Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  No doubt Ish had considered this provision ample. After all, for the next thirty years Vern had the Castle to live in, the wine cellar to plunder, excellent food to eat, and enough cash income to afford his trips to New Orleans, including the services of a two-hundred-dollar-an-hour hooker. Hog heaven, right?

  Again, not exactly. Vern stood on the verge of middle age without savings or prospects, tantalizingly close to wealth he couldn't touch. Even seeing his pals at Who-Dat Heaven was getting painful. They'd all made lives for themselves, had wives and children and businesses and modest fortunes, and when they asked him what he was up to these days, what could he say? I'm a lizard sitter in a fake castle in a little town in the Bible Belt and I'll never escape, because it's either that or go back to the siding industry, where I wasn't exactly a success either.

  Sure, he'd tell them that.

  These bitter thoughts played across Vern's brain as he watched Ish scamper and snap at bugs and poop in the dry moat. When reptilian fun and games were over, he and the sprawling creature re-entered the courtyard and Vern took the broilers he'd purchased that afternoon from the trunk of the Cad.

  Now came a nervous moment. Confronted with food, Ish's eyes with the slit pupils took on a menacing glare, his pink mouth with its array of sharp white teeth opened halfway, his respiration became a quickening series of hisses, and his yard-long sticky tongue slid out and licked all around the rough lipless edges of his thirty-inch maw. Hastily Vern tossed his uncle a chicken.

  Gulp, gulp, and it was gone. Another followed. And another. In that respect, Ish hadn't changed a bit. The human form had vanished but the ravening gourmand endured—the creature's true soul, his immortal part.

  It was the next day when Vern, rising late as usual after feeding his uncle, became aware of small, puzzling clues that something else peculiar was happening in the Castle.

  The first was nothing but a well-gnawed rib still redolent with sauce piquante, which he found lying on the floor beside Ish's desk in the study. Vern blamed the guys from the cleaning service for lunching there without permission, and discounted their pleas of innocence.

  Opening the safe, he noted something far more alarming. When he locked up, he habitually turned the combination back to zero. Today he found it set on 42. Mojo's rent money still lay inside, untouched, but Vern was puzzled and disturbed enough to pocket the bills for transfer to his bank box. He moved to the desk, reached out to turn on the computer, and noted that the monitor's green LED was glowing, even though he could swear he'd shut it off the night before. Huh, he thought. He was gazing at it with brow contracted when Mrs. Lemieux entered the study to report that a dish of marinating ribs had disappeared from the fridge. She too blamed the cleaners.

  "We got us too damn many peoples running round this place, Meestair Vairn," she declared.

  Her comment lingered at the back of his mind that evening, when he visited the wine cellar and found a bottle of excellent vintage (Chateau Clemenceau '64) missing from the high-class shelf. He couldn't remember drinking it himself, and certainly hadn't wasted it on Mojo. Back in the study, he sat down and embarked on the unaccustomed labor of thought. Despite what many people believed, Vern wasn't really stupid. But he was slow, and time passed while his mind—which, like his hands, seemed to have thick fingers—assembled one by one the clues that had emerged during the day, and groped for a conclusion.

  There really was only one possibility. Antsy little Mojo had relieved his boredom by picking the lock on his door. Hell, you live with a guy, you get to know him only too well, and twenty years ago Mo had been suspected of picking locks to steal from his frat brothers. Only suspected—those guys were impulsive, and if they'd ever found proof, he wouldn't have lived long enough to loot any pension funds.

  So what had happened? He'd come downstairs during the night, gone exploring, copped the ribs, taken the wine, returned to the study, had a snack and a drink, tried unsuccessfully to crack the safe, and used the computer to contact Chalice, afterwards deleting his message and her reply. And if Vern knew him, he also knew Vern. That was why guessing his password wouldn't have been too hard. Mo knew his collegiate nickname (Chugger, from his all-star beer swilling) and the year of his birth, since it was the same as his own. Vern felt really dumb not to have changed CHUGGER74 when the little bastard moved into the Castle. And like all slow-witted people, Vern hated feeling dumb.

  By now he'd sat so long that dusk had come again and the evening star was peeping through the study window. He turned on the desk lamp, lifted the phone, and left a call for Petey Potts. Then he touched the button that opened the bookcase, entered the elevator, ascended to the top floor, unlocked the door that Mo had cannily relocked, and with a smile apologized for being late. Vern had never been much on literature, equating Shakespeare with itching powder in the jock. But a line from Hamlet, heard long ago in English 202, stuck in his memory because it fit so many people he'd met, first in the Athletic Department and later in the aluminum siding industry: One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. All through dinner that night, Mo bitched and bitched, and Vern smiled and smiled.

  Next morning Petey arrived, a cliché ambulant, wearing pleated slacks, a white-on-white shirt, a narrow tie, even a pocket protector, which Vern thought had gone out of geek fashion. His aroma was faintly gamy and though he couldn't have been over seventeen, a loose fold of belly overlapped his belt buckle. Vern felt a kind of visceral loathing for the gnome, yet watched in unwilling awe as Petey's flying digits evoked a backup memory containing Mojo's query, Honeybutt its me, wassup? and Chalice's reply, Grt 2 hr frm u Baby, nt ready yt bt soon.

  "Make me a new file," Vern commanded, "with its own password, something Jesus Christ Almighty couldn't hack. And tell the computer to copy every ingoing and outgoing message into it."

  "Piece a cake."

  Vern wrote down the new password, which looked like the formula for a particularly lethal kind of nerve gas. But when Petey offered to change Chugger74 too, Vern told him no, absolutely not.

  "I see," quoth the elf, grinning rather nastily. "You got you an unauthorized user, and you're laying a trap for him. Who's this Mo guy, anyway?"

  "Curly's friend," Vern replied. He wrote another check on the Castle's account, and Petey drifted off, peering at it like a shard of Neolithic pottery.

  Over the next few days Vern read with mounting fury the messages that flickered between Mims Castle and Miami. Mojo demanded to know what the hell Chalice was up to, what was taking her so long, didn't she realize that Vern was stiffing him, that he was running out of ready cash? Not to be bulldozed, she replied tartly, Chrissake, nt over the net, u a-hole!

  Baffled, he took out his frustrations on Vern—such a butthead, he said, that being swindled by him was downright embarrassing. Jumbo Dumbo's skill with a football was understandable, since they both had the same IQ. Mojo even downed Vern's sexual prowess, alleging falsely that Sharon Resnick had swallowed her partial retainer while trying to get him hard. LOL, responded Chalice. Mo yr a riot.

  That was the exact moment when Vern decided to kill him, steal all his money, and escape from Bonaparte forever.

  With a brain sharpened by hate, he devised a scheme that he hoped would accomplish his goal without putting him at the (so to speak) hind end of the raping queue in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary.

  At dinner that night, he told Mojo how a famous banker had just blown his brains out, while another had taken up the Olympic sport of high diving from his office window. He expressed relief that the funds of the Mims Trust were invested in treasuries, the bankers being so crooked and the banks so unsafe. As he spoke, the corrugations in Mo's forehead visibly deepened.

  "Maybe some dessert, Old Buddy?" Vern asked, smiling in the manner described by Hamlet. "Mrs. Lemieux fixed a nice crème brûlée."

  "Not tonight," Mo said, for once leaving some food on his plate. "Think I'll go to bed early," he added, rising and giving a stagey yawn. "Why don't you do the same, Vern? You'
re looking kind of washed out."

  "Maybe you're right," said Vern, also yawning elaborately. "Got to stay healthy, right?"

  He saw Mo to his room and locked him in as usual. Then he retired to the vast chamber on the third floor where Ish used to sleep, the one with the repro Gobelins tapestries on the walls, the coffered ceiling, and the suit of aluminum armor standing in the corner with lance uplifted.

  Vern undressed, popped one of the old boy's favorite movies into the vast entertainment center, crawled into bed, and began viewing Them! Ninety minutes later, he awoke to find that the movie had played all the way through, and was starting over against a background of desert sand, Joshua trees, and atomic radiation. He doused the flick, remembered that he hadn't yet brushed or flossed, bounded athletically off the mattress, and headed to the bathroom. Halfway there, a beelike hum caused him to put his ear against the wall. The elevator was coming down.

  He proceeded to polish his fangs at Ish's marble sink with the gold-plated Moen faucets, take a goodnight leak in the French porcelain bidet with dancing shepherdesses, and return to bed, where he fell asleep as sweetly as a child. For the first time since his gridiron days, Vern felt that he was the one with the mojo.

  Skipping breakfast next day, he closed the study door, took out his copy of the new password, fired up the computer, and accessed the secret file that Petey had created. And there it was, just as he'd hoped—Mojo's query to his bank on Grand Cayman, along with his PIN and account number and code words he needed to access the information. The balance amounted only to millions, instead of billions as Vern had hoped, but as he copied down the information he decided to be content. After all, look what being greedy was just about to get Mojo!

  After breakfast he phoned Ben Price, asked him to recommend a broker, and by lunchtime owned something he'd often heard about but never before possessed, a numbered Swiss bank account. The rest was obvious. He called Petey and asked if he could manage a transfer of funds from Grand Cayman to Zurich. Of course the dwarf Klingon knew at once that something crooked was up, but Vern didn't care, because they were about to become co-conspirators. They agreed that ten thou would be Petey's fee, to be paid in mixed-denomination, non-sequentially numbered bills, of which Vern's bank box happened to contain quite a few.

  That afternoon they met in the Castle's study and did their business. Vern waited until Petey had left the room—in fact, the building—to give Schweitzerische Bankverein his ultimate ID, a code word devised by, and known only to, himself.

  At dinnertime he went through the customary charade of unlocking Mo's door. The usual chitchat occurred, less annoying tonight because it was the very last time. After brandy, Vern said goodnight and locked him back in, then strolled down the hall, unlocked the lizard's den, and left the door ajar. The animal, being in its digestive phase, merely blinked at him—first the left eye, then the right.

  Downstairs again, Vern opened the Castle's main junction box and shut off power to the elevator. He went to bed, slept well, and next morning paid off the cleaners and gave Mrs. Lemieux and the gardener a week's vacation. Then he closed the Castle, took the Cad out of the courtyard, locked the gate behind him, and drove to New Orleans.

  This time he had a nice long visit. Lunched with Ben at Galatoire's and told him the fugitive had moved on. Blew a thou on an absolutely memorable afternoon with Shavonda, who charged extra for the kind of fancy stuff that Vern—usually a straight shooter—wanted in his current exalted mood. Spent a day at Harrah's, eating and drinking and dropping another few thou as casually as the twenty bucks he handed the bellboy at his four-star hotel. He got drunk in Who-Dat Heaven and bragged to his pals that he was about to pull off something big. Then, with soul at peace, he drove back to Bonaparte, listening to an easy-rock station along the way, and slapping the steering wheel to keep the rhythm.

  At the Walmart he purchased a large can of spackle, a wide-bladed putty knife, rubber gloves, extra Renuzit, and an ample supply of an air freshener called Pert. As he turned into the Castle's graveled drive, he noted with a rare touch of esthetic feeling how mellow, how almost authentic, the monstrosity looked in the light of the setting sun. He unlocked the gate, drove into the courtyard, and parked the Cad next to the Rolls. He'd just opened his trunk, and begun to remove the cleaning materials when muffled screams and wild thumps and scraping erupted from the top floor of the Castle keep.

  Surprised—Vern hadn't expected either of his guests to fight off hunger this long—he paused and looked up. The sounds coursed back and forth, fading and amplifying by turns as Mo fled his pursuer up and down the fourth-floor hallway. Then, after a final Aaaagh! the one-way window exploded outward, pulverized by a small fleeing financier with a giant monitor lizard attached firmly—and, Vern felt certain, quite painfully—to his backside. The thump when they landed was spectacular.

  Fascinated and appalled, Vern approached the complicated heap of remains. Both were dead, or as good as, but some sort of post-mortem reptilian reflex kept Ish's jaws moving for half a minute more. Wow, thought Vern, talk about having your butt chewed!

  When all movement ceased, he took his supplies inside, changed into sweats, flicked on security lights in the courtyard, donned rubber gloves, and returned. He found Mo's keys in his yucky pocket, noting that the keyring also held a professional-quality lock pick. The hard part of the work now began. Vern opened all four doors of the Rolls, detached his frat brother from the conjoined lizard and stowed him in the boot. In death as in life, Ish was a royal pain, but Vern—now sweating profusely despite the cool evening—somehow hauled and crammed the creature into the back seat, coiling the tail with its serrated armor twice around the body.

  Nice roomy car, he thought gratefully, pausing to wipe his brow when the job was done. Classic. Even running boards!

  Back in the kitchen, he removed his gloves, drank a beer, and had a bite to eat. Then he turned on the elevator and spent another couple of hours hard at work on the fourth floor. He spackled the clawmarks gouged into the sheetrock, scrubbed down the formerly occupied rooms, and packed into the duffel and the Louis Vuitton everything Mo had brought with him—extra clothes, razor, penknife, toothbrush, deodorant, a pack of marked cards, and a manual for investment counselors called Screwing the Universe for Fun and Profit.

  He carried the luggage down to the courtyard, jammed it into the Rolls, and a little past midnight, making a face at the dense sticky odor of reptilian blood, finally slid into the driver's seat. The sound of the engine was the gentlest of murmurs, and Vern felt a pang of regret over destroying such a beautiful machine, even if it was second hand. He drove up Cemetery Road, where tendrils of mist rising from the river made the monuments of the Confederate dead look even more ghostly than usual. At the end, a yellow DANGER sign mounted on sawhorses warned drivers that the river had undermined the bluff, and the remainder of the road had fallen in. He stopped, moved the sign, put the Rolls into gear, and with one hand on the steering wheel rode the running board to the teetering verge, where he jumped off.

  The front end tipped over, but the back hesitated on the brink. For a few seconds Vern felt like Tony Perkins in Psycho, watching the car with the body in the trunk float on the marsh, and wondering what he'll do if it doesn't sink. Then the weight inside shifted forward, and the Rolls somersaulted into the mist below. An incredible length of time elapsed before Vern heard the echoing splash, as three tons of metal and mammal and reptile hit the river. Gargling noises followed, while the car and its contents sank through seventy feet of murky water into the muffling silence of fathomless Delta mud.

  Vern felt rather astonished at what he'd done, a bit at a loss now that it was over. He replaced the warning sign—wouldn't want anybody to get hurt, right?—and stood quietly for a moment, wishing he'd worn a hat so he could take it off. Yeah, Ish and Mojo had been human hemorrhoids, both of them, but what the hell, he'd never been a guy to hold a grudge. Then his solemn mood lifted. Hiking back to the Castle, he thought about his be
ckoning future and began to whistle the Tulane fight song.

  Next day the Fall Pilgrimage began, with the arrival of the first tour bus. Vern—big, gracious, deploying his shy smile and honest brown eyes—greeted the visitors, pleasant folks who were mostly sixty-plus.

  Last night's mist had burned off, the fall sun was bright, and fat red buds were opening on the camellia hedges. Inside the Castle, lines formed outside the bathrooms, and ladies in running shoes and light sweaters led their husbands around on invisible leashes. An Englishwoman with a deep bass voice asked Vern if Mims Castle had been intended as a movie set—the most perceptive remark he heard all day. A lady from Ohio asked to see the slave quarters, and frowned when Vern said the Castle didn't have any. "At Oak Alley," she said, "they have the nicest little cabins for them."

  At noon, Sylvie Cartouche showed up to see how things were going, and made a number of catty remarks about Ish's antiques.

  "They do Louis XV so well on Taiwan," she murmured. "Mah grandson, the one lives in Alabama, you know? His factory makes those Victorian parlor chairs. He was planning to move the operation to Haiti for the cheap labor, but then along came the earthquake. Sometimes it's just one thing after another, idden it?"

  She added that there was trouble at Pilgrimage headquarters. The computer system had gone down at the worst possible moment, and Petey Potts hadn't returned her urgent call. "This has always been a one-horse town," she sighed. "Now it's a one-geek town, too. So inconvenient."