Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  "I didn't know people still used these things," Petey muttered, peering suspiciously at the slip of paper, where words and numbers were written by hand.

  "I also collect vinyl records," said Vern, just to pull his chain.

  "Wow."

  The cyberspace alien left. The phone bleated again, and this time the caller was Sylvie Cartouche, who ran the Fall Antiques Pilgrimage (and everything else in town). Vern promised that the Castle would be ready for the expected throng, and Sylvie—her hoarse old voice somehow bridging the vast gap between Gomer Pyle and Queen Elizabeth II—said that would be jes' fahn.

  "Ah think it's so entertaining to vary the genuine mansions with something like Mims Castle," she murmured.

  "My uncle's instant great house," he said.

  Sylvie gave a hiccup of laughter. "Ah'll never know how you put up with that little old booger all those years, Vern."

  "Ish had his good points," he said, doubtfully.

  " That's a surprise."

  After lunch, Mojo called from a Mexican restaurant outside Jackson where, he said, he'd been eating fajitas, guacamole, and his heart out with worry. Vern told him to take I-55 south and 84 west, but not to arrive until seven.

  "The servants will be gone by then," he explained.

  "You live in a castle with servants, " said Mo bitterly, "and I'm sleeping in my car." Next to greed, envy had always been his besetting sin.

  The afternoon droned on. Mrs. Lemieux rattled pots in the kitchen. Vern finished watching Godzilla (or maybe it was Rodan, since it had wings) and took a nap. At dusk the fugitive arrived in a Rolls—a second-hand Rolls, as he pointed out, complaining, "The goddamn feds got my Maserati."

  He parked in the courtyard beside the Cadillac that Vern used to chauffeur Ish around in. After an obligatory hug and secret handshake, the frat brothers unloaded a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a duffel bag from the Rolls's boot, and Mo trailed Vern into the Castle, staring as he went at the tall keep, crenellated walls, stained-glass lancets, and gargoyle rainspouts.

  "Who in the hell built this thing?" he demanded. "And why?"

  "First a drink," said Vern. "Then I'll tell you the secrets of Mims Castle. Some of them, anyway."

  THE KITCHEN was big and totally up-to-date. Vern poured drinks, and they sat down at the granite-topped island, clinked glasses, and noted the changes that twenty years had brought. Mo still looked like the shrimpy little guy whose daring at seven-card stud had won him his nickname in ???. He'd gotten tubbier, of course, had tufts of gray at his temples and corrugations in his forehead. He looked perpetually worried, as who wouldn't when facing a long term in a federal pen?

  "I need a place to hide," he announced. "My lady friend Chalice is in Florida, making arrangements to get me out of the country. It's taking her a while, because the Feds are watching everything. I gotta hole up for I'm not sure how long. Maybe a week, two weeks."

  "Happy to entertain you, buddy. The rent is two thou a day."

  Mojo's eyes bulged and he choked on his drink. "Is that friendship? In the old days, didn't we share everything—drugs, crib sheets, Sharon Resnick?"

  Vern cut him no slack. "You think I'm harboring a fugitive for any less, forget it. By the way, the terms are strictly cash, payable in advance."

  "That's the problem with being a crook. Everybody you meet is either a sucker or another crook."

  After a few more drinks, Mo calmed down and they shared the dinner Mrs. Lemieux had left warming in the oven—coq au vin, dirty rice, artichoke-heart salad with aioli vinaigrette, a flambé dessert that flared up nicely when Vern soaked it in fine brandy and touched a match to it. The wine was an okay Merlot, Chateau Marin County '05. Two of Ish's few good points had been finding a Cajun cook and establishing a wine cellar. Mo acknowledged as much.

  "God, you live well," he said. "Howjoo do it, Vern? Far as I can remember, the only reason you got through college at all was the Athletic Department leaned on your professors."

  Vern admitted that his sports career hadn't worked out. Scouts were indifferent, professional football passed him by. When his Uncle Ish wrote to say he needed a Man Friday, Vern was scraping a living by selling aluminum siding to unwary homeowners. Even so, his Mama warned him against accepting her brother's offer.

  "You remember, Honey, that time when some fool put itching powder in your jockstrap?"

  "Could I forget?"

  "Well, Ishmael's worse."

  Vern took the job anyway. Despite the meager salary, his uncle was rich and childless and might, he hoped, be looking not only for a Man Friday but for an heir. Vern came to live in the Castle, then so new it smelled of tacky paint and fresh cement, and for the first time saw the small Delta town where Ish and Mama had spent their mostly miserable childhoods.

  Grandpa Mims had been a drunken Kleagle who, until the FBI nailed him, used to terrorize black folks whenever he wasn't doing the same to his wife and children. Vern's Mama escaped the family's double-wide by fleeing to New Orleans and marrying a NASCAR wannabe named Helms, who lost most of his races but at least didn't beat her up. Young Ish fled only as far as Bonaparte's Avalon Theater, where—cramming an already capacious maw with Cracker Jacks and anything else remotely edible—he sat through long, dark hours immersed in tales of ghosts, werewolves, saucers, alien pods, giant insects, and Attack of the Fifty-foot Woman.

  He never got over the years when a fat little sissy found comfort in food and escape from a brutal world in fantasy. And he never outgrew the feudal society of Bonaparte, where everybody who was anybody lived in what amounted to a castle. No dummy, he won a scholarship to Emory, moved to Atlanta, studied the biochemistry of nutrition, and after decades of experimentation invented Yumz, cholesterol-laden snacks that received an award from the American College of Cardiologists because of all the work they gave its members. Ish sold the formula for big bucks to a conglomerate called Industrial Food and Napalm, and at the age of fifty-five returned to Bonaparte, determined to build a great house and join the gentry at last.

  Still about thirteen emotionally, with the tastes typical of that age cohort, he wanted something in the Gothic style, with turrets and hidden rooms and secret passages leading to chambers of unimaginable horror. He found a German architect named Hartmut Ungeheuer whose specialty was catering to people with similar tastes, and the result of their collaboration was Mims Castle.

  Sylvie Cartouche and her friends—all of whom lived in Greco-Roman temples with lots of white columns—told each other the Castle was just what you'd expect rich trailer trash to build. All the greater was their shock when it became a local landmark. Tourism formed Bonaparte's only reliable source of income, and the turistas loved Mims Castle, goggling like fancy goldfish at treasures from eBay, repro suits of armor, furniture from a dozen unrelated periods, and oil portraits of other peoples' ancestors. They thronged it, just as their European counterparts besieged the fairyland castle that Mad King Ludwig—another perpetual child—had built in the mountains of Bavaria.

  Ish kept private the Castle's third floor, where he had his opulent suite and Vern had his bedroom, bath, and clothes closet, which were all about the same size. The fourth floor remained unfinished at the time of Ish's funeral, never to blossom forth as he'd intended with décor out of the original, classic Frankenstein.

  "And up there, Old Buddy," Vern said, pointing at the ceiling, "is where you'll be staying, out of sight of the servants and the tourists and the FBI and everybody. Just as soon as you pay me for the first night."

  "What, you don't trust me?" asked Mojo, and appeared pained by the howl of laughter he received in return.

  They settled their business in the study. Under a wad of dirty laundry, Mo's duffel bag turned out to be full of money, and he counted out fourteen grand for the first week's board and lodging.

  "This," he explained, "is my rainy-day fund. I began accumulating it years ago, knowing the gravy train would fall off the trestle sometime. The bills are mixed denomination and non-sequent
ially numbered. I hope you appreciate the foresight that shows. Now, how do we get to this place you're keeping me in?"

  Vern tossed the loot into Ish's big safe and slammed the steel door before replying, "Look." He pressed a button hidden under the edge of the desk and a bookcase full of leatherbound classics swung out, revealing a small elevator.

  "You gotta be kidding," muttered Mo, as he and his duffel and his Louis Vuitton squeezed in next to bulky Vern.

  On the fourth floor they exited into an unfinished hallway with sheetrock walls, naked fifteen-watt bulbs, and seven closed doors standing in a row. Each door had a pseudo-medieval handle in the shape of a dragon and a big round keyhole. Vern unlocked the last door on the right, revealing a garish room with king-sized bed and excessive mirrors. An adjoining bath shimmered in hues of mauve, turquoise, and gilt.

  "I milked the Maintenance account for this," he admitted modestly. "A New Orleans contractor who specializes in, uh, certain establishments, designed it and brought in a team of illegals to do the work. They didn't speak a word of English, so even in Bonaparte, where everybody knows everything about everybody, nobody knows anything about this. Even the window is one-way glass."

  The illegals called the room his lioneria. Mojo didn't know the Spanish word, but he knew what he was looking at. "Never lived in somebody's private whorehouse before," he muttered.

  He poked around, made sure the TV worked, flushed the toilet, glanced through the window at the coiling Mississippi far below, and began to complain.

  "What if I have a heart attack way up here?" he demanded. "What if you have a heart attack? What if we both have heart attacks?"

  "That phone," Vern said, pointing, "connects to my cell phone. Only to my cell phone. If you find yourself dying, give me a buzz. By the way, let me see your cell, BlackBerry, any other gadgets you carry."

  Looking baffled, he handed them over. Vern dropped them on the floor and stomped them into molecules with his size-12s.

  "From now on," he said, raising his athletic basso to overwhelm Mo's shrill protests, "and for as long as you stay here, I'm your sole contact with the rest of Planet Earth. Anything else I can do for you tonight?"

  Mo spent some more time making noises like an enraged guinea pig, then yielded because he had to. "The least you can do," he growled, "is check with Chalice for me."

  Vern agreed, noted the web address of a billboard/chat room where she was to leave messages, wished his guest good-night, and left, locking the door behind him. It would have been a mistake to say he didn't trust Mojo as far as he could throw him. He could have thrown the shrimp a fair distance, while he didn't trust him at all.

  Back in the study, he found one posting from Chalice— Mo: Kp yr drwrs on —shrugged and went to bed early, knowing that a busy week lay ahead.

  Preparations for the Pilgrimage began next morning with the arrival of a white-coveralled crew of window washers, rug shampooers, and armor burnishers from the Spit 'n' Polish Cleaning Service of Baton Rouge, La. While they labored, Vern extracted the Castle's gardener from the redneck bar where he more or less resided and set him to work, shaping up the camellia hedges and grooming the plantings in the dry moat. He also asked Mrs. Lemieux to start fixing bigger dinners, saying he'd gone off his diet.

  "C'est bon," she approved. "You can die from not eating enough. Maybe étouffée tonight? I got me some crawfish froze I can thaw out."

  Wondering how he'd dispose of the body if Mo really did have a heart attack upstairs, Vern said doubtfully, "Those mudbugs are full of cholesterol."

  "Oui, Meestair Vairn. But it's good cholesterol."

  So that night he and Mojo gorged on crawfish tails and drank an extra bottle of Shiraz from Ish's wine cellar (Chateau New South Wales, '06) to unclog their arteries. The food was fine, but the company wasn't. Since leaving the frat house, Vern had forgotten that Mo was a practically terminal pain in the tail. That night, and every night during the week that followed, his guest reminded him.

  "I need a sunlamp," he complained on a typical evening. "My stores of Vitamin D are getting depleted. I need a massage three times a week. I'm losing muscle tone. I need female companionship. It's like I'm back in junior high, jerking off all the time. I need an internet connection, so I can check with Chalice myself. How do I know you won't stiff me for more rent even after she says go? Besides, I want to follow the market."

  "Believe me," said Vern, "you don't want to follow it where it's going."

  "That bad, huh?"

  "Worse."

  "Lucky I cashed out before I ran. I guess the Feds did me a favor after all. You never know how things will work out, do you? Still, it drives me nuts, my money just laying there in a bank vault, while here I'm living in an attic like a rodent."

  Just to pass the time, he invited Vern to come up and play a few hands of Texas Hold 'Em. "Don't bother to bring a deck of cards. We can use mine."

  "Maybe you'd like to invest my life savings for me, too."

  "Aw, Vern, don't be like that. I'm just bored outa my gourd is all."

  That made two of them. After a week of dinners with Mojo, Vern took an afternoon off and escaped to New Orleans. He lunched with Ben and explained the situation at the Castle. The lawyer didn't like it at all. "You get caught harboring a fugitive," he warned, "you could wind up as Hoxie's cellmate for the next twenty years."

  That chilling thought stayed with Vern on his return to the Castle. The city had long been his escape from the inexpressible tedium of life in Bonaparte. On a typical visit he'd kiss his mama, drop by a sports bar called Who-Dat Heaven to see the guys he used to take showers with, and spend a few hours with a lady of the evening named Shavonda, whose favors he happened to be sharing with U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA). But for the time being, all that was over—he had to get home every evening, or Mo wouldn't eat.

  And that wasn't his only problem. Tonight, as happened every week, Vern would have to feed the creature again, a chore not only depressing but dangerous. Damn, he thought, damndamndamndamn . There were times when he hated his life. Hated it.

  JUST OUTSIDE BONAPARTE, he stopped at the Walmart and purchased three fresh broilers. Dinner in the Castle was the usual, Mojo was the usual, everything was the usual. After locking the little nuisance in for the night, Vern walked to the opposite end of the fourth-floor hall and opened the last door. There, hissing with impatience, Ishmael Mims—or what was left of him—awaited.

  Vern had to admit that he was a handsome creature, which certainly had never been true before. Ish's querulous voice had been forever stilled. His new body was supple, athletic, armored with gleaming scales. In the elevator he was restless, his long claws skreeking on the metal. When they emerged into the dark Castle grounds, he shot off like a crossbow bolt, almost catching an astounded rabbit. Then he rested on the dewy grass, flexing his crimson dewlap and snapping at end-of-season lightning bugs.

  Hard to believe that a scant three years ago, Ish had been dying, his rotund body a cauldron of ills—diabetes, prostate cancer, atherosclerosis, sweating liver—with multiple organ failure looming on the horizon. Vern had begun reading travel brochures, making plans to sell the Castle as soon as it became his and move to a villa on the Riviera. Or Rio. Or the Costa del Sol—anyplace where Bonaparte was a fading memory, and the sun-ripened tomatoes didn't all grow on bushes.

  What the hell, he used to reflect in those still hopeful days. He was only thirty-five, woke up with a boner almost every morning, ran seven miles without getting winded, won Shavonda's praise for the energy if not the subtlety of his lovemaking. He fairly glowed with health, while Ish lay all day in bed, a large, pale lump of moribund, flatulent inertia, viewing obsessively his library of classic movies—back at the old Avalon Theater, and so, Vern hoped, dying happy.

  He failed to notice that Ish was watching one particular movie over and over. A piece of ancient 3-D hokum, The Maze told of an English lord transformed by an unfortunate genetic anomaly into a really, really big frog. As a co
ld-blooded creature, his Lordship had lived for centuries and would probably have lived for more, except that in the last reel he took a tragic plunge off the tower of his castle, falling through a theaterful of polarized lenses right smack into the faces of the audience.

  When Ish announced that he wanted to try curing his physical problems with injections of amphibian DNA, Vern smiled encouragingly and said, Sure, why not? Wrapping his uncle in blankets, he tucked him into the Cad and drove him to a clinic in Needles, California, whose shtick was bringing quaint fantasy into the age of molecular genetics. Though thrilled to have their very first human volunteer, the docs at FutureMed nixed the frog idea—frog populations were crashing throughout the world, and what would be the point of transforming a half-dead human into a sick batrachian with seven limbs and four eyes?

  Instead, they began using harmless viruses to carry vigorous reptilian genes into Ish's cells. Of course the experiment failed. Life imitates art, including bad art, and in such stories the experiment always does fail. Ish's appearance became so odd that Vern had to fake his demise, lest the Burr County Animal Control Officer lasso the old guy and ship him across the river to a Louisiana tourist attraction called Reptile World.

  Yet the experiment also succeeded. Even as six hired pallbearers were inserting his empty casket into a laughably ornate mausoleum, the reborn Ish was becoming almost intolerably healthy. His diabetes cleared up, his prostate cancer vanished along with his prostate, his cholesterol sank to Komodo levels, and his now three-chambered heart beat with metronomic regularity thirty-eight times every minute.

  So what did Vern care? If Ish was legally dead, didn't that mean he inherited anyway? Well, not exactly. Turned out that while still in human form, the sumbitch had left his money not to the blood relative who'd served him loyally for twelve years, but to a legal fiction called the Mims Historical Trust, whose mission was to maintain the Castle and keep it open for the improvement of American art and culture. Under the watchful eyes of the CPAs on the Governing Board, Vern could reside there and draw his 28K as curator every year until he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. He could then move to a trailer park—back to the old Kleagle's double-wide!—go on Social Security, and live out whatever was left of his life.