The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “It’s out already. I’m sorry, Max,” said Bert Mayer, “to keep you jogging back and forth with that thing. Can I get you a fresh drink, Jillian?”

  Max’s slim auburn-haired wife was on the window seat, her back to the tree-filled acres outside. “I can wait.”

  “Bert,” asked Wendy, a tall, pretty girl with no make-up, “why did you want five dollars?”

  Bert blinked. “Excuse me for not mentioning it.” He grinned over at Max. “Just smoke now, Max. It was the chafing dish. When I was opening the back door for the delivery boy the chafing dish fell into the salad and the dressing and the denatured alcohol started a fire.”

  “What delivery boy?” asked Wendy.

  “From the Cala market,” explained Bert. “The last fire ruined the steaks. I’m sorry. So I ordered some frozen fish. You can’t get meat after six o’clock. I hope that’s okay with everybody.”

  “Won’t they take a cheque?” said his wife.

  “Not after I knocked him down,” said Bert.

  “How’d that happen?”

  “He drove over the petunia beds out behind the patio and I thought it was the raccoons again come to steal the garbage cans and I ran out,” said Bert. “And, I’m sorry, I sort of fell into him. Because the patio lights are on the fritz again. Even after I helped him up the stairs he stayed surly. Max, we sure seem to have trouble with delivery boys. It was the same when we lived near you folks in San Francisco.”

  Wendy said, “Bert trips a lot.”

  “I do,” agreed Bert. “Can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

  A motor started up outside and they heard a truck driving away. “He didn’t wait, I guess,” said Wendy. “Max and Jillian, I hope you’ll forgive us. Here you are, the first time we’ve had you to dinner at the house we inherited, and the meal is getting all fouled up.”

  “They’re used to that,” said Bert. “We gave dinners like this before we moved to Marin County.”

  “Bert, why don’t you make us all fresh drinks and I’ll fix up something quick,” said his pretty wife. “An omelette or something.”

  Bert shook his head. “No, Wendy. When we moved in here last month we made up a schedule. Now that I don’t have to work any more, I can give a lot more help with the house. And, I’m sorry, but according to the schedule, it’s one of my nights to cook. You can understand, Max, our wanting to stick to a schedule and keep ourselves organized.”

  “It’s your mansion and you can run it any way you’d like,” Max scratched the very top of his crew-cut head. “Though maybe things would go faster if you just sent out for pizza.”

  “Those pizza places,” said Bert. “They never understand my instructions on how to get here. They always send anchovy even if I ask for salami. No, we’re always having trouble with pizza people, Max.” He grinned at Jillian. “Anyway, here’s Jillian who’s a food consultant to your ad agency, Max. She isn’t going to eat a pizza in my house. I’m sorry.” He noticed that the kitchen had stopped smoking. “I’ll whip up something quick. Wendy, come on and get the fresh drinks.”

  When they were alone in the living room Jillian asked her husband, “Well, is he?”

  Max moved to her, rested his forefinger on the nape of her neck. “Haunted? I don’t know. Bert’s always been sort of a screw-up. Sometimes when you approach thirty it starts to accelerate.”

  “What about that first fire?” asked Jillian. “Could a ghost have done it?”

  “His cigarette lighter fell into a pan of cooking oil,” said Max. “Maybe something supernatural nudged his hand.”

  “It’s my father,” said Wendy, behind them. She put a tray of drinks on a marble-top coffee table. “That’s who it is. He won’t leave Bert alone. He hasn’t since we got married sixteen months ago.”

  “Your father’s ghost, you mean,” said Jillian.

  Wendy returned to the sofa, sat, nodded. “My father was, as I remember him and he died eight years ago when I was seventeen, he was an exceptionally competent man. He had to be. He was, you know, in the music business most of his life. Led his own dance band from the 1930s to late in the 1950s. King Challens and His Musical Jacks. Not as well known as Benny Goodman or even Anson Weeks, but we always lived well.”

  Max picked up a Scotch and ice. “What makes you think the ghost is him?”

  “It plays all his arrangements.”

  “Oh, so?” said Max. “There’s music.”

  Wendy shrugged slightly. “Since we moved here anyway, Max. My father was a very careful, efficient man and he did all his own arrangements. I know his versions of Harbor Lights and Laura.”

  “Where’d you hear the music?” asked Jillian as Max handed her a glass.

  “Well, in the dance pavilion.”

  “Dance pavilion?”

  “Yes, it appears out on the front acre. Where there’s mostly grass,” said the girl. “It’s the Strawhouse Pavilion, where dad played so often in the forties. I’ve got photos of it in my scrapbook upstairs.”

  Max asked, “The whole ballroom shows up to haunt you?”

  “And the parking lot. The real Strawhouse Pavilion was torn down, in Sacramento it was, ten years ago,” said Wendy. “It’s appeared out there some six times now. In fact, the neighbours have begun to complain. We’re next door, about three acres from, to the Psycho/Technocratics Foundation, you know. They have all those quiet retreat weekends and I guess hearing Tuxedo Junction from a twenty-four piece swing band spoils their mood. Bert and I have both apologized.”

  “Wait now,” said Max. “You told Jillian that you felt Bert’s been haunted for much longer than just the month or so you’ve lived here in Marin.”

  “Sure,” said Wendy. “Really, Max. He wasn’t like this before we got married. He maybe wasn’t as heads-up and efficient as my father, but he wasn’t always setting fire to kitchens and falling over delivery boys, either.”

  “Why is your father supposed to be haunting him?”

  Wendy ran her tongue over her upper lip. “It’s sort of a joke, I guess. Dad always used to kid me I’d never find a husband like him. Now I think he’s exaggerating Bert’s clumsiness and forgetfulness, making extra things go wrong, to point up the contrast between Bert and himself. You don’t always want to marry somebody just like your father anyway.”

  “Whatever your father’s ghost was doing before,” Max said, “he didn’t bring his ballroom with him then.”

  “There wasn’t any space,” said Wendy. “That third-floor flat we had was charming but small. Bert could hardly ever even find a place to park our Volkswagen. Where would you have put a dance pavilion?”

  “All the evidence, the real evidence, of a ghost,” said Max, “has shown up since you got here.”

  “The signs my father is haunting us are more obvious now, yes,” admitted Wendy. “I’d like you to investigate this, Max, and find out exactly what’s going on.”

  Max turned away from her, watched the dark grounds beyond the high wide windows. “The occult investigating, Wendy, has never been more than a hobby. Jillian and I are on our way up the coast to Wollter’s Bay for a week, as you know. For a vacation.”

  “Max is reluctant about the ghost detective business,” said Jillian in her faintly British voice.

  “Couldn’t you investigate after your vacation? Next weekend, maybe,” said Wendy.

  Max said, “What does Bert feel about this?”

  “About what?” asked Bert, coming into the big beamceilinged room with a bottle of red wine in his hand. “I’m sorry, Max, I didn’t catch what you were saying. The ghost stuff, was it?”

  “Wendy’s told us about the problems you’ve been having with what might be her father’s ghost,” said Max. “She asked me to investigate, but I won’t unless you agree.”

  Bert was pumping the wooden handle of the corkscrew which seemed to be stuck in the cork of the wine bottle. “I like to open the wine early, give it time to breathe. Excuse me a second.” He twisted the bit of the corkscrew and t
he cork plopped down into the wine. “That keeps happening. I have a trick with a fork and a drinking straw that usually gets it out. What were you asking me, Max? Oh yeah, the ghost. I don’t know. I think Wendy is making too much of the situation. Still, if you want to.”

  From out in the darkness came the sound of automobiles driving across gravel and parking. Yellow and orange light, throbbing, grew up in the night. “It’s him,” said Wendy. She hurried to the front door and out onto the elevated sun deck that looked down on the front acre of the estate.

  Max and Jillian followed.

  The grass and some of the trees were gone and a bright wood-and-glass building rested on a wide stretch of gravel. The building was white, octagonal in shape, with a great thatched dome and stretches of lattice work all over it. The cars in the parking lot were bright and new, none newer than 1940. The name Strawhouse Pavilion flashed gold and below it were the red neon words Dine & Dance. An oilcloth banner, painted red and gold, stretched across the space above the wide arched door and announced the appearance inside of King Challens, his piano and his orchestra. Laughter and light came from the pavilion.

  “That’s some ghost,” said Jillian, holding Max’s hand tight.

  The band began to play. “One O’Clock Jump” said Wendy. “That was one of his favourites.” Her waist was pressing against the porch railing.

  “I’m sorry,” said Bert, joining them. He had red wine blotches on the leg of his tan slacks. “There’s our mysterious phenomenon, Max. You’d think, since I inherited this place from my uncle, that the ghost would be from my side of the family.”

  “Be quiet a minute,” Wendy said without looking at him. Her head moved gently in tempo with the music. “It’s hard to see inside the pavilion. Why is that, Max?”

  The windows glowed with light but it was a hazy light and you couldn’t see anyone inside the pavilion. “I don’t know, Wendy.” Max touched his wife’s hand and let go, moved down the porch steps toward the yard. The summer night was still warm. Max had walked twenty feet toward the Strawhouse Pavilion when he noticed several people on the grounds. They were staring up at the pavilion.

  “We’ve warned them about this,” said a dark-suited man with a shaggy moustache. He was carrying an unplugged mixer. “How can you have a Psycho/Technocratics weekend and play appliance games when this lousy rotten noise is going on.” The cord of the electric mixer swung with his angry gestures at the noisy ballroom.

  “I take it from your clothes,” said Max, “you’re not a 1940s ghost.”

  “You bet your lousy dingbat,” said the moustached man. “My wife and I are novices second class at the foundation. My suit is from Lew Ritter in Westwood.”

  “Connie,” said his wife, a blonde woman with a blender under her arm, “don’t let your anger spoil all your fine progress.”

  “What kind of lousy progress am I making when a lousy rotten anachronistic honky-tonk can upset me?” He threw his mixer at the ghost pavilion. “As for you, Dr Wally, I quit. I demand a refund. I want a lousy rotten refund from you. When I pay for silence and beatific solitude I don’t want lousy rotten jitterbug music.”

  Gliding silently across the grass was a tall, slender man of about fifty. He had hair like a Midwest poet and a gap between his front teeth. “The fervency of your reactions, the vehemence of your furor, the sufusion of fervid emotions, Mr Conners,” the tall man said, “add nothing to an already pungent situation.”

  “Listen, Wally,” said Conners. He grabbed the blender from his wife and threw it in Wally’s direction.

  Dodging the flung appliance, Wally asked Max, “Are you an intimate, a confrere, a compatriot of Mr and Mrs Mayer? I am Dr E. Phillips Wally, founder of the Psycho/Technocratics Foundation and pioneer in appliance therapy.”

  “Yes, I’m Max Kearny. I’m a guest at the Mayers’,” Max told him. “Why are you and your disciples carrying appliances?”

  Dr Wally smiled. “You haven’t read, haven’t pored over, haven’t studiously regarded my book, which is called If You Like Machines, You’ll Like People.”

  A dark woman of forty was at Wally’s side now. The pavilion was playing a slow waltz. “Don’t waste time, Phil. What would this shmuck understand about establishing rapport with the deep forces of machinery?”

  “My wife, Charlotte,” said Dr Wally.

  “You look to be some kind of public relations simp like your friend Bert Mayer.”

  “Advertising, art director,” said Max. This thin dark-haired woman looked vaguely familiar. Max pointed a thumb at the pavilion. “What do you know about this?”

  “Only that we want it to stop,” Dr Wally told him. “The noise, the increasing frequency of the noise, Mr Kearny, is disrupting, desolating, and laying waste to the important silences my work and my therapy call for.”

  “What’s this boob know about tranquillity?” said Charlotte Wally.

  The music of King Challens’s big band, the shuffling of feet on the dance floor, all the sounds of the pavilion began to grow dim. The image of the ballroom was becoming less distinct. For a few seconds the sound and look of the place flared full again, then it was gone. There was grass again, trees. Mrs Wally gave a small grunt and gathered up the two appliances Conners had flung. She and Dr Wally walked away toward the pines and redwoods at the edge of the estate, up the gradual incline and into the woods. Their disciples left with them. Max went and paced the area where the Strawhouse Pavilion had stood. He found nothing. From the three-storey Mayer house came a mild explosion. Max ran back to the porch and Jillian met him on the steps. “Bert again?”

  Jillian nodded yes. “Looks like we’ll all be going into Tiburon for dinner.”

  “I’ll drive,” said Max.

  * * *

  Seagulls were walking in single file along the warm sand toward Max. He squinted slightly in the bright noon sun and watched them. On the hillside behind him underbrush rattled and crackled. Max stretched up off his towel and saw Bert Mayer tumbling, fully clothed, from the edge two hundred feet above. When he hit the white sand of the beach Bert rolled over twice more, sat up. He held part of a flowering bush in his right hand.

  “I’m sorry,” said Bert, getting to his feet as Max approached. “I guess I ruined your flowers.”

  “You okay?”

  “I suppose,” said Bert. “I should have tried the stairs but I had a bad experience with old rickety weather-beaten stairs like that once and I decided to try the hillside, except I tripped over something.”

  “What brings you?”

  “That’s what Jillian asked,” said Bert. “I saw her up at the cottage. She’s really gotten a tan in the three days you’ve been here.” He started to hand Max the bush, decided to throw it away. “I hate to bother you, Max, but that ghost, well, things are much worse. The ghost of Wendy’s father is showing up every night now. The pavilion is really bothering the Wallys. You know, he was trying to buy our place just before my uncle died and left it to me. I suppose Wally’d like us out of there entirely.”

  “He would, huh? What else is worse about the ballroom?”

  “Wendy,” Bert said. “Wendy seems to be getting more and more fascinated with the place, with the idea her father’s ghost is playing in there. She used to just stand on the sun deck and watch. Last night she started walking up to the place.” He shook his head. “Mrs Wally told me it would be dangerous if Wendy went right in there.”

  Max said, “Charlotte Wally, Charlotte Wally,” and tapped his bare foot three times in the sand. “Of course she’d say that.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “I thought she looked familiar,” said Max, grinning. “She wasn’t always in the psychoelectric business. Eight or nine years ago, when I was first getting interested in occult detecting, I went to one of her seances.”

  “Seances? She was connected with ghosts?”

  “Right,” said Max. “A very good medium and very good at summoning up all kinds of spirits and spectres
.” His foot tapped the sand again. “I’ll have a talk with the Wallys.”

  “Good. Maybe that’ll help. I hate to see you cut your vacation short but this is an emergency.”

  “It’s your emergency,” said Max. “Jillian and I will be at your place on Saturday.”

  “This is Wednesday, Max. Suppose she goes inside the ghost pavilion before Saturday?”

  “You’ll have to keep her from doing that.”

  “How?”

  “Hold on to her if you can’t talk her out of it.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I can.” He put his hands in his pockets. “One other favour, Max.”

  “Which?”

  “My car got stuck in the sand off the road up there. Can you help me tow it out?”

  Max said, “Okay, Bert,” and led him to the stairs.

  The branches of the willow tree flicked against the bow window of the study and Dr Wally turned his head away from the refrigerator. He noticed Max. “I can tell you nothing of consequence, nothing of significance, nothing of great moment about the unfortunate, and much too loud, haunting our neighbours are suffering. If you’d like to sit down and meditate you’re welcome.”

  There was an electric toaster on the only other chair. “No, thanks,” said Max. He stepped around a portable dishwasher and a clothes dryer. “Your wife used to be a successful spirit medium. In fact, you used to put on a turban and run the check room. A few days after the Mayers move in next door to you they start having ghosts.”

  “A coincidence, an accidental synchronism, an innocent concurrence,” said Wally. He put his fingers on the smooth sand-coloured surface of the refrigerator and closed his eyes. “We gave up the spirit dodge years ago, Kearny, after I got my PhD. When I found how to establish rapport with machinery and how to translate it into the daily conduct of life, there was no more need for the other world.”

  Max leaned against a water cooler. “I notice you can communicate with machines even when they’re not plugged in.”

  “You’re not ready for that concept,” said Wally. “You must work up. My advice to you, Kearny, is to try to understand your electric can opener, then perhaps work up to your power lawn mower.”