Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Gladly, you old plank-ass!” Diverting as the perpetual Motorball Tourneys on television were, Jack relished simple human intercourse. So while Motherway chased six-legged squirrels (all four of the mature bonedog’s feet an inch or two off the ground; only bonedog pups could get much higher), Jack and Dirty Bill would confab the droogly minutes away.

  After his supper each night—commonly a pot of slush-slumgullion or a frozen precooked bluefish fillet heated in the hellbox, whichever being washed down with a tankard of Smith’s Durian Essence—Jack would leave Motherway behind to lick doggy balls and umbilical while the bonedog’s master made his visit to Boris Crocodile’s. There on his reserved barstool, while empty-eyed Nori Nougat danced the latest fandango or barcarole with beetle-browed Zack Zither, Jack Neck would nod his own disproportionate head in time to the querulous squeegeeing of Stinky Frankie Konk and affirm to all who would pay any heed to the elderly GGGB-er, “Yessir, assuming you can get through the rough spots, life can turn out mighty sweet!”

  But all that, of course, was before the advent of the Worrybird.

  * * *

  That fateful morning dawned nasty, low-hanging hieratic skies and burnt-toast clouds, an ugly odor like all the rain-drenched lost stuffed- toys of childhood seeping in from the streets. Upon opening first his good left eye, then his bad right (’twasn’t the eye itself that was dodgy, but only the nacreous cheek-carbuncle below it that was smooshing the orb closed), Jack Neck experienced a ripe intestinal feeling telling him he should stay in bed. Just huddle up ’neath his checkerboard marshmallow quilt, leaving his beleathered feet safe in the grooves they had worn in the milkweed-stuffed mattress. Yes, that seemed just the safest course on a day like today, so pawky and slyboots.

  But the allure of the common comforts awaiting him proved stronger than his intuition. Why, today was a Motorball matchup made in heaven! The Chlorine Castigators versus Dame Middlecamp’s Prancers! And then there was Motherway to be walked, Dirty Bills dishy yatterings, that Dinky-Pachinko-poured tot of dumble-rum to welcome midnight in. Surely nothing mingy nor mulcting would befall him, if he kept to his established paths and habits.…

  So out of his splavined cot old bunion-rumped Jack Neck poured himself, heavy hump leading Lady Gravity in an awkward pavane. Once standing, with minor exertions Jack managed to hitch his hump around, behind and upward to a less unaccomodatingly exigent position. Then he essayed the palpable trail midst the debris of his domicile that led to the bathroom.

  As soon as Jack entered the WC, he knew his vague forebodings had been spot on. But it was now too late to return to the safety of his blankets. For Jack saw with dismay that out of his chipped granite commode, like a baleful excremental spirit, there arose a Smoking Toilet Puppet.

  The rugose figure was composed of an elongated mud-colored torso, sprouting two boneless and sinuous claw-fingered arms, and topped by a rutted warpy face. The Puppet’s head was crowned by a small fumey crater, giving its kind their name.

  “Ja-a-ack,” wailed the Puppet. “Jack Neck! Step closer! I have a message for you.”

  Jack knew that although the creature might indeed have a valid and valuable delphic message for him, to heed the Puppet’s summons was to risk being abducted down to the gluck-mucky Septic Kingdom ruled by Baron Sugarslinger. So with an uncommon burst of energy, Jack grabbed up a wood-hafted sump-plunger and whanged the Puppet a good one on its audacious incense-dispensing bean.

  While the Puppet was clutching its abused noggin and sobbing most piteously, Jack stepped around it and flushed. Widdershins and downward swirled the invader, disappearing with a liquidly dopplering “Nooooooo —!”

  Jack did his old man’s business quickly while the runnels still gurgled, then lowered the heavy toilet lid against further home invasions. He stepped to the sink and the sweatcrusted mirror above it, where he flaked scales off his reflection. He shaved his forehead, restoring the pointy dimensions of his once-stylish hairline, plucked some eelgrass out of his ears, lacquered his carbuncle, and congratulated himself on meeting so forcefully the first challenge of the day. If nothing else adventured, he would be polly-with-a-lolly!

  Back through the bedroom and out into his sitting sanctuary, where Motherway lay snoozily on his fulsome scrap of Geelvink carpet. Approaching the dirty window that looked out upon Marmoreal Boulevard and the Isinglass, the incautious and overoptimistic Jack Neck threw open the wormy sash and shouldered forward, questing additional meaning and haruspices from the day.

  And that was precisely the moment the waiting Worrybird chose to land talon-tight upon the convenient perch of Jack’s hapless hump!

  Jack yelped and with an instinctive yet hopeless shake of his hump withdrew into the refuge of his apartment, thinking to disconcert and dislodge the Worrybird by swift maneuvers. But matters had already progressed beyond any such simple solution. The Worrybird was truly and determinedly ensconced, and Jack realized he was doomed.

  Big as a turkey, with crepe-like vulture wings, the baldy Worrybird possessed a dour human face exhibiting the texture of ancient over-waxed linoleum, and exuded a stench like burning crones. Jack had seen the ominous parasites often, of course, riding on their wan, slumpy victims. But never had he thought to be ridden by one such!

  Awakened by the foofraraw, Motherway was barking and leaping and snapping, frantically trying to drive the intruder off. But all the bonedog succeeded in doing was gouging his master’s single sensible leg with his hooves. Jack managed to calm the bonedog down, although Motherway continued to whimper while anxiously fidgeting.

  Now the Worrybird craned its paste-pallid pug-ugly face around on its long sebaceous neck to confront Jack. It opened its hideous rubbery mouth and intoned a portentous phrase.

  “Never again, but not yet!”

  Jack threw himself into his slateslab chair, thinking to crush the grim bird, but it leaped nimbly atop Jack’s skull. By Saint Fora- minifer’s Liver, those scalp-digging claws hurt! Quickly Jack stood, prefering to let the bird roost on his hump. Obligingly, the Worrybird shifted back.

  “Oh, Motherway,” Jack implored, “what a fardelicious grievance has been construed upon us! What oh what are we to do?”

  Motherway made inutile answer only by a plangent sympathetic whuffle.

  * * *

  The first thought to form in the anxious mind of bird-bestridden Jack Neck was that he should apply to the local Health Clinic run by the Little Sisters of Saint Farquahar. Surely the talented technicians and charity caregivers there would have a solution to his grisly geas! (Although at the back of his mind loomed the pessimistic question, perhaps Worrybird implanted, Why did anyone suffer from Worrybirditis if removal of same were so simple?)

  So, leaving Motherway behind to guard the apartment from any further misfortunes which this inopportune day might bring, Jack and his randomly remonstrative rider (“Never again, but not yet!”) clabbered down the four flights of slant stairs to the street.

  Once on Marmoreal (where formerly friendly or neutral neighbors now winced and retreated from sight of his affliction), Jack turned not happy-wise left but appointment-bound right. At the intersection of the Boulevard and El Chino Street, he wambled south on the cross-street. Several blocks down El Chino his progress was arrested by the sloppy aftermath of an accident: a dray full of Smith’s Durian Essence had collided with one loaded with Walrus Brand Brochettes. The combination of the two antagonistic spilled foodstuffs had precipitated something noxious: galorping mounds of quivering dayglo cartiplasm that sought to ingest any flesh within reach. (The draft-animals, a brace of Banana Slugs per dray, had already succumbed, as had the blindly argumentative drivers, one Pheon Ploog and a certain Elmer Sourbray.)

  Responding with the nimble reflexes and sassy footwork expected from any survivor of Drudge City’s ordinary cataclysms, Jack dodged into a nearby building, rode a Recirculating Transport Fountain upward and took a wayward rooftop path around the crisis before descending, all the while writing a hundred t
imes on the blackboard of his mind an exclamation-punctuated admonition never to mix internally his favorite suppertime drink with any iota of Walrus Brand Brochettes.

  Encountering no subsequent pandygandy, Jack Neck and his foul avian passenger arrived at the Health Clinic on Laguna Diamante

  Way. Once inside, he was confronted with the stern and ruleacious face of Nurse Gwendolyn Hindlip, Triage Enforcement Officer. From behind her rune-carven desk that seemed assembled of poorly chosen driftwood fragments, Nurse Gwendolyn sized up Jack and his hump-burden, then uttered a presumptuous pronouncement.

  “You might as well kill yourself now, you old mummer, and free up your GGGB for a younkling!”

  Jack resented being called a mummer—a mildly derisive slang term derived from his union’s initials—almost more than he umbrigated at the suicidal injunction.

  “Shut up, you lava-faced hincty harridan! Just take my particulars, slot my citizen-biscuit into the chewer, and mind your own business!”

  Nurse Gwendolyn sniffed with bruised emotionality. Jack had scored a mighty blow on a tender spot with his categorical comment “lava-faced.” For Nurse Gwendolyn’s scare-making and scarified visage did indeed reflect her own childhood brush with a flesh-melting disease that still occasionally plagued Drudge City. Known as Trough’n’Slough, the nonfatal disease left its victims with a stratified trapunto epidermis. Nurse Gwendolyn forever attributed her sour old- maidhood to the stigma of this pillowpuff complexion, although truth be told, her vile tongue had even more to do with her empty bed.

  Snuffling aggrievedly, Nurse Gwendolyn now did as she was bade, at last dispatching a newly ID-braceleted Jack to a waiting area with the final tart remark, “You’ll surely have a long uncomfortable wait, Mr Neck, for many and more seriously afflicted—yet naytheless with a better prognosis—are the helpseekers afore you!”

  Coercing his fossil leg into the waiting room, Jack saw that Nurse Gwendolyn had not been merely flibbering. Ranked and stacked in moaning drifts and piles were a staggering assortment of Drudge City’s malfunctioners. Jack spotted many a one showing various grades of Maskelyne’s Curse, in which the face assumed the characteristics of a thickly blurred latex mold of the actual submerged features beneath. The false countenance remained connected by sensory tendrils, yet was migratory, so that one’s visage slopped about like warm jello, eyes peeking from nostrils or ears, nose poking from mouth. Other patients showed plain signs of Exoskeletal Exfoliation, their limbs encased in osteoclastic armor. One woman—dressed in a tattered shift laterally patterned blue and gold—could only be host to Dolly Dwindles Syndrome: as she approached over months her ultimate doll-like dimensions, her face simultaneously grew more lascivious in a ghoulish manner.

  Heaving a profound sigh at the mortal sufferings of himself and his fellows, Jack sat himself saggingly down in a low-backed chair that permitted the Worrybird to maintain its grip upon Jack’s hump, and resigned himself to a long wait.

  On the 749th “Never again, but not yet!” Jack’s name was called. He arose and was conducted to a cubicle screened from an infinity of others by ripped curtains the color of old tartar sauce. Undressing was not an option, so he simply plopped down on a squelchy examining table and awaited the advent of a healer. Before too long the curtains parted and a lab-coated figure entered.

  This runcible-snouted doctor himself, thought Jack, should have been a patient, for he was clearly in an advanced state of Tessellated Scale Mange, as evidenced by alligatored wrists and neck poking from cuff and collar. Most horridly, the medico dragged behind him a long ridged tail, ever-extending like an accumulating stalactite from an infiltrated organ at the base of the spine.

  “Doctor Weighbend,” said the professional in a confident voice, extending a crocodile paw. Jack shook hands happily, liking the fellow’s vim. But Doctor Weighbend’s next question shattered Jack’s sanguinity.

  “Now, what seems to be the matter with you, Mr Neck?”

  “Why—why, Doc, there’s an irksome and grotty Worrybird implacably asway upon my tired old hump!”

  Doctor Weighbend made a suave dismissive motion. “Oh, that. Since there’s no known cure for the Worrybird, Mr Neck, I assumed there was another issue to deal with, some unseen plaque or innervation perhaps.”

  “No known cure, Doc? How can that be?”

  Doctor Weighbend cupped his dragonly chin. “The Worrybird has by now slyly and inextricably mingled his Akashic Aura with yours. Were we to kill or even remove the little vampire-sparrow, you too would perish. Of course, you’ll perish eventually anyway, as the lachrymose-lark siphons off your vitality. But that process could take years and years. ‘Never again will you smile, but not yet shall you die.’ That’s the gist of it, I fear, Mr Neck.”

  “What—what do you recommend then?”

  “Many people find some small palliation in building a festive concealing shelter for their Worrybird. Securely strapped to your torso bandolier-style and gaily decorated with soothing icons, it eases social functioning to a small degree. Now, I have other patients to attend to, if you’ll permit me to take my leave by wishing you a minimally satisfactory rest of your life.”

  Doctor Weighbend spun around—his massive tail catching a cart of instruments and beakers and sending glassware smashing to the floor—and was gone. Jack sat wearily and down-in-the-dumpily for a few long minutes, then levered himself up and trudged off down the aisle formed by the curtained wards.

  Almost to the exit, Jack’s attention was drawn between two parted drapes.

  On a table lay the Motorball Champion Dean Tesh! Bloodied and grimacing, his signature cornucopia-shaped head drooping, sparks and fizzles spurting from his numerous lumpy adjuncts, Jack Neck’s hero awaited his own treatment. Assuredly, that day’s game had been a rumbunctious and asgardian fray! And Jack had missed it!

  Impulsively, Jack entered the Champion’s cubicle. “Superlative Dean Tesh, if I may intrude briefly upon your eminence. I’m one of your biggest fans, and I wish to offer my condolences on your lapsarian desuetude.”

  Dean Tesh boldly smiled like the rigorous roughrider he was. “’Tis nothing, really, old mummenschanz. Once they jimmy open my cranial circuit flap and insert a few new wigwags, I’ll be right as skysyrup!”

  Jack blushed to be addressed by his union’s highest title, in actuality undeserved. “Your magnificent spirit inspires me, lordly Dean Tesh! Somehow I too will win through my own malediction!”

  Dean Tesh’s ocular lenses whirred for a better look. “Worrybird, is it? I’ve heard Uncle Bradley has a way with them.”

  “Uncle Bradley! Of course! Did he not design your own world- renowned servos and shunts? If medicine holds no answers to my problem, then surely Uncle Bradley’s Syntactical Fibroid Engineering must!”

  And so bidding Dean Tesh a heartfelt farewell replete with benisonical affirmations of the Champion’s swift recovery, Jack Neck set out for Cementville.

  * * *

  Soon Jack’s trail of tiny archless footprints—outlined in fast-growing sporulating molds and luminescent quiverslimes—could be traced through many an urban mile. Behind him already lay the evil precincts of Barrio Garmi, where the Stilt-legged Spreckles were prone to drop rotten melons from their lofty vantages upon innocent passersby. Jack had with wiles and guiles eluded that sloppy fate. The district of Clovis Points he had also cunningly circumnavigated, wrenching free at the last possible moment from the tenebrous grasp of a pack of Shanghai Liliths, whose lickerish intention it was to drag innocent Jack to their spraddle-skirted leader, Lil’ Omen, for the irreligious ceremony known as the Ecstatic Excruciation. For several blocks thereafter he had dared to ride the Henniker Avenue Slantwise Subway, disembarking hastily through his cars emergency exit and thence by escape-ready ladder-chute when he spotted a blockade across the tracks surely erected by the muskageous minions of Baron Sugarslinger. Luckily, Jack had had the foresight to obtain a transfer-wafer and so was able to board the Baba Wanderly Aerial Viaticum fo
r free, riding high and safe above the verdigrised copper-colored towers and chimney-pots, gables and garrets of Doo-Boo-Kay Flats.

  At last, as a pavonine dusk was o’erspreading the haze-raddled, swag-bellied firmament, Jack Neck and his endlessly asseverating Worrybird—its face like a hairless druid’s, its folded wings gloomy as a layoff notice from Krespo’s—arrived at the premises of Uncle Bradley. The largest employer in gritty Cementville, the firm of Bradley and His Boyo-Boys, experts in SFE, ran round the erratic clock all thirteen moons a year, turning out many and many a marvelous product, both luxuries and essentials, the former including Seductive Bergamot Filters and the latter notable for Nevermiss Nailguns. Renowned for accepting any and all engineering challenges, the more intractable the more alluring, Uncle Bradley represented Jack’s best hope in the Worrybird-Removal Department.

  At the towering portal to the lumbering and rachitic nine-storey algae-brick-fronted manufactory that occupied ten square blocks of Dimmig Gardens, Jack made free with the bellpull: the nose of a leering brass jackanapes. A minidoor opened within the gigundo press- board entrance, and a functionary appeared. As the employee began to speak, Jack noted with dismay that the fellow suffered from Papyrus Mouth: his words emerged not as ordinary vocables but as separate words printed in blearsome bodily inks upon shoddy scraps of organic- tissue paper.

  Jack sought to catch the emergent syllables as they spelunked buccally forth, but some eluded him and whiffed away on the diddling breezes. Nervously assembling the remaining message, Jack read: Business state Bradley please with.

  “I need to solicit dear Uncle Bradley’s genius in the area of invasive parasite disengagement.” Jack jerked a thick split-nailed thumb backward at his broodsome rider.

  A gush of flighty papyri: Follow Bradley Uncle free see if me.

  Most gladfully, Jack Neck entered the dynamic establishment and strode after the Papyrus Mouther. Through humming, thrumming offices and sparky workshops—where crucibles glowed with neon-tinted polymeric compounds and, under the nimble fingers of Machine Elves, transistors danced the Happy Chicken Trot with capacitors and optical-fluid valves—Jack and his guide threaded, until at last they stood before a ridged and fumarole-pocked door with a riveted steel rubric announcing it as UNCLE BRADLEY’S CARBON CAVE.