friendship that was all that really counted.
"Angus plays crib," I compromised. "And we play poker. High hand takes the pot."
Fishhook just shrugged. He was clearly not bothered by the compromise; Stout Willy Gables had something to say, however.
"We were playing poker last I checked," Stout Willy said.
"Cards is cards," I said. "Are you in or are you out?"
Nobody argued.
Face it. I could talk anyone into anything, even Stout Willy Gables, our local scholar. Stout Willy was about the most well-read man in the town of Empty Harbour. Anyone who spends as much time on the toilet as Stout Willy just naturally finds himself with an awful lot of time for reading and some of it stuck.
You see, Stout Willy lived on his toilet these days. He had this idea about hatching himself up some eggs. The fact was he was squatting on the toilet right now in front of us, holding his hand of cards under the shadow of his sagging man-boobs maintaining an absolutely impenetrable poker-face.
Now that might sound a little unsanitary to anyone else, but we all understood. The fact was, Willy had been squatting on his own personal brooding throne for nearly six years now, ever since a Halifax night club hypnotist had gone and convinced Willy that he was a really a nesting seagull. Ever since then, Willy had taken up residence upon a disconnected toilet perched upon the mud-bound tugboat he'd inherited from his Uncle Waylon after old Uncle Waylon had gone and died trying to push the tugboat clean clear out of the mud flats.
There isn't any plumbing underneath the toilet. There's nothing but a hole that Stout Willy broke open. I'm not sure how he broke it open and I'm too polite to ask. There are mysteries that a thinking man like me knew full well enough to leave unplumbed.
"Dealer takes two," I said, meeting Finnegan's bet with a handful of All Dressed Lay's.
That broken-out toilet hole lead down into the hull of the tug boat and had done so for the last six years, which meant right now me and Angus and Finnegan and Willy were hunkered down and card-playing over the largest cesspit in recorded history. Not even the eternally-stenched and fly heavy dung vaults of pre-Sennacherib Babylon came anywhere close to Stout Willy's dump-tug.
"Cards is cards, Willy." Fishhook echoed.
"I'm just saying," Willy said, and that's all he'd say. He wasn't all that talkative, not since the tragedy of the sour dozen.
The sour dozen tragedy happened this way.
You see, me and Angus snuck up here to the tug one night and worked our way up through the tugboat's inner-workings. It wasn't pretty. We sa
w things that night, moving in and out of Stout Willy's leftovers that were damn near indescribable but it was worth it. We worked our way up to straight underneath Stout Willy's toilet hole and hand-loaded a dozen Grade-A grocery fresh eggs into the bowl.
Now let me tell you that performing a flashlight lit reach-up-and-around insertion of eggs into a fat man's brooding toilet is something I never want to see Angus attempting again.
I'm right glad I talked him into it, instead of me.
"Well I'm just calling," Fishhook said, plunking his last potato chip into the pot and laying out three sixes.
The very next morning Stout Willy took a peek around back of himself to see what was cooking and lit his eyes on those dozen eggs. Straight away Stout Willy rose up from his self-imposed ablutionary stance and ran through the town of Empty Harbour, bare assed naked, handing out White Owl cigars. We weren't really certain just where Stout Willy had been hiding them cigars all this while, but they smoked just fine if you were careful to hold your mouth just right on the inhale.
"I fold," Stout Willy said.
"Me too," Angus said, origami-ing his poker hand into the semblance of a nesting stork. Angus never did get the difference between folding paper and folding a hand full of cards, ever since he picked up that yard sale picture book on Japanese paper folding. I blame myself for handing it off to him instead of saving it for Stout Willy's reading stack.
Ever since Angus read that there book he has been working his way towards trying to construct himself a genuine Cenobitic Lament Configuration out of the clippings of an old Rosie O'Donnell magazine, a boxful of crumpled gift wrap, and a torn-up box of Wheaties.
Everybody's got to have a dream.
"Goddamn it Angus," Finnegan said, chucking his hand into the pot in a display of disgust. "We lose more poker decks that way."
I figured it was Stout Willy's fault for saying the f-word "fold" in the first place, instead of our previously agreed upon phrase, "I frunker out." I would have chided Stout Willy for bringing the phrase up, but this here poker game was nothing more than a device to uplift the fat man's spirits, so I saw no point in dampening them further with any ill-chosen criticism.
"Aces and eights," I said. "Read them and cardiac arrest at your leisure. You all would have been beaten anyways, and the game would have been over. I'll bring along a fresh deck next week."
It was only guilt that kept me coming back.
You see, after the eggs me and Angus had left behind in Willy's brooding throne had started to sour out, Stout Willy slumped into a record-breaking case of postpartum empty-nest rotten egged depression and hadn't stirred off of the pot ever since. So me and Angus talked it over between ourselves and decided that a weekly hand of poker would be all that was needed to cheer the fat man up.
The truth was we felt kind of responsible for Stout Willy's slumped spirits. It didn't take too much to talk Fishhook Finnegan into joining us, being as he was in serious need of some distraction seeing as how his Nessie trap hadn't played out to his expectations yet.
You see, ever since Jacque Cousteau had passed on and flippered off into that great aquarium reef in the sky, Fishhook Finnegan Hayes had vowed to catch himself the Loch Ness Monster as a sort of a tribute to the old toque wearing fisherman.
It didn't seem to matter much to Fishhook Finnegan that Scotland was about a couple of thousand miles to the east of Empty Harbour. Finnegan was out there dockside every morning, checking his hand line of helicopter cable and hoping for a nibble.
The hand line was baited with a bagpipe stuffed full of haggis. Angus had swum out there one night while we were trying to figure out how to reef the hand line around the tale of a wandering humpback whale.
Angus stayed down there for ten whole minutes contemplating the problem. I don't rightly know just how he held his breath that long, but every now and then I figure that there's more to Angus than meets my eye. He swore the haggis still tasted pretty good. I took Angus's word on that, and the two of us are still trying to figure out how to work that whole whale tail gag.
"I gotta flush," Stout Willy said, only he wasn't talking poker.
So we all stood up and looked the other way out towards the harbour while Stout Willy hauled his carcass up off of the reinforced titanium steel toilet seat and tipped a bucket of brine down into the mouth of the toilet to wash down what needed rinsing.
Now I know you are probably wondering just how in the name of Dristan decongestant the three of us could have sat there playing cards while Stout Willy unloaded his back trunk in front of us, but cards is cards and poker is poker. Besides, that there dump-tug smelled so bad by now that the whole town was getting used to the rancorous aroma.
So we stood there, staring out to the sea, and that was when Gnarly Hotep came roaring on into town.
The first thing we noticed was a change in the wind, which was a bad thing when you were standing on a dump-tug. That Atlantic breeze came moiling across the harbour like a hammering hawk, flying north by northwest, on a tide as dark as a blot full of midnight. There was a roll of hard fog baying out over that dark tide, and standing in the heart of that hard howling fog was Gnarly-Hotep himself.
Now mind you, I didn't recognize him right off the bat. To me old Gnarly just looked like the biggest blackest figure of a man I'd ever seen. Now I'm not talking Shaquille O'Neal type big and black. As far as I could tell he wasn't the least bit African-American, if you know what I mean.
He looked more like somebody who had been stretched out in all directions like the mother of all Stretch Armstrong action figures, and then dipped into a bucket of black paint, a whole night sky full of the darkest and blackest paint you could imagine, paint so dark that patches of it looked to me like shadows or space or something even darker.
"That boy is sure some big," Fishhook said.
"Even bigger than me," Angus agreed, and he was about the biggest man in Empty Harbour.
Gnarly Hotep roared in closer on that bank of hard fog, sailing past us like we weren't even there. Now I'm no fashion consultant, but it looked to me like he was wearing a night-burrow top hat, a pair of wyrm-hide spats, a netherbone walking stick, and a high yellow pimp skin zoot suit.
"Wow," I said.
Elder God or not, I never did trust no fancy dressing man.
As he got closer I could see there were some kind of stars twinkling down deep inside of his darkness, like he'd just come from a midnight run through the Milky Way. He gave out a big old hooraw-halloo, just like the sound of a sounding foghorn and sailed straight on past us. I don't even think he noticed us parked there in the mudflats of the harbour.
"Holy Trojan hippo shit," Stout Willy swore. "Do you fellows know who that was?"
"Wilt Chamberlain?" Angus suggested.
"That there black guy from The Green Mile?" Fishhook guessed.
"That there was Gnarly Hotep." Stout Willy said, or at least that's how I heard him say it. "We're talking Elder Gods, major domo mojo. Old Gnarly Hotep hails from out of Memphis, and I can't imagine a more darker presence short of old slumbering Chooloo himself to appear here in Empty Harbour."
"Sulu?" I said.
"I always preferred Chekov, myself." Fishhook said. "That Russian accent does me in."
"I thought it was Elvis who came from Memphis," Angus added.
"That's Memphis, Egypt, Angus," Stout Willy said. "Gnarly Hotep comes from Memphis, Egypt."
I decided to cut to the main bait before we ran one more time around the fishing hole.
"So how bad is this fog-surfing gnarly dude, and what kind of trouble is Empty Harbour in for?"
Stout Willy took himself a long old breath, like he was afraid to speak.
And then he spoke and I understood why.
"Gnarly Hotep is kind of like the travelling front man for the forces of Elder Chaos," Stout Willy said.
"How's that again?" Fishhook asked.
"You know the way that posters will sprout up on lampposts, like they'd just grown
there before the travelling sideshow comes to town? You know how the birds will whisper calliope tunes and the breeze will smell of cotton candy and the waves roll onto the beach with a trumpet of triumphant trained elephants?"
Both Angus and I nodded hard. The travelling circus fair was our favorite time of the year. There was nothing I liked better than riding on an old-fashioned carousel or prowling through a booga-booga many mirrored fun house and Angus was wicked awesome at Whack-A-Mole.
"You bet," I said.
"That's usually the work of the front man, the fellow that goes on ahead of the show, preparing the ground for what is about to follow," Stout Willy explained. "That's Gnarly Hotep's job, paving the way and ploughing the road for the long-prophesied coming of the Dark Elder Gods. He rides into town, stirs up shit, and then rides out leaving a backwash of insanity and misguided desire, kind of like the Lone Deranger."
"So when-abouts are they prophesizing this here Dark Elder is coming?" Fishhook asked, scratching three of his chins in a calculated I'm-thinking-about-it kind of motion.
"It might be nigh onto three hundred years from now or so before the whole catastrophe comes down on us, give or take a decade. We'll see the decline and fall of the Disney Empire, the rebirth of eight tracks, and the landslide election of Tom Cruise for president."
"So you're saying I still ought to keep paying my income tax for a while just yet," Fishhook said.
"Render unto Caesar," Stout Willy confirmed. "Death and taxes will bury a fellow, quicker than you can say landslide."
"Never mind all of this Roman history," I said. "This guy sounds like bad news for Empty Harbour."
"That would be an understatement," Stout Willy allowed.
"So what do we do to stop him?" I asked.
"Might be we don't want to try and stop him," Stout Willy said.
"Come again?"
"His business is spreading fear and worry. He is the midlife crisis of the millennia. We go running around like decapitated poultry, trying to fix things up right, and we might end up just playing into his big black sticky fingers."