Lizard World (24 page)

      
The voice broke off again and in the silence Smedlow watched the fingers rummage through the heap until they had located what looked to him like a yellowed, crumpled, mildewed and extinct species of long underwear. As this garment was lifted closer he could hear the old meat sigh, feel the old heart beating faster and he could smell -- through the mustiness -- the very faintest lingering of perfume.

      
“
And yet,
” resumed the voice, “
my exceeding great vexation notwithstanding, I cannot say but that I was, in some measure, disposed to favour this adjournment of my pleasure. For the inconveniences of my condition, the most dolorous and ill-beseeming alterations of my person, did not in the least conduce to the tranquillest enjoyment of the sex. Indeed, I would nowise venture out a-doors unless my agony were lightened by a dram of opium and unless my face were hid behind the cover of a vizard-mask. For I could scarce endure my torments. And as yet neither my powders nor my patches nor my periwigs -- nay, nor the cunning transmutations of chirurgery -- could reconcile my looking-glass to the ravages of my singular distemper.
”

Chapter XII.

Wherein Mr. Frobey makes a scientific experiment and plans a military expedition whilst Dr. Smedlow regains hope and his Lordship eats a beggar.

Yep, he
was healin’ up real good, thought Lem as he snipped the last stitch in the scalp, pulled out the black thread with his tweezer and laid it down with all the others on the Kleenex. Why, it wasn’t no more than a week and already you couldn’t hardly see the cut, which beside the fact that all them fuzzy little white hairs would soon be big enough to hide it, wasn’t no more now than a pink, itty-bitty line. Why, already the patient was sittin’ up and fiddlin’ with them skivvies, which was goddamn freakin’ good seein as how Uncle Earl had pretty near rebuilt his entire engine, exceptin’ for that whatchumacallit gland he’d been so careful to leave in.

      
“Lem! Get a move on! Go hang up one a them bloodbags. And don’t you make no mess.”

      
Well, it was only after the bloodbag was hung up just right and he was tryin’ real hard to connect it up with one a them real narrow plastic tubes, that it finally all of a sudden struck him that maybe, after all, this here splicer was the English fella. Now it wasn’t that he hadn’t seen before that the patient was sniffin’ skivvies. It was just that he hadn’t paid no mind to what Uncle Earl was always callin’ the “scientific and philosophic implications.” Of course he’d heard tell that a splicer -- like a pig’s head spliced onto a billygoat, for example -- was always kinda like Siamese twins. But the point was to figure out which a these suckers, in a manner a speakin’, was sittin’ in the driver’s seat. Now it was true that the patient was sniffin’ them undies like Uncle Earl had said the English Fella would. But that didn’t prove nothin’, since everyone knows that a chicken walkin’ around without its head ain’t doin’ much more thinkin’ than some kinda goddamn electric eggbeater. But if that pain-in-the-ass prisoner was the one in there callin’ all the shots, there was one sure way to find it out real scientific.

      
Paralyzed in his wheelchair, counting breaths to calm himself down, Smedlow saw Lem plunge into his jeans’ pocket and pull out his own -- now unspeakably precious -- monogrammed silver lighter.

      
“Kinda like a long lost friend, ain’t it?” said Lem, plunking it down on the table: “Well, if you want it, all you gotta do is reach out and take it.”

      
“Lem!” barked Aunt Ligeia: “The blood’s leakin’ on the rug! Now you grab a wad a paper towels and clean it up real good.”

      
That’s right, he thought, grabbing the towels and nodding, why not just go ahead and dump another load a shit on old Lem? Everybody just always figured he was gonna keep on grinnin’ and takin’ it. Like that bigshot editor, for example. Not that he minded so much her takin’ highfalutin potshots at his grammar and all, but if you was gonna say somethin’ bad about his hero, Billy Angel, well, then that was somethin’ else again. Oh yeah, they all just thought he was gonna keep on waggin’ his tail. But nope, he thought, dabbing the carpet and watching the towel redden, now that he was a soldier and had studied up real good on the tactics of guerilla war, there just wasn’t no way in hell he was gonna let some bigdeal fancy bookworm take a crap all over his honor.

      
“Lem! Now go give ’im one a them big needles in the right hand and I’ll go get the left.”

      
No, no, don’t listen to them, thought Smedlow. Just . . . get a hold of yourself. The wondrously, momentously initialed -- MNS -- silver lighter seemed to float away on the sheen of the table like a life preserver just beyond his grasp. If only he could take it. If only he could locate the control panel, make that mummy’s hand stop fingering those old rags.

      
“Aw Hell, I missed the vein,” said Lem, focusin’ real good for his second try and this time hittin’ it just right. Which reminded him, as he watched the blood flow through the tube, how Floyd Fusco had told him and the other guys (after they was all swore-in as soldiers of Anubis) that the whole trick to fightin’ a guerilla war was stayin’ real focused and livin’ off the land -- eatin grubs an’ ants an’ stuff -- and always stayin’ hid so as you could spring yer ambush. And Floyd, after he had told ’em all how they was gonna take over and settle up the scores, had said that the whole trick to ambushin’ was thinkin’ like yer enemy -- and that thinkin’ like yer enemy, when you come right down to it, wasn’t no different than fishin’, which all boils down to findin’ some little smelly dead fish or some nice big worm or bug yer goddamn mudpuppy’s gonna go for. And so, reasoned Lem as he watched his aunt stab the other hand, if he was gonna go fishin’ for some bigdeal, fancypants editor, then his one damn, fuckin’ problem was to figure out what kinda bait was gonna make that kinda mudpuppy swim down to take the hook.

      
“Lem! Quick! Grab one a them plastic jugs and bring it here!”

      
Which is just exactly what he was doin’, puttin’ the patient’s outflow tube into one a them big plastic milk jugs, when all of a sudden that piece a ass Annabel comes walkin’ in -- her little tail wigglin’ in that red plaid skirt -- and starts lookin’ for somethin’ in the cubbies a the desk.

      
“Say, whatchya doin’ there, sugar?” he said, starin’ at the way that skirt showed off her fanny and that sweater cupped her titties.

      
“Mr. Griswold,” explained Annabel, picking up some stationery, pronouncing the words slowly as if she were speaking to an idiot, “is a very important man. He is (as even you must know) the owner and publisher of
Black Bodice Romances
,
Stud Magazine
and
The National Oracle
. Since he can’t write letters for himself, I must do it for him.”

      
Well, I’ll be, thought Lem. Why, it just come to him all of a sudden outa nowheres, like them verses he’d started scribblin’ on the wall when he was sittin’ on the commode in the Magnolia diner. Why, all he had to do was write that editor a letter: this old goddamn geezer was the bait.

      
“Well, looks like me an’ you is goin’ fishin’, pal,” he said, flashin’ a grin, bringin’ his face real close up to the damned old bastard -- so close that Smedlow lowered his gaze from the muddy, subhuman eyes to the spinach trapped between a lower canine and bicuspid.

      
“Oh no, don’t look at it,” Smedlow told himself, shutting the eyelids, taking refuge in his private darkness. For some moments he remained like this until he heard the receding steps and smelled a marked decrease of that peculiar blend of halitosis, Dentine, cigarette smoke, gasoline fumes and animal waste with which by now he identified the proximity of his captor. There is, Smedlow, he now told himself, revving up the engine of his hopes, only one way out of this: you must seize control of this carcass.

      
Oh sure, this time it was easy enough to lift up the muscles to the eyelids, but those fondling fingers -- just a few inches from his silver lighter -- still refused to yield to his control. At first it was the memories that got in his way -- that humiliating night he got the lighter, that dismal birthday party where, no matter how much he begged, Lou Blumberg and Agnes’ father kept on saying no, they wouldn’t admit him to their dental group, that the future was in gingivectomy and that they didn’t need another general practitioner, what they needed was a periodontist. But finally he pushed these distasteful memories from his mind, mustered his concentration and -- yes! yes! -- saw the brown and wrinkled forefinger slowly straighten and lift up. A rapturous intoxication overtook him: the victorious army of Smedlow had captured an enemy garrison, was raising the Smedlow flag. Only a moment later he had taken command of the other fingers, forcing them to drop the yellowed panties and reach toward his precious silver prize. And they had almost touched it, when he became aware of another force fighting against him in the phalanges and knuckles, irresistibly pulling the fingers back. It was the growing violence of this struggle that made the hand lurch back and yanked the needle from the vein.

      
“Well now, look what you gone an’ done,” said Lem, wiping the blood off the back of the hand and sticking the needle back.

      
And it was then that Smedlow, once again, heard the sickening intrusion in his head, felt himself losing his own private and priceless frequency -- as if some foreign station were breaking into his ordinary broadcast, tuning in as it drowned him out.

   
“ ’
Twas the blood itself,
” said the voice, “
or so my ever-eager chirurgeons did conceive it, that did carry the transformative and immortal poison of my distemper. Thus at the first did they surmize that the remedies of ordinary physick -- letting blood by cupping and by the application of leeches to my person -- might draw off a sufficiency of venom. And yet, albeit they did bleed me oft-times thrice a day, these meer half-way measures did nowise suffice to arrest the shedding of my skin, my teeth, and digits -- or the yet more abominable growth of scaled and snakish flesh. But more worser still, the poison coursing thro’ my veins -- but inadequately drawn off by these expedients -- did upon occasion excite a voracious hunger at ev’n the very most faintest smell of meat. For such was the keen and accurst gift of my immortal affliction that, whilst in the hellish extremity of my torments I lay abed of nights next my open casement, I could smell out every ragman, charwoman and beggar making its vile progress thro’ the gloom of distant streets. Never before had I known such a singular acuity of my nervous fibres or such a peremptory desire to feed.
   

  
   
One most regrettable night, by way of example, having lain some hours cruelly vext and sleep-bereft upon my pillow, I could not chuse but give heed to an exceeding gin-sodden and stable-like -- yet in no sort displeasing -- odour.In a trice I had clambered out my window, nosed my quarry thro’ the darkling maze of streets, and come upon the creature asleep upon a door-sill in an alley. ’Twas but some wretched sort of stable-born beggar sleeping off her, no doubt, customary swill. And yet, for all that she was but a most prodigiously foul and ragged jade, there was, natheless, somewhat of a ripe and fruity odour to her young and filthy flesh. When I did surprize the slattern, she at the first mistook me, in her inebriated torpor, for one of the set of ragamuffin curs to whom she vouchsaf’d the favours of her beggarly amours. But when, quite utterly in my own despight, I fell to eating of her haunch, she was altogether of another mind -- most impudently a-biting of my hand and a-tearing at my ears. The creature’s noise must needs have been full loud, for presently comes this meddlesome oaf of a watchman, making such a deal of fuss that, considering well of the matter -- tho’ I had but scarce fallen to my repast -- I was fain to flee
.”

      
The abominable whispering stopped -- and in that sudden silence Smedlow felt himself shaken by the tremors of a cerebral earthquake, as if some vast tectonic plate had shifted beneath him in the interior of the alien skull. His own precious silver lighter on the table, the wigged and ruffled portraits on the wall, the skyline in the window, had now all rushed back to their accustomed places -- and in that sudden return to normal programming, he knew that he -- Max Nathan Smedlow -- had advanced and that his enemy had inexplicably retreated. Immediately he focused his attention on the brown and wrinkled fingers, found no resistance whatsoever in the muscles, and forced them to take possession of his lighter.