999

by Al Sarrantonio

  December 1st:

  … his own daughter. They’ve become monsters, but at a woeful cost. No matter how tough and ruthless you may be, you cannot remain unmoved when serving up your own flesh and blood.

  And your business cannot remain unmoved when your guilt interferes with your attention to it, and you leave gaping holes in your corporate charts by butchering those who made it what it is.

  Nor can that business remain unshaken when your surviving employees are individually informed of what has happened, by messages that remain on screen just long enough to read and then vanish forever from Fairfax Technologies’ now universally used network servers.

  December 9th:

  The Signs are all, save one, ruined, victims of their own hunger and the things that hunger brought. With my inside knowledge of their troubles, it has been easy to buy them out and swallow them up in their weakened condition. The last one fell just this morning.

  The companies of the Signs of the New Zodiac have been devoured.

  Minutes of the Thirteenth and Final Meeting of the New Zodiac

  THE FAIRFAX CLUB, NEW YORK DECEMBER 28th, 20—

  Present at table: All Signs. Capricorn, caterer.

  Absent from their seats: Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius.

  MENU:

  Hors d’oeuvres a’ la Aquarius Pisces jardiniere

  Potage queue de Aries Taurus rôtis

  Gemini pâté Cancer à la crème

  Leo d’agneau—mint sauce Roast suckling Virgo

  Libra Parmentiére Scorpio à la casserole

  Sagittarius de lait farci au marrons

  WINES:

  Pol Roger extra dry 1956

  Château Latour 1947

  Tichner Madeira 1868

  Café Anglais 1854

  Discussion following the dinner was succinct. Brother Capricorn observed that sometimes there is no remedy for incivility in society but removal of the incivil elements. No one spoke in opposition to this remark.

  After a brief period of silence, it was moved by Brother Capricorn that the New Zodiac be dissolved due to lack of members. The motion carried, 1–0.

  Bro. Capricorn, having dined alone, offered to bear the entire cost of the dinner, and there were no objections.

  The other Signs rested most comfortably, and most civilly.

  Adjourned.

  Capricorn, Secretary

  Eric Van Lustbader

  AN EXALTATION OF TERMAGANTS

  When Eric Van Lustbader’s first best-selling novel, The Ninja, was published in 1980, he presented a copy to me with the inscription “Forget those short stories already, and write a novel!” At the time I was privileged to work on his Sunset Warrior novels at Doubleday (see the introduction to F. Paul Wilson’s story for comments about these cheaply produced Doubleday novels—then go out and buy the Sunset Warrior books, which are wonderful), and though I took his advice a few years later, I didn’t abandon short fiction, and neither did he, to our good fortune.

  The Ninja proved to be only the first in a string of bestsellers for Lustbader (the most recent, Angel Eyes)—but here, for you and me, he has written the following novelette, a tough and tender story with beautiful fantasy elements.

  I consider it the renewal of an old friendship.

  Let me introduce you to the great love of my life. My grand affair with Ms. M lasted almost fifteen years. She wasn’t pretty, and God knows she wasn’t often fair, but she did lead me into some mighty special places—places I sure as hell never would have set foot in if it hadn’t been for her. I bless her for that; but I also curse her. Every night I find new ways to curse her, and all the while I’m missing her so bad my stomach hurts like it’s got a nest of nasty little demons inside it. And maybe it does. After what happened a couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t surprise me, not even a smidgen.

  Mescal’s her name, yessir; and fucking up my head’s her game. She did that every night while I tongue-kissed the smooth taste of her. Oh, yeah, you got it now. I’ve had a great galloping love affair with mescal for a long, long time. And she was one helluva jealous mistress, let me tell you. But no more. Not ever again. And here’s why.

  I used to make love shamelessly to my mistress all over Manhattan, but the place I liked best was called Helicon, so named no doubt because its owner, Mike, was Greek. See, Mount Helicon was the home of the Muses, or so the ancient Greeks believed, anyway. The bar was holed up a block away from the Holland Tunnel, on the ground floor of a cast-iron building you could see had been handsome as sin maybe seventy-five years ago. Inside was a long, narrow space with slowly turning fans dripping from a pressed-tin ceiling dating back to the turn of the century. The old millennium, not the one just passed. The tin was pressed into a nice pattern, which reminded me of some old Mexican tiles I had seen when I was living in Oaxaca. When I’d first met Ms. M. So long ago I can’t remember the date. Hell, they don’t make tiles like that anymore. Not since the craftsmen all got jobs making high-profile sneakers and nylon running suits, and assembling Personal Digital Assistants.

  In any event, Helicon had lots to recommend it: sawdust on the floor, and the smell of old beer and even older grease hanging like well-won medals on a gaunt warrior. Not to mention the bar itself, which seemed to go on forever, scarred with the wounds of long-forgotten brawls and newly broken hearts. Best of all, the light was just dim enough so that when you looked at yourself in the panels of cloudy mirror behind the bar’s polished mahogany surface you could just about convince yourself that you were someone else—someone you had once dreamed of becoming, maybe.

  The particular day I’m thinking of I was sitting in a booth, making love to Ms. M, when the bar phone rang. Mike picked it up, spoke a moment, then held out the receiver.

  “It’s for you,” he said to me.

  I grabbed my mistress and brought her to a stool. Scooping up the receiver, I growled, “Yeah, what?”

  “Jesus, Willie, it’s ten-thirty in the morning. Are you drinking already?”

  “Who the hell wants to know?” I took an extra-large hit of the mescal.

  “It’s worse than I imagined,” the disapproving voice said. “It’s Herman, your brother.”

  “Ah, that explains it,” I said, cutting the sonuvabitch off. “You have no imagination.”

  “If you sobered up, you could get a real job.”

  “And, goddammit, my name isn’t Willie!” My cheeks flushed red, I hung up.

  “Wrong number,” I told Mike as I slid the phone back down the bar. He just gave me a wry grin. He knew what was up. Mike and I had a relationship—the kind you can only have with a really topflight bartender.

  Back in my booth, I pushed aside the empty glass from my second drink and sipped some more mescal while I brooded about my empty office and the last contract I had signed. It had been six months and I hadn’t put a word down on my notepad, let alone on my word processor. Idly, I considered calling Ray Michaels, my accountant, who made sure my life didn’t go straight to hell in a handcart while I struggled through my affair with Ms. M. I thought maybe I ought to have him contact my publisher and tell her to forget it, give back the advance she’d sent me. Then I remembered I’d already blown it on that little month-long jaunt back to my old haunting grounds in Mexico. Just as well; I’d never reneged on a contract before and I had no intention of starting now. But what was I going to write about? I hadn’t a clue.

  I glanced up at the carved wooden ship’s figurehead Mike had hung from the ceiling. She was half human, half bird, and because of that I had dubbed her Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. It was said that from the fertile union of Melpomene and the river god, Achelous, the marvelously sad and desperate Sirens had been born to endlessly sing the tormenting tune that lured unsuspecting sailors to their doom against the craggy shores upon which the Sirens were marooned. Sometime in my youth Melpomene had become my personal muse because I could in no other way put into perspective the trage
dy that had befallen my family.

  I looked up as the phone rang again. Mike gave me the eye while he listened to the voice at the other end of the line.

  “If it’s my damn brother again tell him to kiss my white writer’s ass.

  “It’s Ray,” Mike said, holding out the receiver.

  I groaned as I took the phone. My accountant never called me unless he had a good reason. “Hey,” I said.

  “Bill, I just got off the phone with your brother.” He sounded concerned. “He says you’re in a mood.”

  “Does he, now? Let me see. It’s ten-forty of a Monday morning, I’m on my third mescal, and I don’t have a fucking thought in my head. So I’d say, yes, I’m in a mood.”

  Ray sighed. “He needs to talk to you.”

  “The rat bastard ran off with my wife, not to mention the proceeds of my pension plan, while he was what could be laughingly called my business manager. He doesn’t need to talk to me.”

  “Listen,” Ray said patiently, “you sued him and got all the money back. You could have put him in jail if you’d pressed charges.”

  “Don’t think it doesn’t eat at me.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “It would have broken Donnatella’s heart, that’s why,” I said. “God knows why but my ex-wife loves the jerk.”

  “It’s a new millennium,” he said. “Bygones.”

  “Bullshit.” I have to admit my teeth were clenched. “No fucking way, bygones.”

  “Okay, be like that.”

  I heard some suspicious noises in the background and said, “What, are you on the golf course?”

  “Sixth tee,” he affirmed. “You should come out with me and try it sometime.”

  “And have to make conversation with the deadhead bankers you play with? I’d rather be tortured by my termagant.”

  “Your what?”

  “Termagant. Know what a harpy is?”

  “Sure. A woman who never shuts up.”

  “A rose by any other name.” I laughed. “Except this one stinks to high heaven.”

  “Didn’t you used to call Donnatella a termagant?”

  “That would be an affirmative, good buddy.” I looked up at the wooden Melpomene. “And right now, my own personal muse has become one. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Who was it said we all get what we deserve?”

  “I believe it was you. Just now.”

  Ray sighed. “I assume you’re blocked.”

  “Like a bowel full of bricks.”

  “There’s still time to join me for the back nine. Get some gentle sport in instead of all that death-wish extreme stuff you go in for,”

  he said. “The sun’s out, you know. The birds are chirping.”

  “Some of those birds are on the endangered species list. Just make sure you don’t clobber one with your driver.”

  “I’m not good with the driver,” Ray said. “Off the sixth I use a three wood.”

  “That’s the difference between you and me, Ray. I’d use the driver and get to the green in two. Risk, old boy. Take the risk.”

  “I’m an accountant, remember? That word is not in my vocabulary.” I could hear him say something to one of his deadheads and I wondered whether this conversation had lost him his turn. He didn’t like to lose at golf. “Listen, this time your brother really did have something important to tell you.”

  “That would be a physical impossibility, like putting your head up your ass. Although in Herman’s case …”

  “Bill, can the crap. Lilly’s dying.”

  “Um hum.” I took another hit of mescal.

  “Don’t—I mean, don’t for Christ’s sake fall apart or anything.”

  “No chance of that, old boy.”

  “So I see. Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You haven’t seen her in, what … ?”

  “Thirty years,” I said.

  “She’s your sister.”

  “She was a retard,” I corrected him. I found I was already talking about her in the past tense. “Couldn’t move without spazzing all over the place, couldn’t speak a single word. Couldn’t hold a thought in her head, I shouldn’t think.”

  “That’s just plain cold, Bill.”

  I was getting fed up. “Listen, Ray, it wasn’t you who had to live through the nightmare of childhood with Lilly, with her vomiting in your face, mewling all night like a cat with worms, trying to pull your hair out by the roots every time you came near her. It wasn’t you who got into fights three or four times a week because your schoolmates were so fucking cruel. It wasn’t you who had to live with parents who were so filled with dread, so utterly desperate they became helpless as children, taken advantage of time and again by con artists posing as doctors, healers, fortune-tellers. It wasn’t you who had madness staring you in the face for fourteen years. Christ, the thought of it all makes my skin crawl.”

  He was silent for a time. “She’s on the point of death now, Bill. Herman has made it clear he feels he has no obligation in the matter of arrangements. So what d’you want to do?”

  “I want to forget she ever existed, that’s what I want to do.”

  Ray sighed again. “When she dies I’ll have her cremated, then.”

  “By all fucking means,” I told him. “Scatter her spaz ashes to the four winds.” I waited a moment. “And Ray?”

  “Yes, Bill.”

  “Don’t even think about telling me I have to be there when they do it.”

  That conversation set the tone. I was sour and pissed off when I got off the phone, and if I hadn’t been, what happened next might have happened differently. But I was and it didn’t.

  What happened next was that the Tazzman breezed in. Not that I knew his name then; I’d never set eyes on him before.

  “Hey, yo, whiteys, git yo hands in da air an do like I tell yo.” The Tazzman was a tall, cadaverous black man with a sunken chest, wild hair like Jimi Hendrix and a face like Ike Turner, only he was very, very young. The studied meanness of his features seemed no more than a millimeter thick, as if stamped upon him by circumstance rather than by any aspect of his own nature. Mike and I decided to pay attention since he had a scary-looking machine pistol leveled at us.

  He advanced into the bar, watching both of us with quick, nervous movements. “Yo,” he said, addressing Mike, “I wancha money.”

  “Tell me something, kid, you ever do this before?” I said as Mike was about to reply. “I mean, it’s eleven o’clock of a Monday morning. Nobody’s in the place but me and Mike here. What kinda money you think he has in the rill?” I could see from the disapproving glance Mike gave me that he was not a happy camper. Too bad. Someone had to take control of this situation, otherwise we’d both be fucked.

  “Smart guy,” the Tazzman snarled. “Yo gonna git yo smart white ass stuck all over dis here wall yo doan watchit.” His wary, scared eyes took us both in. “Gimme what’s inna till an whut you got on you.”

  I fanned open my wallet. The two fives made me feel briefly ashamed.

  “Shee-it!“ the Tazzman opined as he lifted the bills so expertly I hardly knew they were gone. “Ain’t you even got a watch?”

  “Time means nothing to me,” I said, showing him my naked wrists. “Speaking of which, you don’t look like you’ve eaten anything for a bunch.”

  The Tazzman chewed on his lip and glowered at me as he sized up the situation. He was as jumpy as a bear scenting humans, which should have warned me. But as I said, those phone calls put me in one pissy mood and I was ready to take up arms against the next person who crossed my path. Stupid, right? The ancient Greeks had a better word for it: hubris.

  “Mike, make this guy a burger, would you?” Since the Tazzman couldn’t make heads or tails out of this, I decided to press on. “What’s your name?”

  “Huh?” He seemed stupefied. I guess I couldn’t blame him much. I doubt this robbery was going the way he had envisioned.

  “You got a name, don’t you?” I got up from my booth.
“My name’s Bill, and like I said before this here’s Mike. What do your friends call you?”

  “You makin’ fun a me? I’ll whup yo white ass, dass fo sho.”

  “I’m not making fun of you.”

  He squinted suspiciously at me. “Ain’t got no friends.” He pursed his lips, looking from me to Mike and back again. “I be da Tazzman on accounta my hair.” He lifted one hand to touch it; it didn’t seem to give an inch. “Kids say it make me look like a Tazzmanian Devil, sumpin lak dat.” That’s how Tasmanian came out in his odd accent. He gestured at Mike with the machine pistol. “He really gone make me a bugga?”

  “Sure,” I said, giving Mike the high sign.

  As Mike unwrapped a patty and slapped it on the griddle, I took a step toward the Tazzman. His nostrils flared as he smelled the frying beef and I took another step toward him. He didn’t like that.

  “Hey, muthafucka,” he said, beginning to swing that damn weapon in my direction.

  Mike yelled: “Bill, for Chrissake!”

  And I threw Ms. M into the Tazzman’s face. I don’t know whether you know it or not but she gets into your eyes and she’s one mean momma.

  “Muthafucka!” the Tazzman said, with a thorough lack of originality.

  He squeezed the trigger just as I slammed my left arm against the barrel of the machine pistol. A sound blast seemed to open a hole in my head, boring straight through to my brain. I trod hard on the Tazzman’s instep, and he howled like a banshee. But I had underestimated the beanpole, just as I had misjudged the entire situation.

  He got off a second squeeze. A hail of bullets stitched a lethal line across the mirrors. Mike tried to duck but he got in the way and was blasted back into the triple tier of liquor bottles behind him. Liquor and blood combined in one god-awful spew.

  “Ah, hell,” I said. As the machine pistol swung toward me, I kicked over a table, ducked behind it, then screamed as the high-velocity bullets shredded the solid oak tabletop as if it were paperboard.

  I lurched drunkenly into the shadows at the rear of the bar, but the Tazzman was in full bore and he followed me. The machine pistol quit erupting long enough for him to slam home another magazine. How many did he have? I wondered as I ran.