“Good. Now come with me into the living room. It’s a tight squeeze with your coffin in there, but we’ll manage.”
His furry gut dragged as he followed his friend from the kitchen. Doodlebug opened the lid of the piano case that served as Jules’s coffin.
“Take a peek inside. You should find this very interesting.”
Whatever was inside smelled weirdly familiar. He trotted up to the big wooden box, placed his front paws on the edge, and peered in. The thing that had invaded his coffin certainly didn’tlook familiar. It was like a huge, pulsating slug, but a slug that couldn’t hold a steady shape for more than a second or two. It filled most of the floor of the box; Jules guessed it was between six inches and a foot deep. He couldn’t tell what color it was, of course, but the shadings and the blotchy patterns on its surface shifted as frequently as its shape did.
Why the hell did the thing smell so damnfamiliar?… With a start of recognition, Jules realized what the peculiar odor reminded him of. The big, amorphous slug smelled exactly likehe did, himself, after a few lazy nights of skipping showers, drinking coffee, and lying around in his undershirt reading old comic books.
“Change back to your normal shape now. But keep your eyes on that thing in your coffin.”
Jules did as Doodlebug requested. As his hind legs unbent and his arms lengthened and his nose shortened, he watched the grayish blob. While he was changing, it gradually grew smaller, like a tubful of dirty, soapy bathwater disappearing down the drain. But the piano box didn’thave a drain. By the time he was on hands and knees instead of hind paws and forepaws, the slug-thingie was entirely gone. He reached in and touched the soil. The dirt was dry and crumbly, just as it had been the last time he’d slept. Whatever the thing had been, it had left no trace of itself.
“Holy mackerel,” Jules muttered. “What the hellwas that? And where the hell did it go?”
Doodlebug crouched down beside his friend and placed his arm on Jules’s shoulder. “That was the part of you that you weren’t using at the time. As for where it went, when you needed it again, it vanished from your coffin to rejoin the rest of you.”
Still naked, Jules leaned against the side of the couch and covered his privates by squeezing together his trunklike thighs. What Doodlebug was implying made him dizzy. “Come again?”
“You heard me. It’syou. And I think you suspected it yourself while you were a wolf. I watched your nose twitch very sharply while you were leaning over into the box.”
Jules rubbed his forehead wearily. His life was taking yet another turn toward the bizarre, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “Yeah, I heard you. I’m just not sure Ibelieve you.” The whole notion made him nauseated, as if he’d just watched himself having open-heart surgery. “How come no vampire I ever met knew about this-this slug-thingie?”
“There’s a very simple reason. How many vampires bother to peek back inside their coffins after they’ve transformed into another shape? Not many. And vampires tend to be solitary. Most large predators tend to keep to themselves, with the notable exceptions of lions and killer whales. So it’s not as if many vampires would have a companion who might notice this unusual phenomenon. My Tibetan teachers, however, have lived in very close quarters with one another for untold centuries. On a wintery night in the very distant past, one among them made the shocking discovery of where all that extra mass goes when vampire-man becomes vampire-other.”
Jules was more perplexed than ever. “‘Extra mass’? Whoa! Don’t forget, you’re talkin‘ to a guy with a ninth-grade education here. And half ofthat was in catechism. Keep it simple, will ya?”
Doodlebug smiled gently and helped Jules to his feet. “Come back into the kitchen and I’ll make a pot of coffee.”
Jules pulled his pants and shirt back on, then sat at the kitchen table. Soon the air was alive with the blessed odor of chicory.
“Have you ever read anything about Einstein’s theories regarding mass and energy?” Doodlebug asked.
Jules scowled. “Does the pope bless abortions in a whorehouse?”
“Ohh-kay. I’ll do my best to keep this, uh, basic, then.” He poured two mugs of coffee and joined his friend at the table. “One of Professor Einstein’s most famous theories regarding how the universe works is called the Conservation of Mass. All of the ‘stuff’ in the universe can be classified as either matter-like you or me-or energy, like sunlight. All things that are made of matter have mass.”
“You mean weight, right?”
“Well, that’s a limited way of looking at it. But if it’s easier for you to think about it that way, yes, mass can be thought of as weight. Getting back to our friend Einstein, the good professor said that mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Under certain very unusual circumstances, such as a nuclear chain reaction, mass can be converted to energy, but mass can never simply disappear. Now, when you just changed to a wolf, not only your shape changed. Your mass, or weight, changed, too. You went from a man of approximately four hundred and fifty pounds to a wolf of, oh, I’d guesstimate about two hundred. That extra two hundred and fifty pounds or so didn’t disappear. And it wasn’t converted into energy, either. Or else the entire state of Louisiana and a good part of Mississippi would be a smoldering crater now. The mass had togo somewhere.”
Jules took a long, deep gulp of coffee. “So you’re sayin‘ it went into my coffin.”
“Yes. You saw it and smelled it yourself. It didn’tlook anything like you because it was undifferentiated proto-matter, temporarily separated from the conscious and subconscious organizing power of your brain. But I could tell that your supersensitive wolf nose found the proto-matter’s odor intimately familiar.”
Jules winced. “Jeezus… I reallystink, then.” He took another swallow and was lost in thought for a minute. “So you’re tellin‘ me thisalways happens, every time I change into somethin’ else? My extra mass, or whatever, goes back to my coffin, like a batter runnin‘ to home base?”
“Yes. Actually, to be more exact, your extra mass goes back to the last place you slept. If you’d slept last night in the trunk of your Lincoln, that’s where we would’ve found that slug-thingie. This behavior is most likely what originated the custom of vampires putting soil on the floors of their coffins. Maybe some prehistoric vampire discovered that the isolated proto-matter needs soil’s nourishment to remain viable.”
Jules waved his hands in front of his face as if he were swatting pesky mosquitoes. “Whoa! Just when I think I’m startin‘ to follow what you’re sayin’, you zoom up into the clouds again. Look, this is real interesting and all; it’s like watchin‘ an episode ofThe Outer Limits and discoverin’ that I’m the special guest star. But why the heck does this matter right now? You said you was gonna teach me to be a better vampire, somethin‘ that could help me fight Malice X better.”
Doodlebug smiled again, but his eyes betrayed glimmers of irritation. “Jules, you’re not letting me finish. There’s more. Alot more. You’re capable of feats you’ve never even imagined. Let me show you an example.”
Doodlebug’s face hardened with concentration. His slender form began wavering, and a thick mist escaped from his blouse and skirt. A moment later he stood in front of Jules as a little girl-complete with pigtails-who looked about eight years old. With his clothes all billowy, Doodlebug might have been a cross-dressing tyke who’d snuck into his mother’s closet and tried on her fancy party outfit.
“Oh, I see how this could bereal useful in a dustup with Malice X,” Jules said.
Doodlebug didn’t smile. “Just go to the bedroom and look inside my coffin.”
Jules got up from the table, edged around the piano case in the living room, and walked to the four-poster bed in the next room back. He opened the lid of Doodlebug’s coffin. Inside was another pulsating slug-thingie. Only this slug-thingie was much smaller than his own had been; if his proto-matter had weighed 250 pounds, this blob had to be about a tenth that size, maybe 25, 35 pounds.
; Suddenly the proto-matter began to vanish from the coffin, disappearing down a nonexistent drain just as the other one had. When it was entirely gone, Doodlebug called to Jules in a high, childlike voice, “All right, now come back into the kitchen.”
The mini version of Doodlebug was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs with a large black cat purring contentedly on his lap. Two other cats, a big orange tabby and a white Siamese, rubbed against the loose folds of hosiery bunched around his skinny legs.
The tabby trotted over to Jules and began rubbing aggressively against his leg. The big vampire’s nose twitched. His sneeze made the windows rattle.
“Ohh maannn… get these damn catsoutta here! I got pet allergies like you wouldn’t believe.” He rubbed his nose and tweaked it from side to side. “Where the hell’d they come from, anyway? They the owner’s?”
Doodlebug called to the tabby with a nod of his head. The big orange cat left Jules’s leg and hopped up on Doodlebug’s lap. “No. They’re mine. More precisely, they’reme.”
“Huh?”
“You watched the proto-matter in my coffin disappear, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, sure, but… since when could a vampire change into acat? Much lessthree cats?”
“Didn’t you tell me that Malice X changed into a black panther?”
“Well, yeah. But I figured that was just ‘cause he was a black guy. I figured, y’know, maybe black vampires follow different rules or somethin’ from us white vampires. Like I can change to a couple of animals from Europe, where my people come from, so I guess he could change to a couple of animals from Africa.”
Doodlebug’s hands kept the two cats on his lap satiated with pleasure. The third cat, the Siamese, sniffed and scratched at the cottage’s back door, perhaps sensing the pondful of fat goldfish waiting outside. “That’s not a bad supposition, Jules. Actually, there’s a germ of truth in what you said, although not in the way you’d think. Let me ask you this: After you became a vampire, how did you first learn that you could transform into a bat, a wolf, or mist?”
Jules pulled one of the kitchen chairs as far away from the three cats as he could and sat down. “I dunno. I guess Mo taught me.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin and thought some more. “Come to think of it, I guess I already knew I’d be able to do those things, even before Mo told me anything at all.”
“How so?”
“Oh, y’know, readin‘ vampire stories inArgosy as a kid. And there were even some movies I saw. Silent movies at the big theaters on Canal Street.”
“So when you first became a vampire, you already knew what vampires could do.”
“Sure.”
“And how do you suppose Maureen learned about it before she gave you lessons?”
“Heck, same way I did, I guess. Some older vampire taught her. And she probably already knew about vampires even before that, from readin‘ novels or penny dreadfuls. How about you? How’d you learn? When I first approached you outside that candy store, you knew exactly what I was offerin’.”
Doodlebug smiled. “Oh, I used toswim in vampire lore.Weird Tales, comic books, movies-Dracula’s Daughter,Son of Dracula,Mark of the Vampire — I saw them all. By the time I met you, I knew perfectly well what to expect. And that’s my point.”
Jules looked mystified. “I lost ya somewhere.”
“When it came to vampires, I knew what to expect: Vampires sleep in coffins. They need to drink blood every couple of nights or so. They can change into three other forms-bat, wolf, and mist. So when I became one myself, I only tried doing those things I already believed vampires were capable of. I was limited by what Ithought I knew.”
“Are you sayin‘ vampires can change intoanything?”
“Notanything, no. But my Tibetan teachers showed me that the range of possible transformations is far, far more varied than the three options that became part of the petrified forest of European legends. One could spend a hundred lifetimes attempting to master all the possible permutations. Some of my teachers have devoted centuries to that very quest.”
“Hold on a minute. Malice X never went to Tibet to study with them monks. How comehe could change himself to a panther?”
“I can only assume he wasn’t exposed to media portrayals of black vampires that would’ve affected his mind-set when he became one himself. Even if he was familiar with the same movies and stories that you and I grew up with, they didn’t mold him and limit him in quite the same way. There may be African folk legends he was exposed to that center on men transforming into panthers.”
“Let’s see if I got this down. What you’re basically sayin‘ is, what we can do as vampires is all a mind-over-matter kinda thing, right? Like them Indian guys who can walk across fire barefoot, just ’cause theythink it ain’t gonna hurt them none.”
“Exactly.”
“So the next time I run into Malice X, I can change myself to King Kong and stomp the creep into a smear on the sidewalk?”
“I’m afraidthat particular transformation is out of the question. Remember what I said about mass? Mass can’t be created or destroyed. But thereis something you can do that Malice X cannot. And the wonderful thing is, you can do it thanks to a personal attribute you’ve always considered a handicap.”
“Oh yeah? What would that be?”
“Jules, unlike me or Malice X, you areblessed with mass. Four hundred and fifty pounds of it. Forget about trying to recruit a platoon of followers. You don’t need them. With some guidance and practice, you could will yourself to become a trio of hundred-and-fifty-pound vampires.”
Jules walked along a twisting, looping path of yellow chalk his friend had drawn on the concrete floor of Maureen’s basement. Doodlebug, now six inches tall, sat on his shoulder.
“Faster,” the Barbie-doll-sized Doodlebug said. He struck Jules’s shoulder repeatedly with an iced tea spoon. The tiny blows didn’t sting, but they were irritating.
“Hey, is that really necessary?” Jules said as he resentfully plodded around the maze.
“I’m the bird that taps against the window.”
“Thewhat?”
“The distraction that will inevitably present itself at your most crucial and vulnerable moment of concentration. Remember, you’re learning to form and control multiple bodies, which requires the clear mind and keen mental vision of the finest archer. You’ll need to maintain this pure mental state in deadly combat, surrounded by perhaps dozens of enemy vampires, explosions, and flying projectiles. Even the tiniest distraction while you are manipulating multiple bodies could prove fatal, if you let it. Now walk the pathfaster.”
Doodlebug whacked his earlobe with the spoon, which really hacked Jules off. He’d show that pint-sized pest. Aping Jackie Gleason’s nimbleHoneymooners dance steps, he pirouetted and dipped along the path, careful to keep his toes precisely on the chalk line. He felt Doodlebug grab hold of his collar, and he smiled as he heard the spoon clatter to the floor.
“That was the easy part,” Doodlebug said. “Nursery school. I don’t think you’ll be able to take this next exercise so lightly.”
Jules stared at the electric train set. Doodlebug had instructed him to assemble it so that the tracks crisscrossed the yellow chalk line. The train was a souvenir from Jules’s and Maureen’s happier days together, a hobby they’d shared on those long nights when there was nothing good on TV and one or both of them weren’t in the mood for sex. He was surprised Maureen had hung on to it. He finished assembling the looping track, complete with tunnel, bridge, flashing crossing lights, and New England-style town center. Then he placed the locomotive and its ten connecting cars on the track and hooked the electric control box into a wall socket.
While Jules was on his hands and knees, Doodlebug shimmied up his sleeve to his shoulder. “Very good. Turn on the train to its maximum speed. You are to walk the chalk path, counterclockwise. Here’s the complicated part: You must time your movement so that wherever the chalk path and the train tracks cross, you and the train r
each that intersection simultaneously. You are not permitted to stop and wait for the train to arrive-you may slow or quicken your steps, but you must keep moving at all times.”
Jules eyed the layout carefully. The chalk path and the train tracks intersected at six points, arrayed at nearly even intervals around the basement. It didn’t look too hard.
It was harder than it looked.
Six attempts later-make that three crushed model autos, five flattened pedestrians, and one crumpled church steeple later-Jules made it around the entire course successfully, meeting the train at each intersection. He sat heavily on a bench by the wall, toweling off his dripping forehead and neck as if he’d just run the Crescent City Classic.
He grinned a Cheshire cat smile, despite his exhaustion. “How aboutthat, Tinkerbell? I think I earned myself a coffee break.”
“Actually, Jules, I was just about to suggest that you brew a pot of coffee…”
Ten minutes later Jules stood at the starting line again. This time, however, he held a china cup and saucer in each hand. Both cups were filled with steaming-hot coffee. Doodlebug had returned to his normal size and shed his Barbie clothes for a black leather skirt, neon-pink tank top, and black vinyl thigh-high boots. He sat on a stool with the train set’s control box in his lap.
“I’d like to seeyou do this, hotshot,” Jules grumbled.
“Oh, those monks had me doing much more unpleasant things than this,” Doodlebug answered brightly.
“Yeah? Well, I still think this is a dumb-ass idea. This is Mo’s best china you got me messin‘ with here. I bust any of it up, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“That’ll give you all the more incentive to concentrate, won’t it? On your mark, get set-”
Doodlebug switched on the train’s juice. The coffee cups clattered jarringly as Jules headed down his increasingly hateful path. He made the first intersection. Despite much clattering of cups and saucers, he timed the train’s journey through the tunnel perfectly and made the second intersection with nary a spill. At the third intersection, however, his right toe clipped the corner of a trestle bridge as the train passed over it.
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 26
