Ben Soul

by Richard George

“Not at first. I married her because I needed a wife to get a church. She was a good prospect, I thought, for a preacher’s wife. She seemed to be demure; she’d grown up in the church.” He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. Val put a hand on his shoulder, to comfort him. He shrugged it off. “I learned to love her as I lived with her. I grew accustomed to her soul. I couldn’t see her vicious streak. Maybe she didn’t have one, then.”

  “That vicious streak has always been part of her,” Val said. “Every one of us has the capacity to be vile. Most of us suppress it most of the time. Vanna doesn’t. She operates from it continuously. Probably has since her childhood, or maybe even her birth.”

  “You make it sound almost like original sin.”

  “Original sin? Could be. I don’t understand Christian doctrine.” They were silent for a while, watching the sun westering low on the horizon.

  “There is a place and a function for you,” Val said. “It’s not in the mind-meld.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody has to keep alert in this world, to prevent physical harm. We don’t know what Vanna can do, or what allies she’ll bring with her.”

  “And you think I can do that?”

  “Yes. It’s a situation where your rational mind must be in control.”

  “You’ll be in the mind-meld?” Dickon’s green eyes were pleading for something. Val wasn’t quite sure what.

  “Yes.”

  “Take care of Ben,” Dickon said, and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “It’s too late for me to find anybody else.”

  “I will take care of Ben,” Val said. “We’d better go back, before the tide swallows the path.”

  “We should,” Dickon said. They carefully walked along the surf’s edge on the few stones above water. At the main beach they turned their backs on the scarlet-fingered sunset tincturing the wine dark whale road with bloody highlights.

  Vanna’s Vengeance

  The Reverend Eaton Hamm stumbled into death as he had stumbled through life. Ordinarily he took his evening constitutional on Hickory Bark Lane. That fateful night, he mistook his usual turn, and went along Birch Bark Court. He was walking past Barry Cooda’s home when Vanna set off her psychic brain bomb. Barry was unaffected, Reverend Hamm died. Right there, on the sidewalk, he fell, his gray matter turned to pitiful putty in his skull. He left, behind him, his wife, Westphalia Hamm, a lifetime’s pile of sermon manuscripts (a voluminous record of theological pap that pleased, but never nourished, a string of forgettable congregations), and a yellow stain on the sidewalk where his over-full bladder broke as he died and fell. The coroner listed his death as “by natural causes,” and Reverend Hamm was duly buried in the Las Tumbas cemetery with full religious rites.

  Vanna had worked over a month setting up this particular brain bomb. Barry had earned her everlasting enmity when he prosecuted her trial, the one that had sent her to El Serrucho Oxidado. Studying Barry’s schedule had used up a week. When Vanna was certain she had pinpointed his habits, she began work on her weapon. Brain bombs were tricky things to make. Selection of the proper cone-shaped root (Vanna had finally chosen a fat, short, carrot) had taken several days of prowling vegetable bins and flower shops. Focusing the thrust of the psychic power required several nights of chanting and prancing widdershins, at least according to the book Vanna stole from the Las Tumbas library. Then she had to construct a prop to hold the carrot in position, its sharp point aimed at the window where Barry invariably took his evening meal. This window was on the second story, so the carrot had to aim high. Vanna used an alarm clock, powered by a potato battery, to set the time of detonation. When the brain bomb went off, its signal passed through Reverend Hamm’s brain, making mush of it.

  Barry, as it happens, was having dinner with Dan Druff, and so would not have been affected by the bomb. Perhaps Vanna should have lingered to ignite the bomb when she could be sure of her target, but she had other folk to fry. From Barry and the bomb she had turned her attention to Bertha Van Nation, her one time secretary, and, she had thought, confidant. Bertha’s testimony had been crucial in sending Vanna to El Serrucho Oxidado.

  The Las Tumbas Epitaph had provided Vanna the opportunity she sought. Bertha was to appear live on the local television station as the author of her romance novels. This time Vanna elected to employ less exotic means than a brain bomb. She thought simple electrocution would quite suffice. During the night before Bertha’s appearance on The Ann Jovi Show, Vanna, in her cleaning lady persona, slipped into the studio and wired the guest chair. Since she was using electric power, unfortunately, she had to work in the dark. She secreted a pressure switch in the chair’s cushion, and wired the chair to deliver all the station’s power in a single surge. She carefully cleaned away any trace of her presence, and went home. The Ann Jovi Show was an early morning offering. Vanna, in an obscure motel room, turned on the television to watch Bertha fry. Bertha was confused by the directions she got from the show’s behind-the-scenes staff, and sat in the host chair. Ann Jovi, not wanting to put her guest at a disadvantage, quietly took the guest chair. Ann was a slender wisp of a woman, and inclined to perch on the edge of chairs. She didn’t immediately trigger the electric current. She began her interview with Bertha.

  “Ms. Van Nation,” she said, “you are noted for your steamy plots and daring dialogue in the romance novels you write. Do you write from life?”

  “No, Ann,” Bertha said. “It’s all imaginary. Nobody I know has ever lived the wild kind of lives I write about.”

  “How do you get your ideas? Where do they come from?”

  Bertha frowned in concentration. “I’m not sure where they come from,” she said. “I imagine a character in a situation, and write from there.”

  “For example,” Ann said, smiling into the camera, “you imagined Hillary Heloise Habsburg in that ruined manor house ‘somewhere in the darker parts of England’ and went from there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you come to create such a wonderful villainess as Vivian Valdore, who’s in the same book?”

  “Oh, I modeled her on a woman I worked for, who’s in prison now. Then I added traits of several other unpleasant women I knew along the way.”

  “The hero, Almondo, is he modeled on anyone?”

  “Yes. My beloved husband.”

  “You are very clever, indeed,” Ann said. “We must break for a commercial, now. We’ll see you after the break.” When the director signaled she had cut to the commercial, Ann leaned over toward Bertha. “You’re a very good interview,” she said. “I think it’s going very well.”

  “Thank you,” Bertha said. She watched Ann adjust herself backward into the chair. Ann had pressed her hands down on the arms to lift her body into the chair, and so she dropped herself right on the pressure switch in the cushion. The station went dark, except for the ethereal blue light of the frying Ann Jovi. Ever afterward, Bertha, who had been fond of meats, ate only vegetable matter. Even mushrooms reminded her too much of the frying hostess. Investigators never determined who had rigged the chair, and were never certain whether it had been meant for Ann Jovi or Bertha Van Nation.

  Vanna didn’t know how badly she had missed cooking Bertha’s goose. She was so determined to plunge ahead to destroy Dickon, and this little refuge La Señora had built that she didn’t stay to watch the pyrotechnics on the Ann Jovi show. First she must reconnoiter the scene. Trusting her disguise, she decided to spend one or two nights at the San Danson Station Motel.

  The Girl Scouts

  Harry Pitts did not recognize Vanna when she checked in. She wore her green suit, and a large hat with a floppy brim. The hat, also green, was trimmed with artificial cherries. She registered as Donna D’Schuys, guessing the name was now out of play, and she could safely use it again.

  Vanna began with a stroll along the beach. The wind was high, and tangled her hair. Gulls swooped at her. She f
eared they might land on her head, or worse yet, leave her offerings of a semi-liquid kind. In the cove, the Crablord suffered indigestion and dark dreams, which disorders he attributed, at first, to eating mussels out of season. The killdeer scattered before her like leaves hustled along a street by an autumnal wind. Far out to sea a whale migrating south swung seaward to avoid the uncanny unease prickling in its baleen. Vanna strolled along the beach, hoping to observe the Village unseen.

  Several people saw her. They knew she was from the motel. Harry had announced her signing in as soon as he could tell the first person. Everyone was on edge about strangers. Malcolm Drye watched her wander along the wavelets at the edge of the sand. The Swami peered out his window from time to time to see what she was up to. Ben and Dickon were away that day, and might not have recognized Vanna at a distance, anyway. Butter was troubled, and barked furiously while Vanna was at the seaward end of the beach. No one was at home to hear her, however, so little good it did her to make herself hoarse.

  Vanna’s reconnoitering told her little. The tramp to the sea and back to the motel tired her. The breast augmentation surgery Dr. Porter House had performed was leaching destructive chemicals into Vanna’s system. Slowly her left breast was beginning to turn to point nipple downward at the ground as the lower