The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy Page 41

  “I, er, have some good news,” I told him shakily. “Crowberry Heath is safe. It can never be built on. Not ever.”

  “Really?” I thought it would perk him up. Instead, he crushed me to his chest even tighter. “Oh, Susi, my Susi, how I shall miss you!”

  “You will?” Well, at least one of us was able to perk. “Honestly?”

  “The minute I saw you, tugging at your mini-skirt as you marked those exam papers, I fell in love with you, Susi. That silly curl that falls over your left eye. The way you toss your head when you’re cross. I adore them, and although I’m grateful for what you’ve done – not to mention surprised, I might add! – it’s my love for you that will keep me going for the whole of etern . . .”

  I think he was going to say eternity, but there wasn’t much time left for human kissing. I wanted to snatch what I could.

  “Wow.” Sebastian seemed to be reeling. (Or maybe that was just me). “How did you do that?”

  “Oh, it was so easy when you stop to think about it,” I said.

  March into Chairman’s office bypassing all secretarial dragons since I am clutching a bouquet of roses, being the Satisfied Customer of before, etc, etc, etc. Chairman charmed by young girl in short skirt (and maybe a touch of fairy dust, too). We talk. Or rather, I coerce aided and abetted by much crossing of legs, fluttering of eyelashes . . . and maybe just a touch more of Mum’s fairy dusty. Its effects are very short-lived.

  Finally, though, I lay it on the line for the Chairman. I want Crowberry Heath saved for posterity, and I want it in writing, while you want to be richer than Croesus and get a knighthood into the bargain. He nods. I nod. We knuckle down to business. Drop the Crowberry Heath development, I tell him, and I’ll show you where you can find oil. Now obviously I have to show him my credentials at this juncture, which is rather unfortunate for the hapless Clive who just happens to pop his head round the door at that time. But most people like parrots, and I really needed to prove my point.

  “Go on,” the Chairman of Scumby Homes said, feeding Clive a peanut on his perch, so I did. I turned his secretary into a ginger tomcat, Rupert of Marketing into a tortoiseshell and the teaboy into a tabby.

  “I meant go on with the oil thing,” the Chairman said, “but no matter. Always had a soft spot for cats. Never had ’em at home, see. They give the wife asthma.”

  I wasn’t interested in his wife’s health and I doubted the Chairman had ever had a soft spot in his life. But having proved my abilities, and with him admitting to having taped every episode of Dallas, we moved on.

  “Crowberry Heath is to be left untouched for ever,” I said.

  “Agreed.” With the New Years Honours Lists being drawn up, he signed without even looking. “And the oil?”

  I handed him a map with detailed and accurate directions, left the roses on his desk to remind him what I’d come up smelling of, then left the second bouquet on my great-grandmother’s memory stone.

  “No, I meant how did you come to kiss me like that,” Sebastian said. “It’s . . . it’s as though . . .”

  “As though I love you, too?” Men! “Well, of course I love you, you doughnut.”

  Already his eyes had turned into slits, though, and scales now covered the whole of his skin.

  “I shall always love you, Sebastian.” In fact, the thought of French kissing with those long white fangs made me tingle to the tips of my toes. “Now where did you say you go for the winter?”

  What was left of his hand pointed to a distant drystone wall.

  “Ooh, goody, we can coil round each other for months on end, just me and you,” I giggled.

  And you should have seen his face when my tongue forked.

  “You’re coming, too?”

  “Try and stop me,” I hissed, writhing alongside him through the undergrowth.

  Because that’s the thing, see. We shapeshifters never die. When our human lifespan is over, we invariably turn into Guardian Angels, and since my great-grandmother had the Book of Foresight in her keep, she’d have known the end of her lifespan to the hour.

  I’d worked in that woman’s tavern from the age of sixteen, humping beer kegs, pulling pints, tossing out drunks from midday until midnight, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year, until one day I have the temerity to ask for a rise. You call that a good reason to turn me into a snake?

  One never enchants without the most powerful of reasons.

  My great-grandmother had known Sebastian from when he was sixteen, and in those twelve years he’d never so much as taken a day off. Now if he’d been that devoted to the old woman, she must have adored him in return, so with just two days before the thread of her human lifespan was cut, she gave him the finest gift in her power.

  Eternal youth.

  All good things come to those who wait, Susannah.

  In his case, it was fifty years slithering round Crowberry Heath’s worth of waiting, but as I said, my great-grandmother had had the Book. She knew exactly what Sebastian was waiting for.

  Me.

  Did you really think I would miss a word out of a curse? Me? A Hardcastle!

  Perhaps she’d foreseen my cackhanded efforts in the Book, too. Knew I’d let the side down eventually with my dreadful mistakes. (Poor Raymond, poor Fatima, oh poor little Edna.) And I suppose she’d known from the outset that I wasn’t cut out for teaching, much less casting spells, but believe me, this was one irreversible spell I didn’t mess up. Eternal youth, eternal happiness and eternal love are well worth the additional effort, though you have to hand it to great-gran. That woman certainly understood why the Garden of Eden is ablaze with serpents – not to mention the reason we hibernate through the winter! (And personally, I think temptation’s a jolly good thing, don’t you?)

  What? The oil? Oh, didn’t I say? Even as I was lodging the Chairman’s agreement with solicitors that would finally secure my future home from the developers’ greed, he was following my extremely detailed and accurate directions.

  Right to the oil tank in the basement of St Sylvester’s.

  THE SEA SERPENT SYNDICATE

  Everard Jack Appleton

  If it wasn’t for Jimmy Raines, I wouldn’t try to write this story out. It ain’t the kind of thing I like to think about, any more than I like to remember the name of a horse through which I have lost money; but Jimmy is a good fellow, and he asked me to do it – and what Jimmy Raines wants me to do, I do.

  The reason he wants this story printed is because the people he tells it to don’t believe him, and I don’t know as I blame ’em; but he thinks if they see it in print they will.

  The Sea Serpent Syndicate was a stroke of luck – bad or good, I don’t know which. It started in a little summer garden, not far from Latonia, and it ended on an island somewhere south of Cuba. If it hadn’t been for the earthquake – But I’m getting away before the flag drops.

  To start right, it was a day that was hot enough to warp you – and Jimmy and I decided to absent ourselves from the Latonia races and take it easy.

  We had dropped into John Porter’s summer garden for a glass of beer and a cigar, and both of us tilted back in the shade, when the swing door from the street opened, and a chap that looked like the survivor of a North Pole expedition slouched in and dropped into a chair a few feet away from us.

  The thermometer was somewhere at the hundred mark; but Mr Coldfeet had on an overcoat with the collar turned up, and a muffler round his neck. Jimmy stared at him a moment, and then gave me the wink.

  “I hope you ain’t got your ears frosted, William,” says he to me, as old John came out to get the stranger’s order.

  The guy had a big round package with him, and when John leant over the table to get his good ear near enough to catch the order, the stranger jerked the package away as if it had been a bunch of diamonds.

  “Gimme a lemonade,” said he, “and make it long and sour.”

  I was trying to make up my mind where I had seen him before when he looked up
and straight into my eyes. The change that come over him was something remarkable. In a minute he had cleared the distance between us, and had hold of my hand, pumping it up and down like a steam engine, and saying: “Billy Martin, Billy Martin! Where did you come from?”

  “I didn’t come at all,” says I, “I was here first. Where did you come from, Alphonse Doolan? That’s the question!”

  “From a mighty hot place,” he answers, “and I ain’t used to white man’s weather yet. That’s the reason I feel sorter chilly.”

  “We thought there must be something wrong,” said I, waving my hand at Jimmy. “Mr Doolan, shake hands with my side partner, Mr Raines. Mr Doolan is just back from a vacation in the middle of Africa, Jimmy.”

  Doolan shook his head.

  “No, Billy,” says he, “I left there five years ago. And I’ve been putting in my time in a hotter place than Africa. I’ve been surrounded by the equator, and glued to an island down in the Carib. And I’m nigh dead with the heat of it!”

  “Won’t you take off your overcoat, then?” I says. “The last I heard of you, you was sending daily reports about the temperature and barometer readings from some hole in the great American desert for the wise guys at Washington.”

  Alphonse dragged up his chair and the bundle with it.

  “I was,” he says, “but they transferred me. I had a joke one day, and sent a lot of dispatches to them about the ice forming and the snowstorm freezing my instruments. As it was August, they thought I needed a rest for a couple of months, and after that they shipped me to my island, where for four years I have been hanging on, broiling to death. Four years of heat and thirst, and nobody to talk to! Nothing to look at but scrub and sand – Lord, the sand there is on that island! It’s a wonder it don’t sink with the weight of it!”

  “Working for the government still, Alphonse?” I asks.

  “Sure,” he answers. “Taking the readings every day, and sending them back to Havana whenever they happen to think of me and scow down with grub for me. I’m nigh crazy, Billy – but I’ll soon be better, because –”

  He stopped a minute, looking very foxy.

  “Because I’ve got him!”

  “Him?” says I. “Who’s him?”

  “Billy. I named him after you, Billy Martin, and you’ve got cause to be proud.”

  “Baby?” says I, yawning. I’d expected something more exciting from the way Alphonse had started out.

  “Baby?” says he, scornful-like. “Naw! Sea serpent!”

  Jimmy kicked me under the table, and I sat up. Alphonse was madder than I had thought after all.

  “Oh, I am proud,” I says. “I am, Alphonse. Where do you keep him?”

  “On the island,” he answers, sucking his lemonade through the straw, and watching me closely. “In the middle of the lake the earthquake made. He come in with the quake, and I’ve tamed him. He eats out of my hand, and he’s a good snake, I tell you – but I can’t afford him. It takes all my supplies to keep him good-tempered – and sardines, his favourite, come high.”

  “Yes,” I says, “it must be a kind of a luxury to have a pet sea serpent, Alphonse, following you round the house and eating out of your hand. And as for sleeping with one –”

  “Cut it out, cut it out, Billy,” says Alphonse, as sensible as could be. “You and I worked together long enough for you to know that I ain’t a liar. This is straight goods, and here’s the evidence,” and he commenced to unwrap the package. He took out something that looked like an overgrown soup plate and put it down on the table. It smelt fearful fishy, I noticed, and it appeared to be made of horn, half an inch thick, and as big as a scale from the fish you didn’t catch.

  “Well,” I says, “don’t be silly, Alphonse. Go ahead with your fairy tale. I’ll listen to it if Mr Baines will.”

  “There ain’t going to be no fairy tale,” says Alphonse bristling up. “That’s a scale from my sea serpent – come off him two weeks ago, when he got upset at something and throwed it at me.”

  He took a letter from his pocket.

  “This here letter,” says he, opening it and tossing it across the table, “is from the Natural History Society secretary across the river, and you can see what he says – ‘The article in the possession of Mr Alphonse Doolan appears to be, and probably is, a scale from an ocean reptile, popularly known as a sea serpent.’”

  I looked at the letter, and sure enough that is what it said, and a lot more about the value of the discovery, and wishing the authorities at Washington would take the matter up with Mr Doolan. I read it aloud, and Jimmy’s eyes got bigger and bigger. When I finished and handed it back to Doolan, Jimmy spoke for the first time.

  “Mr Doolan,” says he, “how much would it cost to go after that animal of yours, and bring him to the States for exhibition purposes?”

  “Well,” replied Alphonse, “I don’t know. As soon as I get to Washington, I’m going to get the Smithsonian Institute to work it out.”

  “Smithsonian nothing,” says Jimmy. “Can’t you see something better ahead than that? If you bring that animal here, and if he is as big as that hunk of horn would seem to indicate, there’s a fortune in it for three men.”

  Alphonse nodded his head slowly. “But it would cost all of five thousand dollars,” he says, “and I’m broke.”

  Then Jimmy showed for the first time how sharp he had got all in a minute.

  “Mr Doolan,” says he, leaning over the soup plate thing, “when I am a sport I try to be a game one. Billy Martin and I cleaned up a little more than the figure you name last month. That’s why we are taking the afternoon off here in place of beating the bookies out of other people’s money. Now, Mr Martin seems interested in this story of yours, fishy as it looks to be, and I am, too. I am willing to make you a proposition. We will go back to your island, every fellow paying his own way. If that snake of yours is the real thing we’ll pay for bringing him here, and split the profits on showing him. Is that fair?”

  It was a long speech for Jimmy, and plain as an old shoe. Alphonse couldn’t help seeing it was straight, too.

  He thought a minute, looked at me, and then held out his hand to Jimmy.

  “Shake,” he says. I did the same, and the Doolan-Raines-Martin Sea Serpent Syndicate was formed.

  Six days later we were aboard a little fruit boat on the Caribbean Sea, looking for Alphonse’s island. It was my first experience on the raging deep, and I think it will be my last, unless I am chloroformed and dragged aboard another ship. The fourth day out, about ten o’clock in the morning, Alphonse let out a yell like an Indian, and grabbed a chart from the captain’s hand.

  “That’s my island, cap,” he says, pointing to a little black spot on the edge of the ocean. “Steer for her, and dump us off. I’m hungry to see that bunch of sand again.”

  In less than an hour we had drawn up alongside the hump of sand and scrub palm trees, and half an hour later we were sitting on our traps watching the fruit boat get smaller and smaller in the distance. It was hot enough to roast a pig, but Alphonse seemed really happy. He messed round and got something for us to eat out of his pack, and then we all lighted our pipes and waited for the sun to go down a bit.

  “Alphonse,” says I, as we stretched out under the biggest tree we could find, “I haven’t asked you for any particulars since we started on this expedition. Now I want you to tell us how you came to round up that snake of yours.”

  Alphonse took a long draw at his pipe and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “It ain’t much of a story,” says he, “but you’ve got a right to know it. My station ain’t anything but a shanty, and a soap-box for furniture. It stands at the head of what was a ravine. One night there come a ’quake, and I got up to see where I was. The moon was shining bright, and when I looked for my ravine I made sure I was off my head. There wasn’t none left.

  “In place of the valley was a lake, half-a-mile wide and two long, boiling and churning. And in it was the curiousest
creature you ever see. He’s three hundred feet long – I made him lie still once while I measured him so you can bet on the figures – and has a head on him like a skinned cow. He was bellering and flapping his fins, and smelt something fearful. That was Billy, and I soon figured out what had happened. The ’quake had opened my island from the bottom, let Billy and a lot of water in, closed up again – and left the snake and me to get acquainted.

  “I didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night, with his thrashing around and bawling for his folks, but by morning he’d worn himself out and was sleeping as peacefully as a lamb on top of the water. I took a fancy to him right then. I don’t know what made me think of you just then, Bill Martin, but I did; and I named him after you before he could wake up and object.

  “When he opened his eyes and seen me observing him, he got upset. He raised about ten feet of his neck out of the water, and cut loose, with a twist of his head and a grunt, and this very scale that brought us three together come sailing straight for me. I side-stepped and it buried itself in the sand.

  “ ‘Look a-here, Bill,’ I says, ‘that’s no way to treat the owner of this island. I didn’t invite you here, in the first place; you’re unexpected company, and you oughter behave yourself polite. I’m willing for you to stay, but you’ve got to be good-natured.’

  “I don’t say he understood me, but he looked as if he might. Then he opened his mouth and yawned like he was embarrassed, so I throwed him a piece of meat. He caught it and swung around, and started for the other side of the lake. From that on he acted right, and I didn’t have no cause to complain. I never realised what company a sea-serpent could be; I’m right lonesome for him now. He’s an affectionate reptile, and it won’t take him no time to get broke in, once we git him to the States. A few more weeks of kind treatment will make him as gentle as a kitten, and he will swim after any boat I happen to be on. You hear me?”