The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  As he reached her, and would have lifted her over the sill, Leejee held back, and indicated by gestures that she wished to await Havler’s shout of despair when he should first feel the growth on his cranium.

  At that very moment, down in the Royal Furnace Room, the queen, with the aid of a long heat-proof pole (the fires were very white-hot), thrust the parchment, with its damning signature, full into the flames. It hissed, turned brown, then black, then flared into leaping needles of red fire and was gone. At that instant, the orange turban sagged, lost its contours, and fell about the shoulders of the happy queen.

  Simultaneously with the immolation of the parchment, a horrified scream rang through the feather-pit room of Havler Grem. Leejee heard it and smiled, and then her smile turned uncertain and died. The scream did not seem to emerge from the dark recesses of the feather-pit. She listened more carefully, and tried to divine the source of that eerie, piteously hopeless noise. Ah! It came from behind her. Leejee turned about. There was none behind her save Garnel, her lover. But what had happened to him!?! Leejee’s cowlike eyes widened even more than their usual width as she watched with horror the greenish, stiff, leafy thing that burgeoned gently upward through the blue curls of Garnel’s hair. For, so all-absorbing and all-engrossing was Leejee’s love for Garnel that she had written his name by mistake. Leejee, with a soft cry, swooned dead away on the floor of the room, while Garnel just kept screaming for the longest time . . .

  Or, at least, that is the tale told nowadays around the campfires of the Carrot-Eaters (to the south), when their Bachelor King, Garnel of the Tall Hat, is not about the place . . .

  WU-LING’S FOLLY

  Alan Dean Foster

  For a period Alan Dean Foster (b. 1946) was amongst the most prolific novelizers of movies, including Star Wars (1976) and Alien (1979) and its sequels, Clash of the Titans (1981), Krull (1983) and Pale Rider (1987), yet despite this Foster has succeeded in developing and maintaining his own voice with a multitude of his own stories and novels since his first story was published in 1971. Probably his best-known fantasy books are the Spellsinger series, which started with Spellsinger at the Gate (1983). He has produced many short stories, of which those in The Metrognome and Other Stories (1990) contain some of his most humorous. He has also edited two anthologies of humorous fantasies, Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves (1991) and Betcha Can’t Read Just One (1993). Back in 1982 he started a series of stories about a giant North American woodsman, Amos Malone, of which the following story was the first; the stories are available in book form as Mad Amos (1996).

  Hunt and MacLeish had worked for the Butterfield Line for six and seven years, respectively. They’d fought Indians, and been through growler storms that swept down like a cold dream out of the eastern Rockies, and seen rattlers as big around the middle as a horse’s leg. All that, they could cope with; they’d seen it all before. The dragon, though, was something new. You couldn’t blame ’em much for panicking a little when the dragon hit the stagecoach.

  “I’m tellin’ ya,” Hunt was declaring to the Butterfield agent in Cheyenne, “it were the biggest, ugliest, scariest-lookin’ dang bird you ever saw, Mr Fraser, sir!” He glanced back at his driver for confirmation.

  “Yep. S’truth.” Archie MacLeish was a man of few words and much tobacco juice. He was tough as pemmican and as hard to handle, but the incident had turned a few more of the brown-stained whiskers in his copious beard gray as an old Confederate uniform.

  “It come down on us, Mr Fraser, sir,” Hunt continued emphatically, “like some great winged devil raised up by an angry Boston Temperance marcher, a-screamin’ and a-hollerin’ and a-blowin’ fire out of a mouth filled with ugly, snaggled teeth. ’Twere a sight fit t’raise the departed. I gave it both barrels of Evangeline,” he indicated the trusty ten-gauge resting in a corner of the office, “and it ne’er even blinked. Ain’t that right, Archie?”

  “Yep,” confirmed the driver, firing accurately into the bronze-inlaid steel spittoon set at a corner of the big walnut desk.

  “I see.” The Butterfield agent was a pleasant, sympathetic gentleman in his early fifties. Delicate muttonchop whiskers compensated somewhat for the glow the sun brought forth from his naked forehead. His trousers were supported by overloaded suspenders which made dark tracks across an otherwise immaculate white shirt. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, both Archie and me was ready t’meet our maker. You got to understand, Mr Fraser, sir, this varmint were bigger than coach and team together. Why, them poor horses like t’die afore we coaxed and sweet-talked ’em into town. They’re bedded down in the company stable right now, still shakin’ at the knees.

  “Anyways, this ugly bird just reached down with one claw the size o’ my Aunt Molly’s Sunday dress and plucked the strongbox right off the top, snappin’ the guy ropes like they was made o’ straw. Then it flew off, still a-screechin’ and a-brayin’ like the grandfather of jackasses toward the Medicine Bow Mountains.”

  “God’s Truth,” said the driver.

  “This is all most interesting,” Fraser mumbled. Now, while known as a sympathetic man, the Butterfield agent would have been somewhat disinclined to believe the tale to which his two employees were swearing, save for the fact that MacLeish and Hunt were still standing in front of his desk rather than cavorting drunk and debauched in the fleshpots of Denver, spending free and easy the ten thousand in gold which the missing strongbox had contained.

  And, of course, there was also the confirmation afforded by the stage’s three passengers, a reputable Mormon rancher from Salt Lake and two of his wives. At the moment, the ladies were under the care of a local physician who was treating them for shock.

  “Couldn’t it have been a williwaw?” he asked hopefully.

  “Nope,” said MacLeish, striking with unerring accuracy into the spittoon a second time. “ ’Tweren’t the likes o’ no wind or beastie I ever seed nor heard tell of, Mr Fraser. I kinna say more than the truth.” He squinted hard at the agent. “D’ye doubt our word?”

  “No, no, certainly not. It’s only that I have no idea how I am to report the nature of this loss to the Company. If you’d been held up, that they would understand. But this . . . you must understand my position, gentlemen. There will be questions.”

  “And you should’ve been in ours, Mr Fraser, sir,” Hunt told him fervently.

  The agent was not by his nature an imaginative man, but he thought for a moment, and his slim store of inventiveness came to his rescue. “I’ll put it in as a storm-caused loss,” he said brightly.

  MacLeish said nothing, though he made a face around his wad of fossil tobacco. Hunt was less restrained. He gaped at the agent and said, “But there weren’t no storm where we was comin’ through, Mr . . .”

  Fraser favored him with a grave look. Hunt began to nod slowly. Meanwhile, MacLeish had walked to the corner and picked up the ten-gauge. He handed it to his partner. The two of them started for the door. And that was the end of that.

  For about a week.

  “Another month, boys, and I think we can call it quits.” A bulbous nose made a show of sniffing the air. “Snow’s in the wind already.”

  “Damned if you ain’t right, there, Emery,” said one of the other men.

  There were four of them gathered around the rough-hewn table which dominated the center of the cabin. They were spooning up pork, beans, jerky, dark bread, and some fresh fowl. It was a veritable feast compared to their normal cold meals, but they had reason to celebrate.

  Johnny Sutter was an eighteen-year-old from Chicago who’d matured ten years in the twelve-month past. “I,” he announced, “am goin’ to get me a room in the finest whorehouse in Denver and stay stinkin’ drunk for a whole month!”

  Loud guffaws came from the rest of the men. “Hell, Johnny,” said one of them, “if’n yer goin’ t’do that, don’t waste your time doin’ it in a fancy place. Do it in the streets and let me have your room.”

  “Dang right,”
said another. “You’ll get yourself too stiff t’do what you’ll want t’be doin’.”

  “Not stiff enough, mos’ likely,” corrected the mulatto, One-Thumb Washington. He laughed louder than any of them, showing a dark gap where his front teeth ought to have been. He’d lost those two teeth and four fingers of his left hand at Shiloh, and never regretted it. Two teeth and four fingers were a fair enough trade for a lifetime of freedom.

  Wonder Charlie, the oldest of the four, made quieting motions with his hands. His head was cocked to one side, and he was listening intently with his best ear.

  “What’s wrong with you, old man?” asked Johnny, grinning at all the good-natured ribbing he was taking. “Ain’t you got no suggestions for how a man’s to spend his money?”

  “It ain’t thet, Johnny. I think somethin’s after the mules.”

  “Well, hellfire!” Emery Shanks was up from his chair and reaching for his rifle. “If them thievin’ Utes think they can sneak in here the day afore we’re set t’ . . .”

  Wonder Charlie cut him off sharply. “ ’Tain’t Utes. Ol’ Com-it-tan promised me personal two springs ago when I sighted out this creekbed thet we wouldn’t have no trouble with his people, and Com-it-tan’s a man o’ his word. Must be grizzly. Listen.”

  The men did. In truth, the mules did sound unnaturally hoarse instead of skittish as they would if it were only strange men prowling about the camp. If it were a grizzly, it sure would explain the fear in their throats. A big male could carry off a mule alive.

  The miners poured out the cabin door, hastily donning boots and pulling up suspenders over their dirty longjohns. One-Thumb and Emery fanned out to search the forest behind the hitch-and-rail corral. The moon was swollen near to full and they could see a fair piece into the trees. There was no sign or sound of a marauding grizzly. One-Thumb kept an eye on the dark palisade of pines as he moved to the corral and tried to calm the lead mule. The poor creature was rolling its eyes and stamping nervously at the ground.

  “Whoa, dere, General Grant! Take it easy, mule . . . Wonder, what the blazes got into dese mu . . .”

  He broke off as the mule gave a convulsive jerk and pulled away from him. There was something between the camp and the moon. It wasn’t a storm cloud, and it certainly wasn’t a grizzly. It had huge, curving wings like those of a bat, and wild, glowing red eyes, and a tail like a lizard’s. Thin tendrils protruded from its lips and head, and curved teeth flashed like Arapaho ponies running through a moonlit meadow.

  “Sweet Lord,” Johnny Sutter murmured softly, “wouldja look at that?”

  The massive, yet elegant shape dropped closer. The mules went into a frenzy. Wonder Charlie, who’d been at Bull Run as well as Shiloh and had emerged from those man-made infernos with his skin intact, didn’t hesitate. He fired at that toothy, alien face, a rifle ka-booming through the still mountain air.

  The aerial damnation didn’t so much as blink. It settled down on wings the size of clipper ship toproyals and began digging with pitchfork-size claws at the watering trough just inside the corral. The mules pawed at the earth, at each other, at the railing in a frantic desire to crowd as far away from the intruder as possible.

  One-Thumb ducked under the sweep of a great translucent wing and shouted in sudden realization, “Curse me for a massa, I think the monster’s after our gold!”

  Sure enough, several moments of excavation turned up a small wooden box. Inside lay the labor of four men sweating out the riches of a mountain for a year and a half, a glittering horde of dust and nuggets large enough to ensure each of them comfort for the rest of his life.

  Monster bird or no, they’d worked too damn hard for any of them to give up so easily that pile they’d wrested from the icy river. They fired and fired, and when it was clear to see that guns weren’t doing any good, they went after the intruder with picks and shovels.

  When it was all over, a somber moon beamed down on a scene of theft and carnage. The gold was gone, and so were the bodies of young Johnny Sutter and One-Thumb Washington and a mule named General Grant . . .

  There were not many physicians residing in Cheyenne at the time, and fewer still who knew anything about medicine, so it was not entirely coincidental that the one who treated the Mormon rancher’s wives would also become conversant with the story related by the unfortunate survivors of the Willow Creek claim. He brought the information to the attention of Mr Fraser, the local Butterfield Line agent who had seen to the care of the distraught passengers. Now these two comparatively learned men discussed the events of the week past over sherry in the dining room of the Hotel Paris.

  “I am at a loss as to what to do now, Dr Waxman,” the agent confessed. “My superiors in Denver accepted the report I sent to them which described the loss of the strongbox on a mountain road during a violent, freak storm, but I suspect they are not without lingering suspicions. My worry is what to do if this should occur a second time. Not only would the cargo be lost, I should be lost as well. I have a wife and children, doctor. I have no desire to be sent to a prison . . . or to an asylum. You are the only other educated citizen who has been apprised of this peculiar situation. I believe it is incumbent upon the two of us to do something to rectify the problem. I feel a certain responsibility, as an important member of the community, to do something to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens, and I am sure you feel similarly.”

  “I agree. Something must be done.”

  “Well, then. You are positive these two men you treated yesterday were confronted by the same phenomenon?”

  “There seems to be no doubt of that.” The doctor sipped at his sherry as he peered over thick spectacles at the agent. “With two of their companions carried off by this creature, I should ordinarily have suspected some sort of foul play, were it not for the unique nature of their wounds. Also, they are Christians, and swore the truth of their story quite vociferously to the farmer who found them wandering dazed and bleeding in the mountains, invoking the name of the savior repeatedly.”

  The agent folded his hands on the clean tablecloth. “More than citizen safety is at stake in this. There is a growing economy to consider. It is clear that this creature has an affinity, nay, a fondness for gold. Why, I cannot imagine. What matters is that next time it may strike at a bank in Cheyenne, or some smaller community, when there are women and children on the streets.

  “But how are we to combat it? We do not even know what we face, save that it surely is not some creature native to this land. I suspect a manifestation of the Devil. Perhaps it would be efficacious for me to have a talk with Pastor Hunnicutt of the . . .”

  The doctor waved the suggestion down. “I think we must seek remedies of a more earthly nature before we proceed to the final and uncertain decision of throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Creator. God helps those who help themselves, whether the Devil is involved or not.

  “I have had occasion in my work, sir, to deal with certain individuals whose business it is to travel extensively in this still-wild country. Certain acquaintances sometimes impress themselves most forcefully on these bucolic travelers, who are usually commonsensible if not always hygienic.

  “In connection with unusual occurrences and happenings, with unexplained incidents and strange manifestations, one name recurs several times and is uttered with respect by everyone from simple farmers to soldiers to educated citizens such as ourselves. I have been reliably informed that this person, a certain Amos Malone, is presently in the Cheyenne region. I believe we should seek his counsel in this matter.”

  The Butterfield agent stared across at the doctor, who, having finished his sherry, was tamping tobacco into a battered old pipe. “Amos Malone? Mad Amos Malone? I have heard tell of him. He is a relic, a throwback to the heyday of the mountain man and the beaver hat. Besides which, he is rumored to be quite insane.”

  “So is half of Congress,” replied the doctor imperturbably. “Yet I believe we need him.”

  The agent let out a long sigh. �
��I shall defer to your judgment in this matter, sir, but I confess that I am less than sanguine as to its eventual outcome.”

  “I am not too hopeful myself,” the physician admitted, “but we have to try.”

  “Very well. How are we to get in touch with him? These mountain men do not subscribe to civilized means of communication, nor do they usually remain in one place long enough for contact to be made.”

  “As to that, I am not concerned.” The doctor lit his pipe. “We will put out the word that we require his presence and that it involves a matter of great urgency and most unusual circumstance. I believe he will come. As to precisely how he will learn of our need, I leave that to the unknown and ungovernable means by which the breed of man to which he belongs has always learned of such things.”

  They waited in the doctor’s office. Just before dawn, a light snow had salted the town. Now the morning sun, hesitantly glimpsed through muddy dark clouds, threatened to melt the serenely pale flakes and turn the streets into a quagmire.

  Sitting in the office next to a nickel-and-iron stove were the Butterfield Line agent and a distraught, angry, and bandaged-up Wonder Charlie. Wonder Charlie wasn’t feeling too well – his splinted right arm in particular was giving him hell – but he insisted on being present, and the doctor thought the presence of an eyewitness would be vital to give verisimilitude to their story.

  The clock on the high shelf chimed six-thirty.

  “And that’s for your mountain man,” snapped Fraser. He was not in a good mood. His wife, an unforgiving woman, had badgered him relentlessly about risking an attack of colic by tramping outside so early in the morning.

  Dr Waxman gazed unconcernedly at the clock. “Give him a little time. The weather is bad.”

  There was a knock at the door. Waxman glanced over at the agent and smiled.

  “Punctual enough,” Fraser admitted reluctantly. “Unusual for these backwoodsmen.”