Dead Jack and the Pandemonium Device

by James Aquilone

  “Oswald’s not dead!” I shouted. I think spit shot out of my mouth. Maybe my nose, too.

  “Sure, sure. He’s just sleeping, Jack.”

  “What do you know, Lilith? Oswald isn’t like the rest of us.”

  “Do you want me to try calling Wally the Wizard again? He might be able to help. I think he’s back from Purgatory Island.”

  “What did they pinch him for this time?”

  “I think he was selling fake philosopher stones.”

  “Forget that guy. He’s a charlatan. We need someone big. A sorcerer supreme or a mad scientist or maybe a god. Did you ever hear back from Lucky McGuire?”

  “No word. He’s lying low after the leprechaun queen put a hit out on him.”

  “Great. He’s the best snitch in town, but he’ll never surface if Dana is after him. Find me a god. Greek, Norse, Hindi. I don’t care.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  “Get the Devil Boy first.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Lilith floated through the wall. From behind, she wasn’t so glamorous. The back of her head was bashed in and pieces of brain oozed out. That was the highwaymen’s handiwork. They used a hammer. “Door!” I shouted as she disappeared into the reception area. Ghosts! So set in their ways.

  I lifted Oswald. He seemed just a ball of fluff, but the little bugger was heavy as hell. In fact, he seemed like he had gained some weight. Dead weight, I guess. Could Oswald really be gone? The weirdo was just rubber and marshmallow. He had no heart or brain or internal organs. I bounced him in my hand. Did he have a soul? And now he doesn’t? Did the Jupiter Stone destroy it? Did Ratzinger’s Soul Suckers take it? What the hell is a soul anyway? I’ve gotten along without one for decades and I’m fine. Well, fine-ish.

  His X eyes were the only things that showed he was him. I waved my hand before them, trying to get a reaction.

  I’m not proud to admit it, but I had shoved the homunculus back into my skull, hoping that would revive him. I kept him in there for five days, but nada. I just got a splitting headache.

  When he returns, I’m going to give him such hell.

  I put Oswald back on the desk, gave him a little pat.

  The intercom buzzed. Lilith squawked, “There’s someone here to see you, Jack.”

  “Send them away,” I said.

  I had turned down three jobs since I returned. One was for a missing hunchback grandpa from Vodun Heights, another was a surveillance job on an unfaithful werewolf, and the third was a vampire looking for his long-lost love, most likely so he could drain her of her vital essence. And I needed the money, too. Just as I thought, my suit needed extensive dry cleaning and tailoring and my fedora needed blocking. (I passed on deodorizing it all. I’ve gotten used to my odor.) I didn’t have the heart to take the cases, though. No, it had nothing to do with Oswald! I’m perfectly capable of solving cases without him. I just needed a break. Saving the world takes a lot out of a person.

  “He insists,” Lilith said. “He says it has to do with your missing soul. He says you’d know what’s at stake.”

  I broke out in another sweat. If I had a heart it would have been trying to break out of my chest right now. I reached for the bottle of Devil Boy, then remembered it was empty. Fook! I took a quick hit of fairy dust, gave myself a couple slaps to the face, and said, in a controlled voice, “Send him in, Lilith.”

  The door opened and—wouldn’t you know it?—it was the creep in black. Paranoia my arse. I was back in business. But business wasn’t good.

  * * *

  Dead Jack: Book 2 Coming Soon!

  A Dead Jack Short Story

  The Case of the Amorous Ogre

  GWENDOLYN

  She was thirty-two inches of nauseating cuteness in an itty-bitty emerald dress that made her seem, somehow, more naked than if she wore nothing at all. Her skin was snowflake white, her hair torchlight red, her eyes tiny blue moons. And if I wasn’t such a smart guy I’d have thought she was a child. But she was probably five centuries past her sweet sixteen. The little lady sat across from my desk, her thin, see-through wings twittering nervously.

  She said her name was Gwendolyn. She was a pixie.

  I poured myself a shot of Devil Boy. “Care for some?” I said. “Looks like you might need it.”

  She pulled on one of her pointy ears. “I don’t drink formaldehyde.”

  Lilith, my secretary and the resident office ghost, told me the pixie was in trouble. Of course she was in trouble. Why else would she be in the same room as a zombie?

  I threw back the formaldehyde, most of which poured out from the bottom of my skull. The pixie’s face scrunched up in disgust.

  “Gwen, let me ask you something. Any of you pixies not so goddam adorable?” It wasn’t a compliment.

  She tugged down on her flimsy get-up. She covered an extra inch of thigh, but also managed to expose a healthy chunk of pixie cleavage. If I wasn’t a zombie, I’d be sweating buckets now.

  “Can we, please, get down to business?” she said. “I was told you’re the best detective in Pandemonium. Was that a lie?”

  I don’t know who told her that, but I should hire him to do my PR. I wasn’t the best, just the cheapest. Which is why I got the dirtiest cases in the Five Cities.

  “Gwen, everyone lies in this business, but you got the rare truth.” I threw back another shot of Devil Boy.

  “Then you should have no problem rescuing my daughter.”

  “I rescue daughters all the time. It’s one of my specialties.” Actually I never even rescued a gremlin from a tree. But, as I said, everyone lies in this business.

  Finally the pixie got into it. “My daughter, Willa, she’s a very naïve girl. But that’s to be expected: she’s only two hundred and twelve years old. And if you know anything about pixies, especially young ones, they’re always getting into mischief. It’s usually harmless pranks: stealing horses, leading people astray, that sort of thing. But lately she’s been getting into real trouble. Running with a bad crowd, going places a pixie shouldn’t go. I forbid her to go uptown. There are bad types there—”

  “Ogres.”

  “Yes, ogres. And one of those vile, disgusting beasts has taken a fancy to my Willa. I believe his name is Mad Dog.”

  “Madgogg?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “Heard of him. I told you I’m the best. In fact, I already know why you’re here: Madgogg abducted your daughter, is holding her in his ogre lair, and demands that she marry him, right?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s horrible.”

  “It’s an old story, Gwen. Happens every day.”

  “An ogre in the family! I’d never stand for it.”

  “Ogres are stupid, predictable creatures. I’ve dealt with a few in my time. No worries.”

  I didn’t mention that ogres also like to eat pixies, but she probably already knew that. I also didn’t mention that zombies like to eat pixies, too, and just about anything else with succulent, sweet, so juicy flesh. But I kicked that habit (mostly) long ago. I said, “I just need one kilo of fairy dust a day plus expenses.” I didn’t tell her how badly I needed the dust. It had been a while since my last fix and I was getting hungry.

  A SIMPLE PLAN

  Black, tentacled clouds drifted across the blood-red sky as I drove toward the Upper West Side of ShadowShade. The forecast called for more dry heat with a chance of firestones. Creepy shit. But par for the course in Pandemonium, the twilight realm of nightmare creatures, legends, the undead, and everything in between. Home shitty home.

  ShadowShade was actually the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated of Pandemonium’s Five Cities. It has streets and a subway (though you don’t want to go down there if you’re afraid of eyeless mole people), unlike those other Podunks.

  I watched blood-drunk vampires stumbling out of the Full Moon Saloon, the most notorious watering hole in Hell’s Kitchen, and werewolves playing patty-cake with virginal waifs at the edge of the Wood of Shado
ws.

  Madgogg had a brownstone on West 93rd that overlooked the Wood. It was a high-rent area for the well-to-do ogre, and many ogres were well-to-do these days. Droves of the brutes were leaving their cramped huts in Ogreville, nestled in the eastern corner of the Broken Lands, and buying up ShadowShade’s most expensive real estate. Their success must have something to do with their big bodies and little brains.

  My plan, like all my plans, was simple:

  1. Disguise myself.

  2. Infiltrate Madgogg’s brownstone.

  3. Rescue the captive pixie.

  In and out. Easy-peasy.

  I parked around the corner from Madgogg’s place, on West 92nd, nearly running over a careless succubus who was walking her pet midget dragon. As I walked toward the brownstone, I was having second thoughts about the disguise. The hump was biting into my back and the wig was itching like mad. The itching made me wonder where Oswald was. I hadn’t seen him in a while. And that worried me.

  I knocked at the servant’s entrance on the ground floor of Madgogg’s brownstone, and a few minutes later an ancient-looking zombie opened the door. He must have spent a long century dead before being reanimated, which was good—because his brains would be mush and the dummy would be a pushover.

  “Hey there, bones,” I said.

  The dummy stared at me, his lifeless eyes wide and protruding from their sockets. He was a skeleton in a suit. Most likely imported from the Zombie Islands to be a domestic. These guys made me sick.

  I said, “I’m the new hunchback handyman.” I pointed to the hump for emphasis. “The agency sent me over.”

  The creature stood there silently, his exposed jaw hanging open. I wasn’t so sure if he was reanimated after all. Then he nodded and let me in.

  The kitchen was huge. The cauldron in the middle of the room was huge. The three-headed dog inside the cauldron was pretty huge, too. The middle head looked particularly nasty, but none of them were gonna do me any harm. They were ogre lunch. It stunk worse than a zombie’s armpit in there.

  I walked through the kitchen and entered a long hallway paneled with the heads of trolls, gremlins, and at least one goblin. There weren’t any zombie heads, so I stupidly felt safe. But then I figured zombie heads probably aren’t worth much as trophies.

  I heard a series of low moans coming from behind the door at the end of the hall. The door was unlocked. I opened it.

  It was the door to the basement. Nothing good is ever in the basement, so naturally I went down.

  At the bottom of the staircase, the moans were clearer. I heard some grunts, too.

  Another door stood before me, iron and heavy and unlocked, too. This Madgogg must be a real dunzy or real confident. The plan was working to perfection. I could already taste the fairy dust on my desiccated lips. I could also taste flesh and blood and brains—and without that fairy dust to kill the cravings, I was liable to eat half of ShadowShade. And most likely get a stake through the head, too.

  I entered a long, brightly lit hall. On the right was a rough stone wall, and farther up on the left was a prison cell.

  The moaning sounds were coming from inside the cell and now I could make out what they were. Someone was eating and they were enjoying it! I felt a pang of jealousy, but I curbed the zombie in me and rushed down the hall. I had to kick aside garbage that littered the floor—wrappers, empty containers, dirty plates. Ogres had mighty appetites, but this looked bad.

  I stopped before the heavy iron bars of the cell. I couldn’t believe my bloodshot eyes. Fancy tapestries hung on the walls. A gigantic bed with a silk canopy took up almost half the room. And in the middle of the chamber, on a chaise lounge, sat a plump, short girl with wings. They fluttered like mad. Her mouth was fluttering like mad, too, as it tore through a turkey leg. The moaning was coming from her. Obviously she liked to eat.

  She looked up, took another bite of the turkey leg, swallowed, and then said, “Jeez, another hunchback handyman. Don’t you guys ever do anything else?”

  “Are you Willa?”

  She picked a piece of turkey not quite the size of my fist out of her teeth and said, “What’s it to ya?”

  She resembled her mother, if Gwen had a serious food addiction. I finally had an answer to my question: Yes, there are pixies who are not so goddamn cute.

  “I’m here to rescue you,” I said.

  Her eyes widened and then she screamed, “What the hell is coming out of your nose?!”

  I panicked for a split second. As a member of the undead, I often find myself in embarrassing social situations, such as when worms exit my body during interrogations or body parts fall off at dinner parties. Unsurprisingly I don’t find myself on many guest lists. Then I felt a tickle in my nose cavity and I relaxed. But just a bit.

  “That’s just my associate,” I said.

  Oswald’s soft, gelatinous body oozed out of my right nostril. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation; probably the only thing that wasn’t unpleasant about Oswald. He dropped onto the floor with a heavy plop and instantly began to transform, tightening and twisting into the shape of a tiny man.

  “Oswald, where the blazes have you been?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He was busy inching toward a potato chip under the chaise lounge.

  “I thought you were mad at me,” the homunculus said.

  “I am mad at you. I’m always mad at you.”

  “What the hell kind of hunchback are you?” Willa said.

  I leaned closer to the bars and whispered, “I’m not really a hunchback. I’m a detective. A zombie private eye, in fact. And let’s keep it down. We don’t want to arouse the ogre while we’re trying to rescue you.”

  “You don’t think Reginald will let you walk right out the door with me, do you?” Willa said.

  “Listen, we need to get you out of here. Reginald—who the hell is Reginald?”

  Willa pointed over my left shoulder.

  “He’s the ogre standing behind you.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, and then experienced the closest thing to sleep possible for a zombie.

  PLAN B

  Zombies don’t usually get headaches. So the throbbing in my skull must have been a delusion. I was praying that the straps across my chest and legs were a delusion, too, but I didn’t have much luck convincing myself.

  Thick leather belts held me to a steel table, not unlike those slabs on which corpses rest in the morgue. As if I’d know anything about that.

  The room was cozy, if you happened to be a ghoul. To my right, surgical tools were neatly laid on a long, low table. A shelf above that held various bottles and jars containing glass eyes, ceramic horns, and various other fake body parts. Stuffing lay in heaps in the far corners of the room. Another table, directly in front of me, held a padlocked wooden box and more stuffing. To my left, next to the window, hung a plaque from one of those correspondence courses, certifying one Reginald Belial Madgogg for taxidermy. So the big oaf has a middle name, too.

  Something tickled my right ear.

  Then I heard a little whiny voice. “That was your brilliant plan, huh? Just waltz in, grab the pixie, and waltz out?”

  I couldn’t see Oswald’s face, but I was sure he had that condescending look he always gets: head cocked to the side, eyes rolled up, lips pressed together. The best way to describe Oswald? Imagine a marshmallow with a mouth and X’s for eyes. I had to scratch those eyes in. If you can speak, you should have eyes. Otherwise, it’s damn creepy.

  “The best plans, Oswald, are the simplest ones,” I said.

  “Well, my dead friend, do you have a Plan B?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  Oswald hopped onto my chest. He stared at me. Now, he was wearing his I-know-something-you-don’t expression. If Oswald had pants, he’d be wetting them.

  “Well, don’t strain your worm-eaten brain thinking anymore. I learned something very interesting after that ogre clobbered you and you fell like a sack of dead kittens.”

 
“He surprised me! How was I supposed to know there was a hidden door behind me?”

  “Anyway, I hid in the cell after transforming myself into a puddle of goo. And after stowing you away in here, Madgogg came back and, boy oh boy, what a smooth-talker this guy is. He’s sweet-talking our pixie, promising her everything under the moon: jewels, midget dragons, silks, those golden fish that grant you wishes. Then get this—he promises her his soul. But he means it, literally. He tells her his soul isn’t in his body. It’s hidden on some place called Black Rock, which is suspended over the Undead Sea.”

  “Of course!” I said. “It’s an old ogre trick. They remove their souls from their bodies, because it somehow makes them invulnerable, and they hide the soul in some hard-to-reach place. Oswald, I get that soul, I hold all the cards. Either he gives me Willa or I crush his soul. It’s the perfect plan.”

  Oswald was starting to get bent out of shape, literally. His gelatinous body bulged and warped, going in and out from little man shape to blob shape. That was a bad sign.

  “There are a few problems, Jack.” It was even worse when he called me Jack.

  “Problems are my business.”

  “First of all, the soul is inside an egg...”

  “Okay.”

  “...which is inside a box...”

  “Big deal.”

  “...which is inside a goose...”

  “I can deal with a goose.”

  “...which is inside a jackal.”

  “Okay, so there are some livestock issues.”

  “That’s the least of the issues. The jackal is protected by five demons.”

  “So what? Oswald, scoot up to this Black Rock, retrieve the soul, and get back here pronto. I’ll handle the rest.”

  “Me? You want me to get the soul? I can just untie you and we’ll go—”

  “There’s no time! Go immediately!”

  “You’re still afraid of the water, aren’t you?”

  “Listen, you little freak, I’m not afraid of anything. There’s simply no time.”

  “I’ll just untie you—”

  “If you don’t leave this instant, you are out of the agency!”