The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Yeah,” said Cohen.

  “The trouble is, the stones keep on falling out,” said the troll. “And you’d never believe what those masons charge. Bloody dwarfs. You can’t trust ’em.” He leaned towards Cohen. “To tell you the truth, I’m having to work three days a week down at my brother-in-law’s lumber mill just to make ends meet.”

  “I thought your brother-in-law had a bridge?” said Cohen.

  “One of ’em has. But my wife’s got brothers like dogs have fleas,” said the troll. He looked gloomily into the torrent. “One of ’em’s a lumber merchant down in Sour Water, one of ’em runs the bridge, and the big fat one is a merchant over on Bitter Pike. Call that a proper job for a troll?”

  “One of them’s in the bridge business, though,” said Cohen.

  “Bridge business? Sitting in a box all day charging people a silver piece to walk across? Half the time he ain’t even there! He just pays some dwarf to take the money. And he calls himself a troll! You can’t tell him from a human till you’re right up close!”

  Cohen nodded understandingly.

  “D’you know,” said the troll, “I have to go over and have dinner with them every week? All three of ’em? And listen to ’em go on about moving with the times . . .”

  He turned a big, sad face to Cohen.

  “What’s wrong with being a troll under a bridge?” he said. “I was brought up to be a troll under a bridge. I want young Scree to be a troll under a bridge after I’m gone. What’s wrong with that? You’ve got to have trolls under bridges. Otherwise, what’s it all about? What’s it all for?”

  They leaned morosely on the parapet, looking down into the white water.

  “You know,” said Cohen slowly, “I can remember when a man could ride all the way from here to the Blade Mountains and never see another living thing.” He fingered his sword. “At least, not for very long.”

  He threw the butt of his cigarette into the water. “It’s all farms now. All little farms, run by little people. And fences everywhere. Everywhere you look, farms and fences and little people.”

  “She’s right, of course,” said the troll, continuing some interior conversation. “There’s no future in just jumping out from under a bridge.”

  “I mean,” said Cohen, “I’ve nothing against farms. Or farmers. You’ve got to have them. It’s just that they used to be a long way off, around the edges. Now this is the edge.”

  “Pushed back all the time,” said the troll. “Changing all the time. Like my brother-in-law Chert. A lumber mill! A troll running a lumber mill! And you should see the mess he’s making of Cutshade Forest!”

  Cohen looked up, surprised.

  “What, the one with the giant spiders in it?”

  “Spiders? There ain’t no spiders now. Just stumps.”

  “Stumps? Stumps? I used to like that forest. It was . . . well, it was darksome. You don’t get proper darksome any more. You really knew what terror was, in a forest like that.”

  “You want darksome? He’s replanting with spruce,” said Mica.

  “Spruce!”

  “It’s not his idea. He wouldn’t know one tree from another. That’s all down to Clay. He put him up to it.”

  Cohen felt dizzy. “Who’s Clay?”

  “I said I’d got three brothers-in-law, right? He’s the merchant. So he said replanting would make the land easier to sell.”

  There was a long pause while Cohen digested this.

  Then he said, “You can’t sell Cutshade Forest. It doesn’t belong to anyone.”

  “Yeah. He says that’s why you can sell it.”

  Cohen brought his fist down on the parapet. A piece of stone detached itself and tumbled down into the gorge.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s all right. Bits fall off all the time, like I said.”

  Cohen turned. “What’s happening? I remember all the big old wars. Don’t you? You must have fought.”

  “I carried a club, yeah.”

  “It was supposed to be for a bright new future and law and stuff. That’s what people said.”

  “Well, I fought because a big troll with a whip told me to,” said Mica, cautiously. “But I know what you mean.”

  “I mean it wasn’t for farms and spruce trees. Was it?”

  Mica hung his head. “And here’s me with this apology for a bridge. I feel really bad about it,” he said, “you coming all this way and everything—”

  “And there was some king or other,” said Cohen, vaguely, looking at the water. “And I think there were some wizards. But there was a king. I’m pretty certain there was a king. Never met him. You know?” He grinned at the troll. “I can’t remember his name. Don’t think they ever told me his name.”

  About half an hour later Cohen’s horse emerged from the gloomy woods on to a bleak, windswept moorland. It plodded on for a while before saying, “All right . . . how much did you give him?”

  “Twelve gold pieces,” said Cohen.

  “Why’d you give him twelve gold pieces?”

  “I didn’t have more than twelve.”

  “You must be mad.”

  “When I was just starting out in the barbarian hero business,” said Cohen, “every bridge had a troll under it. And you couldn’t go through a forest like we’ve just gone through without a dozen goblins trying to chop your head off.” He sighed. “I wonder what happened to ’em all?”

  “You,” said the horse.

  “Well, yes. But I always thought there’d be some more. I always thought there’d be some more edges.”

  “How old are you?” said the horse.

  “Dunno.”

  “Old enough to know better, then.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Cohen lit another cigarette and coughed until his eyes watered.

  “Going soft in the head!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Giving your last dollar to a troll!”

  “Yeah.” Cohen wheezed a stream of smoke at the sunset.

  “Why?”

  Cohen stared at the sky. The red glow was as cold as the slopes of hell. An icy wind blew across the steppes, whipping at what remained of his hair.

  “For the sake of the way things should be,” he said.

  “Hah!”

  “For the sake of things that were.”

  “Hah!”

  Cohen looked down.

  He grinned.

  “And for three addresses. One day I’m going to die,” he said, “but not, I think, today.”

  The air blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals. It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze. Except there were fewer and fewer wolves these days, and less and less forest.

  In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire.

  Telling stories about heroes.

  THE TOLL BRIDGE

  Harvey Jacobs

  I couldn’t resist putting this story after the previous one, because of the titles, and because the two stories, whilst very different on the surface, are remarkably similar deep down. Harvey Jacobs (b. 1930) is a much underrated author of fables, utilizing his Jewish background much like Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Only Jacobs usually goes for broke. Some of his irreverent stories will be found in The Egg of the Glak (1969). You might also check out his novel Beautiful Soup (1996).

  Dr Maxfield Shnibitz was no slave to a single discipline. He described his work as eclectic. He refused to be classified as a Freudian, Jungian, or Reichian – or any ian. He once told a seminar on Directions in Psychiatry: The New Age: “The modern analyst must be a bridge between the secular and spiritual worlds, albeit a toll bridge.” Dr Shnibitz – a stocky man with a large, round head bald at the top; a bush of a mustache; sideburns that flared; and a compassionate face – then leaned intimately toward his audience and said, “And while the tolls may be generous, they take a toll.” Dealing wit
h the anguished, the off-center, even the mildly troubled was exhausting, and Dr Shnibitz did not feel overpaid.

  His reward was not all monetary, of course. Occasionally he helped a patient achieve a “breakthrough”, and he played midwife to the birth of a restructured soul. He had been catalyst for amazing change, and those patients who were fortunate enough to shed burdens of fuzzy guilt for a fresh, positive outlook were obviously grateful. Sometimes they gave him presents.

  Such was the case with a man who came in a basket case and climbed successfully from his basket after years of turmoil. During his final session he handed Dr Shnibitz an amulet on a gold chain. “I actually bought this thing from a psychic in Albania,” the cured man said. “That’s a measure of how bad off I was. She told me it was a power symbol that once belonged to a werewolf or some damn thing that went broke and pawned it. That was before the country went Commie. She’s probably the minister of culture now.” Dr Shnibitz accepted the gift without commenting on the symbolic overtones. The redeemed patient was handing his doctor something he himself had redeemed, an amulet that linked him to magic, the uncontrolled, a kingdom of shadows, the dark forces of madness, no longer a threat. He was handing his bit of ersatz power to the man powerful enough to overcome those demons. Dr Shnibitz just smiled from his ample face and shook hands with his departing patient. It was the first time they had ever touched physically, and it satisfied the psychiatrist that the hand he gripped was dry, the handshake firm and confident.

  The amulet was put in a desk drawer. That night, after finishing with his caseload, Dr Shnibitz was filled with a strange curiosity about the object. He took it out of the drawer and laid it on his desk. It was shaped like a pyramid and made from some amalgam of stone, metal, and bone. His fingers brushed over it; there was a porous quality, slightly gritty, like stroking a dry sponge. God knows what it was made of or when or why. A friend of Dr Shnibitz brought back an amulet from Africa formed of rag and wood chips that turned out to be home to a devilish larva. Worms infested the poor man’s apartment. They had to be bombed by exterminators using chemicals that made the place smell like a toxic dump. The amulet on Dr Shnibitz’s desk did not seem like it would harbor anything organic. It felt cold, lifeless. He decided it was no hive or nest.

  Besides, the patient had worn it for years. Curiously, it was never mentioned during their hundreds of sessions. Had it been, the timetable of discovery and recovery might have been quickened. Treasured objects often mirror the most secret images. They can be valuable shortcuts to the core of infection. Perhaps that is why they are so defended. Dr Shnibitz was hurt that his patient had never spoken of the amulet, and he laughed alone in his office to find himself reacting like a child. It was, as they say, “water under the bridge”.

  More interesting was the fact that the patient had actually purchased such a talisman. The man ran a successful business, was married, had children. For all his problem he was a creature of this scientific century. Yet he paid American dollars for something he knew to be worthless. Maybe that was the motivation, a shared sense of worthlessness. Or was it simple, old-fashioned desperation? What had Nixon’s daughter said to the press? “Never underestimate the power of fear.” Well, the patient was no longer a patient, no longer troubled, a closed file.

  Dr Shnibitz wished he could say the same about himself. In recent months he had felt a growing dissatisfaction with his own life. He found himself angry at patients who complained of things that were no more than the ordinary viruses of life. He was bored by transparent dreams and frustrated ambitions that were never worthy of achieving. Dr Shnibitz suspected his own burnout. He needed a vacation, a change, but he could think of no place he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to see.

  Stroking the amulet, his mind wandered to exotic places on the globe – Marrakesh, Tahiti, the isles of Greece, Kyoto – and rejected them one by one. No, it was not a vacation he needed. It was some kind of challenge. He knew that the patient who would replace the patient who left would come trembling with doubt, armed against ghosts that would prove to be made from curds of milk from some denying tit; that he would have to listen to hours and hours of the same old crap, the moaning and groaning, the evasions and denials, and, finally, with luck, confrontation and rejoicing. Another triumph, another little gift, and on and on and on. The truth about people is that they are often duller than dishwater . . . dishwater is a complex swirl about to confront the ultimate drain. Most neurotics confront nothing more than their own borders. Perspective sets them free. They leave satisfied with their limitations. They find strength in the acceptance of weakness. And often they grow arrogant with their new identity as blades of grass, not towering trees, on the human landscape. With that knowledge they go on to intimidate other neurotics, and so on and on and on.

  Dr Shnibitz let out a long, loud sigh. He remembered the case of a secretary who was terrified when she thought of all the papers she would type over a lifetime. She saw them as an Everest of papers. She had been saved with the insight that she would type up pages one at a time. That was enough to liberate her from nightmares. Actually, it should have caused worse nightmares for the poor woman. But she became a more efficient secretary, eventually an office manager, then a vice president, and she still sent a card every Christmas. She also referred patients. Sic transit.

  A challenge, enormous challenge, combat. Maybe that would open arteries clogged with predictability and send a rush of blood to the large eggplant brain under Dr Shnibitz’s bald pate. The doctor found himself tapping at his skull. He also found himself sucking the amulet like a lollipop. Sometime during his meditations he had unconsciously put the trinket into his mouth. It was his first unconscious gesture in years. He marveled while he tongued the weird thing, the gold chain dangling from his lips like dribble, and he thought, “Maybe it is time for the travel folders.”

  There was a loud noise in Dr Shnibitz’s reception room. He jumped. His own secretary had left early to make a theater curtain. There were no arrivals scheduled. The building had experienced several burglaries despite a good security system, and Dr Shnibitz realized that he might become a statistic. The evening news might carry pictures of his dead body.

  There was somebody out there, no question. He could hear sounds of an intruder, even hard breathing. Some of his colleagues carried guns, had cans of Mace, warned him to be prepared. Theirs was a hazardous profession at best. But Dr Shnibitz was a peaceable man who called himself a “black-belt conversationalist”. His conceit was that he could negotiate himself out of any danger. At that moment he wasn’t so sure. Suppose the thief were drugged beyond the spell of spoken word? Bang, it would be over. He would cease to exist as a man and become a scholarship, a memory, a collection of papers stored in a university library. He plucked the amulet from his mouth. How would the police interpret that? It would send them after some voodoo cult in Brooklyn.

  To remain silent was the wrong tack. Better to announce his presence. That would be enough to frighten most petty criminals. And whoever it was would find his way into the consulting room anyhow. Dr Shnibitz said in a strong voice, “Yes, who is it? Who are you and what do you want?”

  The response was a guttural gurgle mingled with a growl. It was not a person out there, no felon; it was an animal, a beast, a predator. Dr Shnibitz felt an old fear, the kind he once knew in the pitch dark of his parents’ beach house on Cape Cod when the ocean seemed to lick at the windows. Well, he had learned to cope with that kind of terror. He took deep, slow breaths, moving quietly toward the thick office door. He flipped the lock, heard the bolt set. Whatever was out there would not have an easy time getting in. Dr Shnibitz ran for his telephone. There was not time to dial.

  The consultation room door disintegrated. It splintered and fell apart. Holding the phone, paralyzed with sheer amazement, Dr Shnibitz saw what was standing there looking in at him. It was only a shape at first, like a fogbank, like steam spitting from a sewer grate. Then it crystallized. Dr Shnibitz put down the telep
hone.

  A man watched. The shape became a man. A man with horns. No, a man wearing a helmet that sprouted horns. A man with a bull’s head. No, the face was human, mustached, bearded with a prow for a nose and enormous blue eyes. And the neck, thick as a thigh, a pedestal. The body, a chunk, a rock, covered in furs – black fur, brown fur, white fur. Braceleted arms, poles with gold rings, hanging apelike from the trunk. Bare legs dangling, stubby legs heavy and muscled, the feet protected by boots made from russet leather skins. The man grunted at Dr Shnibitz but made no move.

  Instinctively, Dr Shnibitz positioned himself behind his formidable desk. He sat in his chair, keeping control, aware that he fused with the desk, became a centaur with a mahogany frame. He knew the effect of that combination on even the most disturbed patients. It calmed them to be in such a presence.

  “You have no appointment,” Dr Shnibitz said. “Leave now. Call my secretary, Ms Rosen, in the morning. She’ll give you a proper time.”

  The visitor came forward and paused at the Eames Chair where new patients sat outlining their misery. Great hands fondled the chair, then grabbed it up off its base and cracked it in two. The hands lifted the metal base and twisted it. The metal bent and finally fractured.

  “Impressive,” said Dr Shnibitz. “But hardly sensible. You’re going to be billed for damages. I suggest you restrain yourself. We both know you’re strong. Now tell me what you want here?”

  “I am Attila.”

  “The Hun?”

  “Of course the Hun.”

  “Your fixation is that you are Attila the Hun?”

  “No fixation. It’s who I am. The damned, accursed, blood-thirsty son-of-a-bitch Teuton who terrorized the civilized world and ate babies for dessert.”

  “Very well. I am Dr Maxfield Shnibitz.”