My lips came to rest upon the creamy slope of her neck.
I was a man and weak, with a goddess pressed against me, offering up her perfect flesh to my desires.
My fangs dimpled her creamy skin, pressing on the artery that trembled, hot and turgid, with heart's blood pounding through that feast of flesh now willingly offered.
But the monster in me was not yet ascendant: I wanted the blood—but I did not yet need the blood.
And her offer was forced—not at gunpoint nor by external coercion but by the betrayal of her own endocrine system.
It was a false gift, born not out of desire but out of pheromones and hormonal triggers. Yeah, I know that there are those who would argue that desire is nothing but biochemical soups and aerosols but I have to believe in something more. Love is a chemist's nightmare, to quote Saperstein, but if we were nothing more than glands and nerve endings the social contract would not stand. It is broken every day by acts of will and lack of will but we still exercise degrees of choice.
If my pheromones had been "weaponized," Liban's choices were illusion. My response was simple predation with a complex camouflage. And the end result potentially more evil by making her complicit in the act. Taking her against her will and by brute force would be a lesser crime.
I dug down deep and found just enough humanity to push her away and say: "No."
"No?" A freight train of emotions rumbled across her face as she dealt with the unthinkable: a mortal turning down a goddess. There was heat in those cool features, now. I suddenly realized how much punishment Fand was happy to deliver to those who had thwarted her. Could my nano-driven elf-defense system handle tag-team payback from the Sidhe Sisters as well as a one-man army of Celtic legend?
Then her face darkened like the moon going behind a cloud. She turned and walked away. Her pride would not let her run but she moved with all deliberate speed, passing the door to the salon's interior, and sought the solitude of the New Moon's open deck at the prow.
I started to bend down to retrieve her top and then thought the better of it. What was I going to do? Return it to her? Best to leave it where she could find it. I turned around and practically collided with Suki.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. She, on the other hand, stood there impassively, like a recently sculpted manikin, staring at me with those empty eyes. Those lifeless orbs, devoid of spark or sparkle. Eyes like the glass fakes utilized by doll makers and taxidermists. She looked at me as if she saw nothing and everything. She stared as if she were looking clear through me and into another space, another dimension. Another possible culmination.
I finally stepped around her and, as I did, she moved forward and bent down to pick up Liban's wet-suit jacket. I watched her carry it toward the front of the boat.
God, I was tired!
Even now with the crackling surges of fresh energy from Liban's blood thrumming through vein and artery, nerve and muscle, I was newly weary. Every day brought fresh pain—every day I brought fresh pain. Fully turned vampires had the advantage of operating without conscience, without emotion. Without regret. Stuck somewhere between warm-blooded human and cold-blooded predator, I was screwed—coming and going. If not for the obligations of family . . .
I turned and went into the salon.
The main lights were turned off to preserve everyone's night vision for going out on deck. A single lamp near the sliding glass doors leading to the bow gave just enough illumination to keep us from stumbling about inside. Added bonus, it was very film noirish: Bogart would have approved.
Setanta and Fand were sitting on the couch, holding hands. They looked at me as I came in and Fand rose to her feet, pushing her big, muscly shadow back down when he tried to rise with her. For all of that she still looked a little shaky.
"I know you bear me much ill will," she began. "And I know it must seem that I have acted out of the worst motivations. But I ask you to believe that I have always had the best intentions concerning your son. And I have been careful to see that you came to no actual harm."
I held up my hand. "Your sister explained. Okay. Doesn't matter. He's still not up for adoption. So here's what happens next. Zotz is bringing us in close to shore and you're all going ashore. Good luck with the next round in your family-planning cycle but just remember that times have changed. These days it takes a village. That, and a small militia, as well as the GNP of a small Mediterranean country. So, good luck, adios, and please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position. I want you out of my house and off my boat as soon as we can lower the dinghy."
As if cued by my words, Zotz eased back on the throttles and the fish-finders eeped indicating "shallow bottom" beneath the hull.
"You don't understand. I'm not a bad person! Your son would have wanted for nothing. More importantly, he would have been safe!"
I had no doubts that she believed her own words. The Fey Folk had been stealing human children for so many centuries it was inevitable that they would become invested in self and racial justification. "No, you don't understand," I snapped, knowing an argument was pointless. "I wouldn't care if you were Mary Frick'n Poppins: my boy already has a family. I've already kicked enough werewolf ass on this subject to open my own kennel club. What makes you think a couple of fairies and their Celtic cabana boy are going to make a difference?"
She shook her head and held her hands out. "Please, I do not wish to argue. You have saved my life. I willingly swear fealty now to you and yours. I acknowledge the wrongs I have done you in my single-minded quest to bring your son under my protection. It is now my wish to expand that protection to cover you, as well."
Yeah. I was just getting ready to say how the best protection she could offer was from herself. I opened my mouth to say words to that effect when Liban and Suki entered the salon.
Let me be more specific.
An explosion of glass marked their entrance as a wave of tapioca pudding hurtled them through the sliding doors at the front of the cabin. The lamp disappeared into the seething tarry mass and the room was plunged into darkness.
I immediately shifted over to infravision but found I was having trouble with detail on the infrared wavelengths. There was a competing light source in the cabin. Setanta was all big and yellowy as he thrashed about. Fand and Liban were nearly violet, a shade of heat signature I'd never seen before but then I'd never trafficked with elves. Suki was too cold to be visible yet there she was, faintly revealed in a pale green light.
It wasn't her body temperature lighting her up, however, but the reflected glow from the pudding itself. It seethed across the floor like a living carpet of bubbles, a giant amoeba that glowed as if lit from within by hundreds of green and white Christmas lights.
Holiday illumination borrowed from The Addams Family.
Or ten thousand glo-sticks from some unholy rave, discarded in a toxic waste dump.
The gelatinous mass rippled into the cabin and began to gather itself into a rising column of goo. Setanta stepped in even as its blobby base receded like a plastic tide, planted his boot-shod feet, and swung Michael's sword.
The other-worldly blade cut through the rising glow-in-the-dark fruitcake like a hot knife through tapioca. The only problem with that pudding analogy is all those little tapioca "pearls" don't turn into eyeballs and mouths and such when you stick a utensil in it.
Ours did.
The chunk that Setanta lopped off fell down into the quivering, bubbling mass that spawned it. It was quickly reabsorbed.
Zotz arrived from the upper deck, landing heavily in the shattered opening with a lantern in one hand and a loaded spear gun in the other. Although the light from the lantern spoiled the bioluminescent light show, it revealed an interesting series of details. Liban lay stunned, half hung over the countered divider cordoning off the galley area. Suki was struggling to her feet like a drunken beachcomber, an incoming tide of pudding lapping at her unsteady feet. Setanta laid about with his vorpal blade but, alas, there was no snicker-snack—just momentary scorings of the gelatinous goo that reclosed and smoothed over as he cursed and howled and flung small oozy droplets about with frenzied abandon. Fand stood atop the sofa and surveyed the chaos with an expression that seemed strangely contemplative. Maybe that was my imagination. I didn't exactly have time to ponder as my eyes returned to the entryway where Zotz was doing a little contemplation of his own. The carpeting at his feet was shredded and mostly missing, the curtain edges where the sludge had brushed through looked scorched and half eaten. Tiny tendrils of smoke seemed to waft from patches of exposed blackish wood.
Zotz fired his spear into the blob. The spear disappeared into its jiggly depths with no discernable effect. Except the honking big amoeba seemed to be moving toward me, now.
I retreated to the galley. Tapioca creature followed.
Obviously swords and spears weren't the weapons of choice in a smackdown with a pudding monster. So the question was WWMD? There was a Model 500 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver in a hidden holster fastened up under the sink. Not exactly the answer to the just asked question of "What Would MacGyver Do?" and more likely to ventilate both deck and double hull than to discomfort the escapee from a giant lava lamp. The other recessed weapon, a Mossberg 590A1 shotgun with a 14-inch barrel and a cruiser grip, was less of a hazard in that respect. The shortened barrel spread the shot pattern "weapon of mass destruction" style, trading tunneling force for area of effect—no small consideration when trying to avoid catastrophic damage below the waterline. Technically, I needed a special background check and tax stamp to possess such an aberration. Had it not been for the increased scrutiny of the state and federal bureaucracy—not to mention the scorn and derision of all the firearm fetishists out there—I might have made the effort to make it legit. Fortunately Coast Guard inspections were rare and rarely thorough this far inland and upriver.
Legalities were the least of my worries right now, however, and the Mossberg, though less likely to send us to the bottom, was still not the prime candidate for pus-buster. I reached for the third option: a spray can of WD-40.
Then I dug in my pants pocket past my SwissChamp pocketknife and fished a Bic lighter out of my pocket.
Yeah, I'd ditched the cigarettes back in those reckless, feckless days of my youth. Never mind the lectures on health and life expectancy; nothing is a surer inducement to give up the coffin nails than the woman of your dreams comparing her make-out sessions with you to "licking an ashtray."
A stint in the military, however, had brought me back to the advantages of always having a bit of butane-enhanced flint-and-steel at hand, a pocket MacGyver for those unique and unexpected occasions.
Such as this one.
I thumb-popped the cap off of the WD-40 and checked the nozzle direction. The many-eyed tide lapped into the kitchen area and I triggered my jury-rigged flamethrower.
Or I tried to, anyway.
Hey, it's not easy. Try patting your head and rubbing your stomach. While being shot at. So, something like; left hand positioning the lighter, thumb rotating the flint wheel for spark, dropping to depress fuel valve button—wishing I had gone to the trouble of replacing my lost Zippo instead of a quick and dirty disposable fix—while simultaneously positioning to ignite chemical spray from WD-40 nozzle being triggered by right hand while pointed at proper angle/trajectory to direct enhanced flame back at target without incinerating left hand or blowing up right hand in the process.
See?
I fumbled and nearly dropped the lighter on the first attempt.
I extinguished the flame with the spray on the second.
The third attempt worked like a charm and the pudding ran smack dab into my miniature flamethrower halfway into the galley.
Imagine a cockroach screaming. Now imagine a hundred of them at the same time. The pudding made a sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of roachdom and skittered back. I held my makeshift torch before me like Van Helsing's crucifix and advanced. Dracula's nemesis would have roared "The power of Christ compels you!" or such. What deity would a pudding recognize? Bill Cosby?
The terrible tide retreated a foot. Then two. I gained another yard, using controlled blasts of flame to sweep the forward edge of the pulsating puddle. "Aye!" I exclaimed, doing my half-assed impression of Scotty from Star Trek, "the haggis is in the fire now for sure!" My amorphous adversary turned into a hasty pudding, withdrawing to the midpoint of the salon.
The rapidity of its backwash knocked Suki off her feet and she went down as if caught in an undertow, the living sludge closing over her like a drowning pool.
At that point my flame died down. And went out. The can was empty. The room was plunged again into near darkness. The opposite doorway was empty: Zotz had fled with the lantern.
Light oozed back in my direction: the glowing mucus monster was making another run at me. I retreated back to the galley, noting the scorched linoleum where the creature had flowed moments before: I hadn't done that with my portable brazier! Under the sink, again, and this time I hauled out the sawed-off shotgun and a bottle of Clorox.
I lobbed the plastic bleach container into the center of the amoebalike mass and jacked a shell into the Mossberg. I fired almost immediately. At this range and with a scattershot spread, I only had to worry about not hitting anyone else. Taking any more time to aim might have lost my target as it sank into the roiling depths of the creature. The buckshot sieved the plastic bottle and bleach began squirting in all directions as the thing received this latest offering hungrily.
A moment later it vomited the bottle back out but it was too late. The plastic was shredded, the contents dissipated into the semisolid masses that twisted and shuddered as the caustic liquid began wreaking havoc on its cellular structures. Light bloomed across the room as Zotz returned with lantern in one hand and a very large pistol in the other.
Correction: a large Very pistol in the other. "Fire in the hole!" he yelled, extending the flare gun and firing into the quivering mass of protoplasm. The flare barely ignited before burying itself deep in the glowy sludge.
Forget the cockroach choir analogy. This thing was shrieking like ten thousand cicadas performing all of the operas in Wagner's Ring Cycle simultaneously! Zotz broke open the Very pistol and ejected the spent shell casing. As he loaded another flare I looked around the cabin for another weapon. Setanta was still in full berserker mode, doing his Cuisinart impression with Mikey's sword. His hair was standing on end, practically giving off sparks of static electricity and, if willpower and earnestness counted for points, this thing would have been dead five minutes ago.
But his blade continued to make meaningless and temporary dimples within the ever changing landscape of the blob, and I looked about for other options.
"Fand!" I called. "Can you reach the lamp?"
I had an idea that, if she could retrieve the table lamp—somehow pull it back out by its electrical cord—she might be coached into stripping the wires in such a way as to shock the creature when the plug was reinserted into the wall outlet.
And it was quickly obvious that getting Fand to pick her own nose right now might be too complicated a task as she was still standing on the couch, still staring at the bubbling mass as if contemplating some dark nightmare from which she might never wake up.
Okay. I was pretty much at the end of my What Would MacGyver Do approach with the blob, what other options were there?
The blob . . .
Silly me. I'd been formulating from the wrong premise. If this thing was anything like the Blob, I should be asking: What would Steve McQueen do?
As in The Blob. 1958 film. The sort made popular on the fossilized drive-in circuit. Directed by Irwin S. Yeaworth, Jr.; theme song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Protoplasmic life-form falls to earth in meteorite. Old hermit discovers said meteorite and is promptly eaten by gooey orange nougat center. Enter Steve McQueen as teenager Steve Andrews in his first starring role. Along with his girlfriend Jane Martin, played by Aneta Corsaut (who would go on to greater fame as Helen Krump on The Andy Griffith Show), they run about Downingtown, Pennsylvania, attempting to warn the Downingtown townspeople. Of course, no one pays heed to those pesky teenagers until it's too late and the orange goo devours a good chunk of the town's population. And it gets bigger with each successive meal: people, cars, a supermarket, a movie theater, even a diner until they discover the thing can't take the cold . . .
So . . .
I snatched the fire extinguisher off of the galley wall praying it was a CO2 model.
It wasn't a CO2 model.
So much for luck and the chance to employ a cold-based weapon attack. But when you're brawling for your life you use whatever is at hand. I pulled the pin, pointed the nozzle, and pulled the trigger just as Zotz fired a third flare into the quivering mass of pustulescent sludge.
Almost immediately a gray film began to spread across the toxic tartar sauce where I applied the gaseous exhaust of my fire extinguisher, its shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles shuddering and becoming fixed as if undergoing petrification. Some of the bubbles burst, emitting a noxious vapor as the beast convulsed and then collapsed in upon itself. The interior of my boat was a shambles and I wasn't sure as to Liban's and Suki's condition, yet, but the foamy collection of eyes and mouths were filming over or gaping with an evident slackness that said that death was imminent for this gummi beast. I turned the canister of the fire extinguisher in my hands and examined the face plate: it was a Halon suppression unit.
I looked over at Zotz as the thing gave a last convulsive shudder. "Grab a gas can, a couple of the mini charges, and ready the inflatable dingy. As soon as I pull Suki out, we're going to have a quick Viking funeral."
"Aye, Cap'n." He turned to go and jumped backwards into the galley.
Rather, he was thrown across the cabin as the Big Daddy version of the mini pudding we had just turned into a baked Alaska smashed its way into the salon. If the last blob had come in like high tide, this one was a tsunami! We were shoved about as a vast tonnage of angry, Hulk-green, glowing goop surged across the floor and crashed up against the walls like a stormy, oil-slicked sea.
I turned the fire extinguisher but it was sputtering in my hands, all but spent. "Shoot a flare at the drapes!" I yelled at Zotz. I meant to take us down in flames if there was no other way. But even that way was lost: the Very pistol had been torn from his hands when the battering ram of protoplasm had smacked into him. The lantern was gone, as well.
If anything, though, it was brighter now inside the salon. The green glow from the luminescent sludge that continued to pour in upon us was brighter than the illumination we typically ran at night on the river. And it was joined by a pulsing violet light as Fand began to scream.
They weren't incoherent screams of terror, though.
"Odael si vali shaerael sor shys eil toil . . ."
They were words—Old English or Anglo-Saxon from the sound—and, though rage comes closer to describing their pitch, they were more like a warrior's timbre of challenge.
" . . . shol tia aelaestia sai ti eil sai ti eilyli . . ."
Fand had finally stepped off of the couch but instead of stepping down, she was floating up. And drifting across the cabin toward its center. Toward the sludge beast's center.
" . . . tasia iar moria shaesi air talyr vaeres . . ."
And the purple light that pulsed and reflected back from the walls and ceiling and, finally, even the green-tinted surface of the beast, itself, was emanating from the faerie queen. The nimbus of energy that crackled and shimmered about her slender form was growing brighter and pulsing more frantically with every word that she spoke.
" . . . eil ialai toli eilor sar air tae shi iaraesia paeryr . . ."
And finally she hovered and turned in midair. Her face once terrible, became momentarily soft and tender and all too young and vulnerable. "We will be together again, my love. If not in this world, then in the next. Until that time, keep my vow and oath: protect the father as you would the child. This sacrifice must not be in vain."
Setanta shouted: "My queen!" And began to wade into the creature as if to reach her by swimming its protoplasmic currents, but she spread her arms and set her face back to its terrible mask of purpose as she turned again.
"Aelael mai, mar air shi pyli!" she cried as she dropped into the seething mass of roiling corruption.
Thunder filled the room.
An infinitesimal glimpse of something—somewhere—between the molecules of the air.
Air that rushed in to fill the emptiness previously occupied by a room-sized monster and a child-sized queen.
Both were gone.
Vanished.
The only acknowledgment of either's former existence were three sounds.
That transitory crash of imploding air—a Tupperware burp of artificial thunder as the world resealed itself.
The sustained weeping of a great warrior, now on his hands and knees.
And the hiss and sizzle as each tear fell upon the scorched and smoking floor.
Nothing else came out of the river during the next hour.
Nor did Fand return from where she had 'ported with our displaced foe.
Setanta made a weak protest when we hauled anchor and prepared to make way, but Liban assured him that her sister could find her way back to him, wherever he was. Once it was safe to return.
Her words were encouraging, her eyes and voice less so. Thereafter Setanta withdrew into himself to nurse his inner wounds.
We spent some time dealing with outer wounds, as well. Liban was bruised, cut, and mildly concussed from being hurtled through the glass door and across the main cabin. Setanta, Zotz, and I had varying degrees of burns from contact with the caustic slime. Fortunately Zotz and I had kept pretty much to the thing's perimeter while Setanta's ongoing commitment to dressing like a gay leather biker had largely protected him when he waded into it.
Suki wasn't so fortunate.
A ninety-pound Asian woman had gone under and stayed under until we'd killed it. Then stayed under some more when the second half of The Blob double feature arrived. I didn't know how fast these things could feed, but what was left behind when Fand opened a momentary door to some otherwhere was only a fraction of the size and weight and mass of a ninety-pound Asian woman.
And didn't look human.
It looked like a cat.
A golden-eyed, sable brown, Burmese cat with two tails.
One that looked as if it had been put in an industrial-strength clothes dryer and treated to a half hour of tumble dry at high heat.
"What's with Mrs. Bigglesworth, here?" Zotz asked as I recapped the aloe vera gel and stowed it with the first-aid kit.
"Mrs. Who?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Wrong reference. Austin Powers not A Wrinkle in Time." He pointed at the cat. "Asian zombie babe goes into giant fruitcake; cat with mange and two tails comes out. What gives?"
The cat looked at him and then turned its head to look at me.
"There is a species of Japanese vampire who may take the form of a cat at times. The one characteristic that distinguishes them from true felines is they manifest two tails instead of one."
"So she's a cat now?" he asked.
The cat stared at me with wide yellow eyes that seemed more alive and more present than the dead, lifeless orbs Suki had stared at me with since her return from the watery depths.
"Maybe Silly Putty Monster absorbed too much mass for her to retain her human form. Or perhaps she needs to transform in order to heal." I shook my head. "I don't know! This isn't my department! I have a liberal arts degree for Chrissake! I should be lecturing on Shakespeare, not dissecting shoggoths!"
"What's a shoggoth?"
I blinked. The word had just popped into my head. For a moment I was back inside Mama Samm's skull gazing into the abyss and—
I jerked as if I had touched a live wire. And shuddered.
Zotz reached out and touched my shoulder. "Christopher? Are you all right?"
I shook my head. "No. I am not all right. I think I am well on my way to losing it. I don't know how much more of this crap I can take."
"We'll stock up on fire extinguishers," he said soothingly. "We'll issue flare guns to everyone . . ."
I shook my head again. "It's not that. It's not just monsters. Or the fact that I'm turning into one. It's all of it. It's Jenny and Kirsten and now my son and Lupé and Deirdre and Mama Samm—and, hell, even you and the passengers and every single person who comes into my orbit—I'm like a lightning rod for every shit storm the universe whips up within a thousand-mile radius!"
"I know it's been a little rough, lately—"
"Lately? Ever since I got the vampire virus two years ago, it's been nothing but major suckiness. There's a reason we mortals are designed to wear out by the three-score-and-ten warranty specs. We're not made for prolonged exposure to living. I should have died with my wife and daughter at the intersection of 103 and US 69. Or, better yet, in that barn just outside of Weir, Kansas!"
"Hey," Zotz said gently, "you know the old saying. If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans."
"Yeah," I said, choking down an unexpected sob, "that's me. God's comedy relief. Other people tune in David Letterman at the end of their day. The Big Guy picks up His remote and points it right at me."
Zotz shook his head. "Oh, hey man, don't talk like that. It's not true! I mean, that's just wrong!" He patted my shoulder. "You ain't nowhere near as funny as Letterman. Maybe Leno on a really bad night, but even then—"
I rubbed my face. "Thanks. You can stop cheering me up, now." I gave myself a little shake. "The pity party's over. Let's go topside and look at the charts. We've got a lot of river to eat and very little time to do it in."
"Aye-aye, Cap'n!" He turned to the cat. "Come, Mrs. Bigglesworth."
I cleared my throat. "Zotz . . ."
"What?"
"Even if she doesn't eventually recover and become a badass vampire again—"
"Yeah?"
"—she can still crap in your shoes."
I don't know which was spookier: the green wash from the fish-finder screen or the red glow from the chart lamp. The demon's face moved back and forth between the two patches of illuminated darkness as we studied the charts and then checked and rechecked the screen to make sure nothing else was sneaking up from underneath us.
"So, our little bathtub sonar is still working?" I asked.
"Near as I can tell," the almost human creature replied from the pilot's chair. In his true demon form, Camazotz Chamalcan couldn't adequately fit into the cockpit and maneuver himself, much less the boat. Obviously, it would be a simple enough process in human form but Zotz seemed unwilling to fully abandon his fundamental badassedness of a sudden. And somehow this down-sized, homogenized, semihuman compromise was more disturbing than the original giant bat-god abomination-from-Hell aspect when he manifested in all of his former death-god glory.
Still, I could hardly fault him after this latest turn of events; I planned on sleeping with a small arsenal for the foreseeable future, myself.
"Then how do Carpet Master and Throw Rug Junior manage to sneak up on us with nary a peep from the security system?" I asked.
"Good question."
"Bad answer," I grumbled.
"My best guess? The fish-finder is programmed to detect objects of a certain size and conforming to a generalized shape. Perch, catfish, large-mouth bass, Deep Thing—the sonar picks it out of the background, recognizes it as separate and distinct from the water around it. Something big and flat, however, coming up off the bottom and rising beneath the hull isn't going to read like a suspended object. It's going to read like a sandbar or a shallow stretch of river bed. The fish-finder wasn't set to sound an alarm for depth soundings."
"Can we correct that?"
"I think so."
"Well, make it so, Mister Zotz."
"Aye, sir!" he said, tinkering with the settings and eliciting an intermittent series of beeps, chirps, and clicks. "A trickier fix is the question of how we steer an 84-foot houseboat with a relatively shallow draft all the way to the Mississippi River and then down to New Orleans where a major storm is brewing?"
"Good question."
"Bad answer," he grumbled.
We'd gone to the GPS screen, first. The satellite charting system was great for local details and long-range overviews but a little clunky for checking details in between us and our final destination until we got there. The paper charts were better for long-range details—like where I might anticipate passage problems or potential interceptions from our furry following.
I sighed. "Look, I've got wolves on the left bank and wolves on the right bank and I've already spent way too much time not going anywhere. I mean to move toward my people and keep moving by whatever means I can find. I'll sail this ship until she sinks or founders. Then I'll take another. Or go ashore and deal with whichever bunch of busybodies offers the path of least bloody resistance. At least that's the plan until I can come up with a better one. It may sound impractical or even just plain nuts but I can't not go forward any longer! It's my problem, not yours. You're welcome to take the dinghy. Seek your redemption on a surer, saner path. I don't mind. In fact, I rather insist."
Zotz stared at me with his newly disturbing, semihuman face, the greens of the GPS and fish-finder screens and the red from the chart lamp giving him an old, 1950s, 3-D, Technicolor monster movie vibe. "This voyage stinks of death and madness! I think great suffering and retribution lie ahead."
I nodded. "Yeah . . ." I murmured.
"Good enough for me! Where do I sign?"
I sighed and turned off the chart light. As I stowed the charts I reflected that Mama Samm would not approve of my taking Zotz along on what was sure to be the equivalent of a pub crawl for an unrepentant alcoholic. I just hoped she'd eventually turn up to give me hell for it.
"Oops," he said.
"Oops?" My head snapped up and I gave my demon pilot a hard look. "You don't drive my house down a river filled with mysterious lights, vicious fish folk, and giant, tag-team amoebas—amoebae—slime monsters—and just say 'oops' like maybe there's a teensy problem."
"Naw." He had fired up another stogie and had liberated a can of beer from his secret stash (for medicinal purposes), promising me that he could navigate unimpaired. He tipped a yachtsman's cap back from his nearly human brow as he continued. "Just remembered, that's all. Been a little busy and distracted ever since you got back."
"And?"
"Mama Samm said you wanted some research on four sets of coordinates."
I did? "Oh yeah. Sure." Mind like a steel trap—closed tight. "What did you find out?"
"For the most part, not a hell of a lot," he groused. "Unless it's that the two of you have a wicked sense of humor." He shot me a look but when I failed to confirm his suspicions, he continued. "I mean, I expected that these coordinates would—well—coordinate with some kind of actual landmark. Like land: an island, a reef, a shoal—something other than empty ocean. But only one set of longitude and latitude numbers conforms to the position of an actual land mass—or two, if you count make-believe."
"Lincoln Island," I said.
He almost lost his cigar. "Then you know?"
I nodded, staring out into the darkness. "Mama Samm gave you the first set of coordinates out of a French edition of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. Interesting book. Verne, a Frenchman, wrote a novel about five Yankee prisoners during the American Civil War—how they escaped the Siege of Richmond by hijacking a hot-air balloon and flying off into the unknown. The unknown being a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, some 2500 kilometers east of New Zealand. The castaways named it Lincoln Island in honor of President Abraham Lincoln."
Zotz nodded and turned the wheel to make a course correction. "Yeah, I pulled the book off the shelf and thumbed through it. Lots of action and that Cyrus Smith guy was always inventing stuff out of raw materials. But I guess the big whoop-de-do is the return of Captain Nemo and his submarine."
"The Nautilus," I appended.
"Yeah, well, the problem is there ain't no such island on the charts, the satellite photos—nothin'."
"Actually," I said, "that's not the only problem. The Mysterious Island was written in 1874 and chronicled events that were supposed to have transpired from 1865 to 1867. It's a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which was published four years earlier and covered Captain Nemo's adventures from 1867 to 1869. That means Captain Nemo dies and the Nautilus is scuttled in the sea caves of Lincoln Island before he takes Professor Aronnax on his memorable voyage in the first book! Yet, Cyrus Smith, our ingenious engineer-hero in the second book, recognizes Nemo and the Nautilus from the descriptions in the Aronnax Journals. Which, if you want to further nitpick, won't be published under the title 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea until 1870—a couple of years in the future at that point."
My demon pilot goggled at me. "How do you know crap like this?"
"I told you, I used to teach American and World Lit. Too bad knowing crap like that doesn't seem to count for anything when it comes to so-called geriatric gods and pseudopodinous probiscae."
"Yeah, well. Bottom line. No island at those coordinates, mysterious or otherwise. On the other hand there is a mysterious island of sorts at the second set."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It's like haunted or something . . ."