“That might be fun. Oh, you filthy fat cow, you’ve pulled my hair!”
* * * *
“Drink this, dear Stepmother,” Friedegunde said when Flosshilde recovered consciousness the next day.
“What...? Did I faint? Ow, my chin hurts!”
“This will help.” She had some of the wise woman’s black potion left, and she tilted the chalice against those foul, flower-petal lips.
Not even the ghastliest of grimaces could wrench the beauty from her face, Friedegunde grudgingly admitted. As might have been expected, her last words were a stupid question: “Oh, Daughter, have you stolen my life?”
“Look on it from your vantage point in the lowest pit of hell, when your eyelashes turn to wasp-stings, when your hair becomes wires that grow inward, when you give birth to a myriad vipers every hour, when your piss boils and your shit sprouts spikes, when Satan himself gags at the sight of you and slams the lid on your pit with a shudder, look on it then, dear Stepmother, as a loan.”
Having wiped the chalice clean, disordered her hair and gown, and taken some of the poppet’s tears to streak her own cheeks, Friedegunde staggered from the room, howling: “Horror! Madness! Joy—I mean, despair!”
* * * *
“She looks more beautiful than ever,” Willi said when he had pried up the coffin-lid.
“You mustn’t say things like that, especially not with a pathetic catch in your voice, when you are standing in a grave and I am standing over you with—” she tapped his tonsure—“a shovel.”
Willi staggered back to his feet, or to the shapely feet of Brother Monocarp, and wiped the blood from his eyes. “Can’t I even admire her as one would admire a—a beautiful tree?”
“Only as a dog would, you offspring of a sodomite and a carrot! You—but take heart, dear Willi. She shall be yours, all yours, but she will burn with the very same love I bear for you.”
Willi lifted Flosshilde from the coffin and laid her at the graveside with such reverence that Friedegunde’s eyeballs seemed about to burst. She restrained an itch to kick the thing back into the grave, dead or not, and shovel the dirt over it.
She dropped to her knees beside it. No: despite all appearances, despite the opinion of her distracted father and his physician (whose flayed body, hanging from the highest rampart, still seemed to twitch when the ravens tore it), the detestable object was palpably warm. Every other few minutes or so, the ghost of a breath crept from its sickeningly pert nose. Left to itself, the creature would bounce back to the state it fancied to be consciousness before the cock crowed.
She was tempted to bury it again and let that happen, to sit placidly at breakfast and savor the picture of her stepmother shredding her fingers down to the bone against splintery planks as she shrieked beneath the muffling tonnage of the earth; but one couldn’t have everything. A glimpse of the longing in Willi’s newly beautiful eyes as he lifted the body convinced her that she had no other choice. Willi wanted the wanton who wanted Willi, and she would be blown aside by the power of that rune. She had no choice but to sacrifice her own sturdy and comfortable body to her lover’s whim. Since Flosshilde’s was younger, and hers was becoming very sore indeed, it seemed a small sacrifice.
“Do you remember the incantation?” she demanded.
“Of course,” he said, and she believed him: hot irons are miraculous mnemonic aids. He said, “But how will I ... explain her?”
“You’re a holy man, clown! You raised her from the dead by prayer and purity. My father will buy you a bishopric, and all good Christians will wade through blood to pay for the privilege of kissing your saintly foot. While I, in my new body, as bishop’s mistress—”
“You’ll have to sleep with your father, won’t you?”
“Even that will I do for you, Willi. But that prosing ancient fought beside the great Otto at Augsberg, and he has crept a good five years beyond the half-century mark. A pillow can now do what a dozen Wendish lances once couldn’t. Would it be a sin to help him totter on his way to his eternal reward?”
She made no comment at the tender care with which he arranged Flosshilde over his shoulder. She showed saintly restraint in saying nothing when she caught him surreptitiously fondling her buttocks, which, after all, would presently be her own. But she could no longer contain herself when he revealed the emptiness of the head that crowned his glorious body by asking, not for the first time, “How can I explain your death? They’ll blame me, they’ll put me to torture—”
“Whoever heard of anyone being murdered inside a locked room?”
“Yes. I’ll show them the key—”
“No, Willi, I’ll have the key.”
“Are you sure that’s how it works?”
“Willi.... My body will rot in unhallowed ground. My name will be a rebuke and a hissing to babes unborn. I will break the heart of my poor, dear father by taking my life in the prime of my youth and beauty. I dare all this for you, for you, dear dwarf. All you have to do is what I tell you to do.”
“And if something should go wrong,” he mused, “I can tell them that I was only following orders.”
She said nothing, but she was awed by his creative brilliance. She knew she had seen something greater in him than wormish lust.
* * * *
Hanging by her heels above the smoldering brazier of herbs, Friedegunde thought it would be appropriate to linger awhile and recall the treasures of her life: the beloved doll whose arms and legs she had pulled off when she understood that it was prettier than she would ever be; the look on her mother’s face when she had tripped her off the parapet, her mother’s evil mind having misconstrued the innocent game involving forfeits of clothing and various services that she played with her father. But the smoke of the herbs made her sneeze, her position was uncomfortable, and she cut short her reminiscences with a stroke of the sword. The smoke became even less bearable as the herbs fizzed and popped in the drizzle of her blood.
The cut was more painful than she had imagined, and the blood blurred her vision. Blinking and shaking her head whenever the appropriate window swung into view, she saw nothing odd whatever about the plain, pale moon. She heard no howling of wolves, only the dull croaking and chirping of lesser creatures and the distant song of drunken warriors in the great hall.
Further straining her ears, she heard no impassioned recitation of witchly runes—and why were her father’s warriors singing about all men being brothers, when not one of them believed that for a minute? But she had often noticed before that music made more sense than words, and the tune was lovely. She nearly forgot pain and danger as she drifted on the virile chorus.
Twisting in the steam of her dripping blood, she forced herself to concentrate hard on the room upstairs. She heard nothing—no, she heard a thumping sound, as of someone pounding a straw mattress. Try as she would, she couldn’t shake the image this evoked of a nasty dwarf using his fine new body to have his way with a drugged and defenseless nitwit.
She thought of screaming a protest, but it was so much easier to revolve on a stately axis and enjoy the music.
She found herself humming along.
NOTHING BUT THE BEST
“You’re ugly, you’re creepy, you’re the filthiest man I ever knew!” Jessica Sexton cried.
“Yes.” Ahab Wakefield’s head was meekly lowered to hide the fury in this eyes. “But I’m rich.”
“And that’s the filthiest thing you ever said!”
She flung back his gifts. The emerald necklace bit his cheek. The tiger-skin coat she hurled shrouded him meomentarily in the ghost of its orginal owner’s fell clutch.
“No, please keep them,” he said, “they’re—”
“Impossible to explain to my husband.”
He learned that her laugh could be splendidly scornful. He had possessed only her body, and she had so much more to offer—but it was hopeless.
“Impossible to explain ... like so much else.” Having admitted the futility of his love, he allowed h
is lips to relax into their most comfortable sneer. “How do you propose to explain why you left him? And what you’ve been doing all this while?”
“Bruce will forgive me. And even if he doesn’t, I can go to any hospital for the criminally insane and find a hundred better men than you’ll ever be. You don’t know ... anything. Did you really think you could impress me with this?” Her toe, perfect to its pallid lunula, nudged the coat with disdain.
“You deserve nothing but the best.”
“Do you know how few of these magnificent creatures are left in the world? To kill one of them for a lousy coat—that disgusts me even more than you do.”
Ahab sighed, admitting his miscalculation. The greatest burden of his long life, he often thought, was trying to keep up with current fads.
“But there is only one Jessica.” The pain of that truth drove him to his knees.
“Very bad.” She spoke with critical detachment. “Sometimes I think you learned how people behave from watching silent movies. What I ever could have seen in you, why I should have left the husband I love so much....” She paused, as if realizing that these questions had no sane answers. “This hogwash—” her gesture included ancient volumes on swaybacked shelves, dried herbs and fungi hanging from the ceiling-beams, the uniquely malformed skull on his desk—“it doesn’t really work, does it?”
He rose deliberately to his commanding height and gazed down on her with less warmth than a corpse from a gibbet. “You will see.”
Fright was another emotion Jessica had not shown him, and she expressed it fetchingly. As she fled, Ahab vowed to see more.
He had indulged this folly before, and with the same result. To win a love freely given, he had released Chastity Hopkins, of Portsmouth, N.H., from a similar enchantment in 1652. She had called him a pig-swyving pissabed and scurried off to lodge a complaint of witchcraft. Jessica Sexton had no such recourse. In some small ways, the world had changed for the better.
“When will I learn?”
Thester, the malapert creature that nested in the skull, croaked: “Nevermore.”
Ignoring his familiar, Ahab took a knife from his desk and cut a strip of tiger-skin long enough to bind his cadaverous waist. He had no qualms about ruining the fabulously expensive coat. Cheating fools was his hobby, and he had paid the furrier with illusory cash. That he had not given Jessica an illusory coat proved the depth of his sincerity. It was fitting that the rejected love-token should be his instrument of vengeance.
“Master!” Thester’s agitated claws rattled the skull. “Master, give her the pox, give her the flux, afflict her with some cagastrical destemper beyond the skill of the most learned surgeons—”
“Death by dismemberment and ingestion,” Ahab said as he assembled further materials, “is beyond their skill.”
“Remember what happened in Avignon in 1329?”
“Avignon? My memory....”
“That time you turned into a wolf to assassinate Pope John XXII. And the gamekeeper who sold you the wolfhide belt neglected to tell you that the animal had died after chewing off its trapped leg. Whereupon you learned—”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Ahab snapped, having remembered.
“—whereupon you learned that a three-legged wolf is no match for a pack of hounds. You had to spend the Renaissance in bed.”
It was true that Ahab would assume the form of the particular beast whose pelt he used. He gave the strip of fur a covert inspection, but it told him nothing. He would have to translate himself to Maylaysia to trace the provenance of the hide, and that might take hours. He dismissed Thester’s quibbles.
“My dear abomination, a three-legged tiger—even one that’s blind and toothless to boot—will be all that’s needed for our loving young couple.”
“And their dog?”
He winced. Shape-changing was a young man’s game, and he was no longer the sprightly bicentenarian who had disported himself as a crocodile among the wading courtlings of Nitokris. He had feared dogs ever since the Avignon fiasco, but he had forgotten the Sextons’ pet, a Doberman pinscher, who had in his last life commanded—with notably more audacity than brains—an SS panzer division. Unaware of this background, Jessica had christened him Muffin.
* * * *
Climbing over the doomed couple’s back fence, Ahab was thankful for Thester’s reminder. Forewarned, he had rendered himself not just invisible, but inaudible and inodorous.
Even so, the dog sprang from its doze on the patio and paced the back yard, tunelessly growling the dimly reealled Curse-motif from Wagner’s Ring. Ahab would never admit to Thester that he’d spared him an embarrassment, but he resolved to find the little horror an especially roly-poly child soon.
He stripped to the furry belt, opened a vein unseen, and made the appropriate symbols in blood on the flagstones of the patio. The dog sprinted and snarled at random shadows as Ahab crouched on all fours and spoke the required words.
Instantly the vigor of a healthy young animal surged through him. The formerly still night echoed with racketing bats and clamorous moths. The neutral smell of the yard was submerged under a canine stench so vivid and frightening that it hurt. It was the memory of Avingnon that pained him, of course, potentiated by even the biggest cat’s hatred for its old enemy.
As the other enchantments were cancelled and Ahab stood revealed in all his fearful symmetry, the stupid dog charged. Ahab’s sharper eyes, no doubt, made the puny creature seem like a black and tan locomotive bearing down on him, but he stood his ground and drew back his paw to blast Muffin’s bones to gravel.
* * * *
“What in hell was that?” Bruce Sexton gasped.
“What does it matter?” Jessica tried to draw him down again.
“I guess—” A second piteous cry froze him in the act of being drawn. He tumbled from bed and ran to switch on the patio lights.
“My God! Look—no, don’t look, Jess. Muffin’s got hold of something, a....”
“A what?”
Not believing his eyes, he forced them again toward the patio. “It must’ve been somebody’s pet,” he said. “But what kind of a nut would dye a rabbit with orange and black stripes?”
DRINK ME
My last attempt at shape-shifting had been a disaster. What I believed to be a tiger-skin, needed to help me become a ravenous beast, had been cobbled together from the hides of rabbits.
Not much was left of me after a Doberman pinscher had his fun, but my familiar, Thester, gathered up my piteous remains. Reviving the imposing figure of my last human avatar, Ahab Wakefield, was out of the question, but he concentrated my essence into a tiny liquor-bottle of the sort dispensed by airlines.
“Jim Beam?” I demanded. “Jim? I am an ancient and terrible wizard, born of a witch who dallied with a crocodile three days before an Egyptian first doodled a pyramid. But who, you blithering abomination, who would cower before me if my name were Jim?”
“You don’t want them to cower before you, master, you want them to drink you.”
“Stop shaking my bottle!”
“The choice is limited—you fly so seldom—by airplane, I mean—”
“You know my Cindy Crawford poster?”
“That’s sad, master, you never did get around to using it for a proper enchantment.”
“Never mind that. Reduce the image to a label with the inscription, ‘One drink will make you my kind of man!’”
“Done,” he said, and I felt the label firmly bonding to the container that held my soul.
“Who could possibly resist me now?”
“The label looks good enough to eat.”
“Well, don’t. Put me somewhere I won’t be too easily found, where I won’t be swept out with a superficial cleaning.”
“As you wish. Meanwhile, master, I’ve been meaning for the last two hundred years to renew my acquaintance with the ghouls of Boston...?”
“Very well, I suppose you deserve a vacation. But remember, I may need you.”
“You don’t have a right hand, you amorphous pustule—” But he was gone already.
My mind is well furnished, but you can recite the Necronomicon backwards and forwards only so many times before even those ringing invocations begin to cloy. I knew that I was dependant on stimuli from the mortal scum I disdained. I longed for the beauty, wit and charm that I loved to ravage. After ten years inside the bottle, I would have settled for a homely halfwit to delude and destroy.
No longer able to stroll beside the sunless sea of Xanadu or surf the stellar flares of Arcturus in my astral body, it was all I could do to extend a ghostly feeler to the bus-stop at the end of my street. There I learned that my home had a bad name, that no one had accepted the image I once cultivated as the kindly old gentleman who would never even think of putting razor-blades in Hallowe’en apples or harvesting corpses from the local cemeteries. My house went unsold.
More time passed while I mentally improved on the games of Bobby Fischer, revised the string quartets of Schoenberg, and bitterly regretted that I couldn’t even see the picture on the label from inside my bottle, much less animate it. And even if I did—
“What do you suppose the old loony used this for, storing broomsticks?” A voice, a human voice at the closet where I had so long abided! “Goddamn it, Spot, not in the house, goddamn it!”
“Oh, no, Jeff, he didn’t! Before we even moved in?” A woman’s voice from another room.
“Didn’t he? This mutt is off to the pound, Grandma’s darling or not. He snaps, he smells, he—wow.”
“What is it?” She had joined him by the closet.
“This label is a Grateful Dead thingie, isn’t it? A grinning skull. ‘One drink will make you my kind of man.’ Yeah, man, like farrrrr out.”
“Do you suppose it’s an illegal drug?”
Thester! The idiot! He could only tell Cindy Crawford from a desiccated corpse if he bit them to see which was crunchier.
Nasty Stories Page 2