Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (13 page)

With his mighty Chewed limbs he ran ahunting amongst the wild Outhouses, wantonly skewering hell-beasties with his bow and his sharp arrows, conversing with famous Caesars of Rome and Kings of Africa and other dead folk condemned to the perditious gray lands of Hades, and flexing his biceps for the New Tourists and their new-fangled electronic Nikons and Leicas, their Sony videocams. See how the Great King of Uruk prances about half-naked for these strange people in their Bermuda shorts and their Hawaiian shirts and their dark sunglasses. Oh mighty King of cities that are now dust! Oh hairy, wild King! Thy head is as a lion's with a glorious mane; thy feet are like the tanks of the neo-Nazi who would defeat the mighty Pluto himself; thy droppings are as great as logs.

Socrates! Plato! Augustus Caesar! Agamemnon! Sumeria! Babylonia! Greece! Now that the historical name-dropping fit is quit from these rapid keyboarding fingers to show off the erudition and sophistication of yours truly, I, the author, Robot Goldilocks, not wasting a drop of research from my historical novel, I, GILGANOSH, nor from one of my early non-fictional efforts, A GUIDE TO EARLY SOFTCORE PORN MYTHS, I shall plunge forward on the tides of my beautiful, facile prose and segue most expertly (like a ballerina pirouetting to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake? Like Joseph Conrad, or Philip Roth or, better yet, those fabulous writers of yore, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore!) into just why Gilganosh was bored.

Oh Gilganosh! Oh mighty hero of millennia past! You're bored, you putz, because you have been alive for century after century, here in Hades where you can't really die! You're bored because you miss your good buddy, Inky-Dinky-Doo, with whom you've had a quarrel and who promises to hack off and serve you up your barrelwide backside on a platter if you ever cross chariots again!

However, harken! A great adventure lies just around the corner! Coming down that hill yonder! Is that a great mythological beast pawing and snorting up dust as it spumes across the wilderness?

No! Why, the thing is as anachronistic as the digital Mickey Mouse watch upon thy mighty wrist!

Lo! It's a Ford Bronco four by four!

The mighty vehicle roared along through the bush of the Hades Outhouse territory, while the driver and his passenger argued amicably, chewing over a favorite old subject, like Cthulhu chews his cud.

“Lordy, H.P!” drawled the beefy, red faced one, sweating and grinning as he kept the wheel of the truck under control. “I don't think there's a shee-eet of a lot of a contest! I was a hell of a lot weirder than you were!”

“Were not!”

“Was too!”

They were speaking, of course, these dead fantasists, of their days on Earth before they had died and gone to Hades, that great mythical hole in the ground curiously mutated now as though by some techno-thriller writer's imagination on downers, coupled perhaps with some warped Latin teacher's lust for Roman history (there was a curious preponderance of the Roman Empire hereabouts, it seemed). They were talking about the halcyon days of yore, the nineteen twenties and the thirties, when both strode like colossi through the pulpy pages of ARGOSY, INSCRUTABLE ORIENTAL SPICY YARNS and, of course, that paragon of the tale of the outré, WEIRD TALES. Both had died in 1936, Howard of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head upon learning that his beloved Ma was dying; Lovecraft of cancer of the esophagus, almost surely brought about by his curious diet, and perhaps the secret indulgence in certain fungi. Yes, yes, stable characters indeed, both of them; their one-way trips to Hades had done them both a load of good. Howard had his Ma around now forever; Lovecraft a feast of history, the outré — and fungi, and the total certainty that behind all this strange business were none other but the Old Ones themselves!

Living myths in a land of mythic living! Ah! Sic transit gloria mundi, Tuesday, or something like that.

“Shee — eet, H.P. Ah'm from Texas,” proclaimed Bob Howard proudly. “We just grow everything bigger there, and my weird's bigger than yours! Did you pound out reams and reams of oriental mysteries, westerns, spicy romances, supernatural monster stories and finally, did you help invent that pin-ay-cull of literature, sword and sorcery, featuring a hero swiped directly from Rousseau and Burroughs, the classic character Conan?” He paused for a deep breath. “Did you off yourself at the age of thirty after years of espousing the heroic life in penny-a-word pulp rags because you couldn't live without Mommy? Did you drool over bare-chested goddesses and amazons in your thumping, pumping prose when you didn't have the nerve to go out and lose your cherry to a two-dollah whore in Houston?” Howard shook his corpulent head, a lop-sided grin on his wide face. “Now, H.P., we corresponded lots back in those days. Now, I admit, mebbe your stories were a mite weirder than mine at times — but deep down, I'm in a different class of weird. Big weird. Texas weirdo. Living weird! Dead now, of course, but weird dead is weird. There ain't nothin' more way out than that!”

Howard Phillips Lovecraft shook his head with etiolated pity.

"Ah, my poor Robert E.! Tsk and tsk again. You died much too young to have the opportunity to truly perfect the subtle points of weirdness, as I did. I realize, Robert, that you were basically a racist, but that was purely cultural, a product of your backward pigsty Texan environment. My racism was truly a moldy bacterial culture, tended and pruned carefully in my decaying Providence basement! You were very fuzzy headed about your Aryan sympathies, Bob. I openly proclaimed the superiority of the white race. In fact, I'm sure you are aware that much of my actual paltry income was earned as a ghost writer. But did you realize that in the twenties, I had a student in a correspondence course for the Famous Bigot Writer's School who paid me to ghost a book called MEIN KAMPF? Yes, as a matter of fact, I met the fellow back in New Berlin a few months ago down here. As soon as he finishes his present thirteen millennia neck deep in sulfuric acid, while suffering terminal athlete's foot, and before he starts a thousand year swim in the main cesspit, he wants to get in some fast outlining. Looks as though he's in the market for another book!

“Anyway, did you live on cornflakes and milk half your life? Did you create, possibly the sickest fictional mythology known to man? Did you live in a rotting old house in a particularly diseased state, slowly festering away on the putrid fumes of illness, cranking out loony letters to fellow pulp writers when you should have been doing some honest penny-a-word westerns? Like you, Bob, who made more money than your local doctor. Now, admit it, Bob. You were most definitely weird, but I, my friend, to put it in one syllable words that even a Texan can understand, I was not only much weirder — I was the fruitcake of the century!”

Their argument was suddenly cut short as the four by four plowed into the solid form standing staunch and unafraid before it.

The Bronco stopped dead.

When H.P. and Robert E. recovered, they found themselves staring up into the frowning face of the biggest man that either of them had ever seen.

“Hey, slimeball,” roared Gilganosh affectionately, tearing off a fender angrily. “Don't you watch where you're going?”

Gilganosh was dying inside.

Oh, not because he had just been hit by a four by four of the automotive persuasion; there were far greater thorns in his side, routine passengers of life. Bemusedly he plucked out some of the thorns and discarded them. No, it was because he grieved at the anger that his greatest friend, Inky-Dinky-Do held for him. He felt worse than Shadrach in the furnace must have felt; no starry ascent to the heavens for Great Gilganosh; it was all purely downward to the Earth for this Son of Man, borne on failing nightwings, perhaps to be impaled on some awful tower of glass below.

Gilganosh looked upon the two occupants of the Bronco with distaste. “You've got the whole wide open plains of the Outhouse to roam in, and you pinheads manage to drive with your eyes shut and hit me.”

The soft, fat, largish man with a crew-cut and a ruddy complexion managed to struggle out from his seat behind the wheel, to waddle corpulently forward. “Jumpin' Jehosophatical jack rabbits! It's Conan!” he hollered. “Conan of Cimmeria, I swear, right down to the corpuscles!”

Gilganosh blinked, bewildered. What nonsense was this New-Corpse mouthing? He'd met a Conan once, but that fellow was the character who believed in fairies and wrote those Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger stories.

“Now Bob, settle down,” said the lardy one's companion, a tall, pale looking New-Corpse with pasted back hair, fishy eyes and a lantern jaw. “Conan is just a fantasy, a concoction of your stylistically incompetent keyboard.”

Bob nodded. “Sure, I know that, H.P. But cut me some slack. I always was a closet nancy-boy, and now I've got a chance to make it with the biggest, hairiest, most heroic hero these moist Texas eyes have ever been set on.”

The writer swished forward, making kissy-kissy noises with his mouth. “Hey, sailor. Want a date?”

“Bob, maybe you're right. You are the weirdest!” He turned his attention to the barbarian. “Sorry about my friend, Mister. I'm H.P. Lovecraft, and this is Robert E. Howard. We're ambassadors of King Henry the Eighth, going to perform our duties as diplomatic envoys to the kingdom of Prester John. How's that for some odd and exotic mishmashed historical juxtaposition. Kinda like Farmer's RIVERWORLD, only much more mythic.”

“Look, buddy, knock off the old pulp crapola, you rotten drivers are interfering with my hunting,” snarled Gilganosh. “And, P. S. — could you stop this pudgy moron from humping my leg? I do an occasional sheep, but bad pulp writers just don't turn me on. Call him off, or woe unto him for the part-god Gilganosh will tear him limb from horny limb!”

“Gilganosh!” cried Robert E. Howard. “Gosh and shucks and tarnation! That's even better. Oh take me, Gilgy! Take me!”

Fortunately for the writer, Gilganosh was distracted by an attacking group of guerrillas, who tended to pop up with annoying regularity down here in Hades. Again Fortune smiled upon the writers; Howard and Lovecraft had sophisticated automatic weapons in their four by four and with the help of Gilganosh's deadly arrows, they finished the guerrillas off in no time at all.

They all went off to Prester John's, where Gilganosh and Inky-Dinky-Do beat the bejeezus out of each other and then decided to be friends once more. Lovecraft and Howard discovered publishing offices there, quit the Kingdom of Henry the Eighth and started writing sexy short stories for the Hades edition of PLAYBOY-GIRL.

In general, Bill enjoyed the stories threading through his sinuses like a bad cold, but he did wish they were longer, so he could really get more endless pleasure from the ones he liked the most, like the Goldilocks piece.

And so the days passed.

There was only one of the novels he had not read yet, and he was just starting on it, reading only the very first sentence:

ANOTHER FINE ARCHETYPICAL MYTH

By

David Pissoff

“It was a dark and stormy Nightworld” —

when suddenly the cell door banged open.

“Bang!” said the door.

“Drop your socks and grab your ... — up and out!” shouted the commandant of the party of soldiers who stormed in the cell. “Summer camp is over and your ass is in the sling, Bill or whatever your cruddy name is,” inferred the grizzled, scarred warrior, looking every inch a debilitated soldier worthy of DI-hood. “The Lord of this 'ere castle wants an audience with you and your companion! Which means like, instantly or sooner, or I stomp you to death!”

Bill smiled happily. “You think your Lord is going to let us go?”

“Let you go?” he howled in apoplectic answer. “Over my dead body — or better yours. Let you go and those two vats of boiling oil we've been stoking all day, sweating and slaving over, will go to waste!”

Bill managed to glugg down one last half-bowl of fermented swill before the soldiers dragged him out of his cell.

THE CRIPPLED KING

“What did you say?”

The pitcher and goblet of wine went splashing off the table and crashing to the floor as the wild-haired Monarch of the Isthmus of Impotence dragged himself reluctantly halfway to his feet and glared down savagely with fierce blood-shot eyes at his cowering prisoners who were wrapped in heavy chains and shreds of clothing, bare blue bottoms shivering, in the midst of the audience hall. Then dropped back with a groan.

Bill licked his lips, and his heart dived with despair at the loss of all that lovely, if noticeably sour-smelling alcohol that was even now dripping onto the floor and swirling down a hair-clogged drain.

“I said, your Royal Impotence, that we are but honest Questers after the Fountain of Hormones.”

“No, no,” screeched the Baron frantically, tugging at his food-spattered robes as though he was about to tear them off with excitement. “Take it back a few sentences. To the man who sent you!”

Bill and Rick exchanged puzzled glances. It was a fair exchange. “Well, that would be Doctor Delazny, right Bill?” said Rick, seeming noticeably paler and thinner after his forced incarceration in the dank dungeon.

“Delazny!” screeched the tall sunken eyed man as he tore out handfuls of his lank hair. “Delazny! Him!”

“Hey, Bill, I got the feeling, somehow, that this guy knows Delazny!”

Bill shook his head in wonderment, his chains shaking in tinkling, semi-musical accompaniment. “I got the same feeling. Only it is impossible. How could the Baron here even know about Dr. Delazny? He's a human being, sort of, and this guy some sort of archetype. Whatever that is.”

Bill, in true Trooper fashion, had already forgotten most of the details of Dr. Delazny's boring lectures about archetypes. There was no room in his teeny-tiny military-shaped and alcohol-destroyed brain for the concept that the sexual dysfunction of billions of male human beings might create an archetype like this one.

The Baron moaned. A most pitiful, heart-breaking sound.

Baron Barren (for that was his name) tried to stand up from his chair but managed only a wobbling crouch. Bent and disfigured, he teetered there, growing red as a beet, tears starting from his eyes as he attempted to rise up into erect state, failing miserably.