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Chapter One

At first glance Deirdre looked human.

Of course, Deirdre always got more than just a glance—even back when she was human.

Once upon a time she had been a stunning beauty with pale skin, blue eyes, and auburn hair. That was before she died last year.

In death she was transformed by the twinned viruses the undead carry in their blood and saliva. As a vampire she had gone from "stunning" to "unearthly" on the beauty meter. Her auburn hair turned the color of arterial blood; her sapphire eyes replaced by haunted rubies and her skin a whiter shade of pale and as luminous as the moon.

The fangs, of course, went without saying.

But she had undergone another extreme makeover in drinking my mutated blood a few months ago. Now her sharp, pointy teeth were all but gone. More obviously, her skin was approaching the mocha and cream shade that came from a daily regimen of sunbathing—something you rarely see in a redhead and never in a vampire. Which was the point, I suppose, as Deirdre was no longer technically undead.

My unique hemoglobin didn't make her human, again, you understand. The crimson eyes were an obvious clue that she was no longer the girl next door. That and the fact that she could still bench-press a small truck. But while I couldn't give her back everything that she had lost in her original transformation, she seemed content: being "un-undead" suited her just fine.

If only Deirdre's situation suited Lupé, as well.

My significant other understood, of course, that I needed a security chief and bodyguard who was conversant with the unique nature of my enemies, could stop a bullet without flinching, and could—well—bench-press a small truck. She also understood the unique obligations involved as (technically speaking) I was the one who had brought Deirdre "over" and (literally speaking) I was the one who had brought her "back." Lupé knew something about blood-bonds and curses and debts-that-do-not-die even when we do the mortal coil shuffle.

Still, Deirdre was major eye candy. Worse, she had made it clear that, when it came to swapping body fluids, we needn't limit ourselves (as we had on the two previous occasions) to blood alone.

It required frequent reminders to all and sundry that my heart belonged to Lupé.

Deirdre, it seemed, had someone else's heart right now.

She was holding it in the palm of her hand.

And it was convulsing as if it were still alive.  

"Where did you get that?" I asked, sensing light gathering at the dark edges of my vision.

She held the squirming cardiac muscle toward me, oily red fluids drooling between her fingers and sheeting down her arm. "Don't you recognize it?" She smiled demurely. "It's yours."

I looked down at the gaping dark hole in my chest . . .

And awoke in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets.

* * *

The upside to having daymares on a regular basis is that you stop going through that whole disorientation phase and learn to wake up real quick. The downside was that they were lasting well past sunset and I still woke up feeling exhausted.

I groaned out of bed, hoping I hadn't murmured Deirdre's name while Lupé was in earshot. Even when she's in human form, Lupé doesn't have to be in the room to be within earshot.

In the bathroom I found a note taped to the medicine cabinet mirror.

 

Gone for groceries and DVDs.  

Movie night tonight . . .  

L~  

 

I reached through the shower curtains and wrenched the cold water handle. Tonight was the Big Night: I had a lot to do and I couldn't waste time trying to put a Freudian spin on today's bad dream.

Even if there was a good chance I would get my heart ripped out before the sun came back up.

* * *

T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" begins with: "Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic . . ."

The dead of winter in Louisiana is something like that: short sleeves one day, a sweater the next. Tonight, the weather hadn't made up its mind. I buckled my shoulder holster over a sleeveless tee and shrugged into a flannel shirt but left it unbuttoned so I could reach the Glock-20 loaded with silver frag-ammo under my left armpit. Opening the screen door, I stepped down and walked barefoot through the January chrysalis of my new back yard. The brown, withered grass sighed beneath my feet, not quite dead, not quite alive.

Like me, in a sense.

Except that, come true spring—mid to late February—the lawn would burst forth with new life while I would be . . . well . . . what?

All flesh is grass but, where most folks end up succumbing to the Lawnmower of Life, some of us cheat the mulching process and come back as ghastly perennials. Considering the last eighteen months of my so-called half-life, there was probably a fertilizer analogy I could come up with . . . but I didn't want to go there.

I stepped on a mushroom and felt it dissolve between my toes. Forget the green stuff; a pale, nocturnal parasite was probably a better analogy for my condition. That's me: a real "fun guy."

Buh-dump-bum.  

By now you'd think there would be a clear-cut diagnosis of my actual condition. But, no: I was left with two starting presumptions.

One, that I actually died in the automobile accident that killed my family and was "reborn" in the hospital morgue . . .

Or, two, that I was only presumed dead while "Virus A" from Bassarab's blood put me in a healing trance. Lacking the combinant factors of "Virus B" that resided in the old vampire's saliva, the infection started converting my body into something new—neither fully human nor technically undead.

Add to either scenario the subsequent contaminants and blood-borne pathogens from my encounters with Kadeth Bey's tanis leaf extract and the demon-laced blood of Elizabeth Báthory—well, the "either/or" factor became rather hazy. And while the distinctions seemed important to some, I had to wonder: in the end did it really matter? My wife and daughter were still dead and the Las Vegas Demesne was booking odds on me attaining the same status within the month.

But this wasn't the night to think about depressing things like vampire vendettas and daymares concerning misplaced hearts, it was an evening made for romance! A sliver of moon hung over the graveyard like a leprous grow-light in Death's terrarium. The wind had freshened, bringing the odor of distant rain and nearby rot. I could see a storm was finally brewing and that meant tonight had to be "The Night."

If Lupé and J.D. ever got back from Blockbusters, that is.

I reached into my pocket, fished past my grandmother's ring, and retrieved a small vial of Mentholatum. I rimmed my nostrils with ointment before continuing to the far end of my property.

One minute I was alone, the next I was outnumbered three to one.

You might think that the ability to see into the infrared spectrum would give me all sorts of advantages. But infravision is worth diddly-squat when the creatures coming at you have no body heat. The dead were a dozen yards away before I finally saw them.

Three corpses shambled toward me; their clumsy, unbalanced rhythms reminiscent of a trio of winos in fully soused search-mode for the nearest liquor store. The one in the middle looked freshly dead while his wingmen had been in the ground a great deal longer. They stumbled to a stop against the waist-high stone wall that separated the cemetery from my backyard.

Unfortunately this wasn't a dream: the stench of dust, dirt, mold, and chemically retarded decomposition continued its forward momentum, slamming past the menthol barrier and up into my nostrils like a slow-motion train wreck. I sneezed and set a brown paper bag on the ground.

"Yo, Cséjthe," the big one on the left said. It sounded more like he was sneezing, in turn. The proper pronunciation of my last name, "Chay-tay," requires a tad more articulation than most decomposing tongues and palettes can muster.

I stood about a foot back from the stonework on my side and tried to breathe shallowly. "Boo," I greeted, "Cam."

Boo grinned; Cam nodded. Boo was scary when he grinned. Cam was scarier because he couldn't. In "The Mending Wall" Robert Frost wrote that "good fences make good neighbors." I wonder if Bob knew how well that analogy extended to graveyards.

In point of fact, however, it wasn't the cemetery wall that kept the dead off my property. My real privacy fence was the line of consecrated salt along the base of the crumbling concrete partitions that bordered my property on three sides. Don't get me wrong. I get along pretty well with a lot of the deceased-but-not-quite-departed. But some of them just aren't real clear on the issue of boundaries. Hey, if they're out of the ground—major clue!

Until Mama Samm came and put a hoodoo barrier around my property I had endured a nightly parade of rotting corpses to my back door. Some wanted help in matters of unfinished business, others were just lonely. Still, there had to be some limits. Now I just replaced the salt every month or so. More often when it rained.

"This here's The Professor," Boo said, indicating the cadaver between them. Cam sort of nodded. A suicide, Cameron had propped a double-barreled shotgun under his jaw and tripped both triggers as his last living act. While the mortician's art has come a long way the funeral was still a closed casket affair. Cam isn't geared for post mortem small talk.

The Professor didn't look anything like Russell Johnson so I politely refrained from asking after Gilligan or Mary Ann. He did, however, look as if he was in a state of shock. It's really hard to tell with the freshly dead; they all have that look of mild surprise or severe disappointment.

"You're not real," he said.

I've been told that I have "issues" but that wasn't what he meant.

"Well, of course he ain't the real Baron Samedi," Boo said. "Don't matter, though. He's still our—whatchamacallem—buddy-man."

I sighed. "Ombudsman. Except I ain't. Aren't. I'm not," I corrected. It didn't matter that I wasn't the Vodoun Loa of the Dead: half of the corpses in the cemetery still believed it, the other half didn't care. There's something in my tainted blood that draws them to me like moths to the flame.

"Aww, he's just modest," Boo continued. Cam just nodded.

"He's not real," The Professor insisted. "You're not real!"

"Huh?" said Boo.

"I am asleep. This is a dream!"

"A dream?" I looked around. "Looks more like a nightmare to me."

"Hey!" said Boo.

A moldy green hand rose up and gripped the top of the crumbling wall. "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake," intoned a new voice. In life it might have been deep and resonant, in death it sounded wheezy and clotted, as if the speaker were missing a lung and had something stuck in his throat. Something like roots and leaves and cemetery earth. " . . . some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. The prophet Daniel, chapter twelve, verse the second," the new corpse finished, dragging itself more or less erect to lean against the stone barrier.

"Well, hell, Preacher," Boo exclaimed in a wounded voice, "which ones are we?"

I think the new arrival was attempting an expression of contempt—something hard to pull off when you don't have the complete palette of skin and muscles to work with.

"He's got a point, Jerome," I said to the cadaver whose Pentecostal proclivities had earned him the nickname "Preacher." "Ole Boo, here, has never given evidence of having any shame whatsoever."

Cam wheezed as though he was laughing. The Professor squeezed his eyes shut and looked as if he was wishing himself back into his bed.

"Atheists," Jerome scolded.

"Now hold on there, Preacher," Boo puffed, "that ain't entirely true. By strict definition I'm an agnostic and Cameron, here, was Unitarian. I'm bettin' that The Professor is one of them secular humanists. Right, Doc?"

"Organized religion is nothing but codified mythology mixed with superstition," The Professor said, still careful to keep his eyes squinched shut.

"A rational mind," I observed, "dedicated to logic and the scientific precepts."

"Yes," he said, easing one eye open.

"Boy, are you in deep doo-doo!"

"How about you, boss?" Boo asked.

I considered the rows of aged and crumbling headstones. "I don't know anymore."

"If you so-called agnostics would read the Bible—"

"'O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave,'" I interrupted, "'that thou wouldst keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldst appoint me a set time, and remember me.' The Book of Job, chapter fourteen, verse the thirteenth."

They all stared at me as if I had grown an extra head.

Reaching down, I pulled an old book out of the sack. "eBay's gotten pricier of late, Jerome, but I got you the Kübler-Ross." I handed it to born-again dead man.

"Josephus?" he queried, taking the old tome with trembling hands. "I know there's a copy in the West Monroe library."

"I'm not kyping library books for you, Jerome."

"I'll give it back when I'm done."

I shook my head. "You don't take care of them. It's not your fault, considering your present address, but I think it's best if we get you your own copies."

"What you need books for, Preacher?" Boo shifted his grasp on The Professor's arm as he tried to pull away. "Can't you just pray to God for your answers—you bein' so righteous and all?"

"Now, boys," I soothed, "we're all just doing the best we can to figure out how it all works."

"And some of us," Boo added, "are trying to figure out why we're not already in heaven instead of slumming with the sinners on the slag heap of the dead."

Jerome turned on his heel and stalked off in a huff. Well, actually, it was more of a shamble-off-in-a-huff kind of thing.

"Hey," the big corpse called after him, "have you tried hopping? Maybe y'all gotta jump-start that Rapture effect! Beam me up, Jesus!"

"That's not very nice," I said.

"Aw, he's always askin' for it." But he did look a little ashamed. "And what am I gonna do? Piss off God? Oooo, He might strike me dead! No, wait . . . He might banish my soul to wander the earth after I die! No wait . . ."

"Alright, you've made your point." I rummaged through the sack and pulled out a packet of oddly shaped dice. One die had eight sides, another ten, and yet another twenty. "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game dice," I read off the package and handed it to Cam. "You play D & D?" It was a rhetorical question—in practical terms, anything you asked Cam was a rhetorical question.

"E & E," Boo answered for him.

"What?"

"Ectoplasm & Exorcists," he elaborated. "Plays with the Gorsky twins over in the northeast plots."

I just looked at him.

"You know . . . you're kibitzing at a séance and suddenly a fifteenth-level exorcist bursts into the room and begins reading from the Roman Ritual. What do you do?"

I shrugged. "Make a saving throw?" I reached into the sack and pulled out another book. "Here, Boo; Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead." As I handed it to him, he relaxed his grip on The Professor, who wrenched himself free and ran back into the mists of the cemetery.

"Oops. Guess we'd better go fetch our newbie before he finds a way off the grounds and really stirs up a ruckus!" As he turned to go, he ruffled the pages of his new present. "Hey, no pictures!"

"It's a war story, Bubba, not necrophilial porn."

He shrugged, took a step, and then stopped. "Hey, Hoss, I think we got company."

I turned my head and looked across the cemetery grounds. There were four—no, five—of them, fanning out as they crept among the crypts, using tombstones and monuments for cover. A couple of them were as cold as Boo and Cam but the others flickered like a banked fire—not warm enough to be alive but not cold enough to be completely dead.

Undead, to be more specific. Outtatown Revenants, come to do some wet-work at la Casa de Cséjthe.

No wonder I had bad dreams. A couple of years ago I was as normal as the next guy. That was before an untidy blood transfusion with the Lord of the Undead netted me one-half of that recombinant virus that changes day-trippers into night-sippers. And while it's true that I'm stronger and faster than the vast majority of humankind, I'm no match for anyone who's completely crossed over to the other side of the blood divide. One-on-one, I'd last about thirty seconds against a full-fledged vampire if everything else was equal. And if I couldn't outrun much less outfight one vampire, what were my chances with five of them?

I reached up inside my shirt and unsnapped the leather restraining strap over the trigger. There's an old saying that "God made all men but Sam Colt made 'em equal." Well, even superhuman reflexes and a Glock-20 with silver fragmentation loads didn't make me the equal of five fanged assassins. Still, I hadn't used my gun in self-defense yet and I was betting that I wouldn't be doing so tonight. I left the Glock in the holster for the moment.

It was a safe bet: the house odds were in my favor. The ground began to boil around the intruders' feet. Two of them lost their footing and fell to the ground. Correction: fell into the ground and disappeared without a trace. Another one fell to his knees. Three cadavers popped up around him, looking like ghastly manikins cut off at the waist. They grabbed the surprised vampire and dragged him down into the unsettled earth. The beginnings of a scream were cut off as dirt clods filled his fanged mouth.

That left two nosferatu on their feet. Dozens of arms were now thrust up out of the ground, moldy hands grasping undead ankles, shins, knees, thighs, a couple grabbing belts. One toppled and disappeared. The other gamely struggled on, ripping an arm loose from a corpse and using it to club at the others.

"How many is this, now?" Boo asked.

"Third attempt this year," I said, "and we're barely through January."

The reason I had survived three attacks was due, in no small measure, to our relocation to the new neighborhood. After our old house was badly damaged during last year's assault by demonically sponsored paramilitary forces, we found ourselves in the market for something with a little more seclusion and a lot more security. The property boundaries of my new domicile practically screamed the old Realtors' adage "Location, location, location!"

The front yard ended as a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River. Since most vampires won't willingly cross running water, the bad guys just figured it was easier to come at me across open ground on the other three sides. Well, "open ground" is a bit of a misnomer: an old cemetery borders my property line where the river doesn't. And, so far, none of my bloodsucking assassins had made it past the necro-hood watch. Eventually the "people" sending them were going to get wise.

But not tonight. The last vampire disappeared beneath a dog pile of decomposing bodies and sank into the loamy earth.

"Five," Boo grunted. "They never sent this many before."

I leaned against the wall. "Kurt wants me to come back to New York. He thinks I could nip this in the bud by facing down the families there that want to challenge me for the throne."

"Throne? You people have a throne?"

"Figure of speech," I said. "I hope. And what do you mean 'you people'? I am not a vampire. Not fully, anyway. Not yet. And Lupé is a werewolf—you don't want to suggest otherwise while she's around. And Deirdre—well, we don't really know what Deirdre is anymore."

He grinned. "And you're not the voodoo Loa of the Dead."

I looked away. I hate it when they grin. "I've met Baron Samedi. He's still miffed that some of his subjects prefer my company to his."

"Guess we ain't the boyz in his hood. Ah, I see Cam's corralled our reluctant zombie."

I turned and saw The Professor being herded back toward us by Boo's faceless buddy. "What are you going to do with him?"

"Walk him around until first cock's crow. The first emergence is always traumatic for the newbies. And you can never tell who's gonna be hit the hardest—the religious types who expect to wake up in heaven or the atheists who don't expect to wake up at all."

He started toward the other two and I turned back toward the house with a troubled heart. The worst part of dealing with the living dead was not the smell or the gruesome reminders of one's own mortality.

It was the troubling question of why they were still here.

* * *

Back in the house I could hear the clanking of heavy weights down in the basement signifying Deirdre's presence. Lupé and J.D. were still unaccounted for.

That wasn't surprising as the trip into town takes a little longer from the new digs. For instance: the garage is on the other side of the river. First, you have to go down to the retaining wall at the edge of the front lawn, duck through the curtain of weeping willows, pass through the gate, go down about three-dozen stairs to the docks below, cast off and take the boat across the Ouachita River to a private landing on the opposite bank. Then you climb about three dozen more stairs to a private garage, disengage two alarm systems, neutralize Mama Samm's voodoo hexes, and drive one of the cars into town.

Lather, rinse, repeat for the return trip.

Yes, it's a hassle and deliveries are a bitch, but the whole crossing running water taboo for vampires combined with a graveyard serving as an anti-undead minefield had raised my life expectancy by another three to four months.

The house was a hundred-and-fifty-year-old, two-story manse with a columned front porch. A carriage house in the back had been converted into guest quarters by the previous occupant. That's where the security staff was housed and the boys were going to be in a lot of trouble if Deirdre or Lupé found out about the particulars of tonight's near incursion.

Of course, I would be in even more trouble if they learned that I had stepped outside unescorted so I wasn't about to tattle. Besides, I knew the hired help was extremely uncomfortable when it came to "The Neighbors"—I was still human enough to empathize a bit on that issue.

Kurt was right. I was going to have to go to New York and settle this somehow. The property boundaries had been very effective so far but eventually they were going to come at me in a different way. Perhaps skydiving nosferatu (nosferti? nosfertae?). If I was going to make any changes to the demesne system during my predictably brief tenure as Doman, I should probably start with their politics.

New York embraced the Klingon model of political advancement through assassination. Even if I hadn't been the primary target for lethal political ambitions, it would have vexed me. Powerful, ancient, bloodsucking creatures of the night should have a better means of governance than a science fiction trope.

* * *

Back in my study a fire crackled merrily in the small Victorian-style fireplace as I popped the magazine on the Glock and locked both in my desk drawer. I was getting better about not setting foot outside without being armed but I'd be damned if I was going to eat, sleep, and visit the john while carrying. If the day (or night) came that any hostile vampires actually made it as far as the house, they still had to be invited in. In that respect, at least, a man's home remained his castle.

I wandered around the room, considering the hundreds of shelved book spines that turned two of the four walls into colorful crazy quilts done in literary motif. I fingered a brand-new translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead next to a cracked and crumbling edition of The Peruvian Book of the Dead. On the other side was a paperback copy of the Jerry Garcia book of The Dead.

I was still working the glitches out of my home-grown cataloging system.

The library was divided into two separate sections, the medical and the metaphysical. A 300-gallon marine aquarium served as a de facto divider, its cold-blooded inhabitants gliding back and forth, occasionally stopping to contemplate the incomprehensible world that unfolded just beyond their own saltwater existence. I stopped to sprinkle some freeze-dried brine shrimp over the bubbling surface and their questions were forgotten in a roiled feeding frenzy. The scorpion fish, a Pterois volitans, was circling the melee, venomous spines a-quiver, as if considering the feeders as potential feedees so I dropped a couple of prawns in to keep the mayhem down to an acceptable level.

The resultant chaos in the aquarium was reflective of my approach to sorting the half of my library dealing with the subjects of death and the hereafter. It remained a work in progress as I vacillated between catagorizing by author, religion, or general theory. Shelving genetics, viral science, and blood-borne pathogens is child's play by comparison.

The biggest problem is that most of everything believed or written about the afterlife or heaven or hell is based on hearsay or wishful thinking and very little in the way of eye-witness accounts. While there are those supposed "life after life" testimonials, who's to say it's not just a dream or hallucination—the by-product of a brain starved for oxygen during that abbreviated time-out called "clinical death"? I'd prefer to hear from somebody who took the extended tour, not just the poke-your-head-in-and-glance-around-then-hurry-back-home-to-the-ICU anecdote.

Returning to Little Gidding, Eliot wrote: " . . . the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." But in my experience, if the long-dead dream of heaven, they don't seem to remember anything if they come back. Ditto for vampires. In fact, just thinking about the whole concept seems to wig them out. They say there are no atheists in foxholes but reopened graves are an entirely different matter. The Bible doesn't record Lazarus' thoughts on his three days in the tomb experience. But legend holds that, during those long years in which he was granted a second sojourn among the living, the brother of Mary and Martha never smiled again.

So a note to all televangelists: resurrection may not be all that it's cracked up to be.

Still, you have to believe in something, I thought as I looked up at the great sword that hung above the fireplace mantel. I do, anyway. I'd rather believe in something and, in the end, discover there was nothing—than believe in nothing and, when the end comes, discover that there was Something, after all. You may not agree but we all have some kind of judgment day, some day, and some time, some where.

I'd already had a couple, myself.

I walked over and pulled the enormous blade from its twisted oaken sheath. The blue-green metal refracted the room's track lighting in coruscating rainbows. So far I'd resisted the temptation to send the magnificent blade off for serious testing. The metal might be some unknown meteorite alloy: it was stronger and harder but lighter than steel. I had seen the edge slice through fossilized dinosaur bones like they were so much papier-mâché. Under a magnifying glass, however, the edge remained impossibly sharp, showing neither nick nor notch.

What could a lab tell me, anyway? That the test results were anomalous?

And what could I tell them when they came back with questions of their own? That it had been left behind by an angel—possibly an archangel?

For now, it continued to hang over the fireplace like a mildly curving question mark, another mismatched piece for the jigsaw puzzle of Faith.

I wondered if "Brother" Michael was ever coming back for his sword.

Maybe all of that was a dream, too; the by-product of a once human brain being slowly turned inside-out by the necrotic virus I'd inherited from Vlad Drakul Bassarab.

As if to punctuate that thought, my computer chimed and a digitized voice announced: "You've got mail! Let's count de messages! Vun! Two! Tree messages! Ah! Ah! Ah!"

Deirdre, in one of her many fits of boredom, had upgraded my messaging system with .wav files of "The Count" from Sesame Street. Having a heavily-accented Muppet announce the arrival of email was kind of cute—the first couple of days. Forget haunted houses and graveyards; the scariest things inhabit the Internet.

I replaced the sword in its gnarled, wooden sheath and sat down to check my computer's inbox. Too bad she hadn't upgraded my spam filter. The first two messages turned out to be pleas from surviving relatives of assassinated African cabinet ministers who wished the temporary use of my bank account in order to launder millions of dollars from private government accounts. At least the virus hadn't sufficiently emulsified my brain for me to fall for scams like this. Sadly, there were people without hemophagic viruses ravaging their cerebral cortexes, who would.

The third message in my inbox was more problematical. As I scrolled down the virtual page, a pattern of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared.

Familiar-looking hieroglyphs.

Followed by an even more familiar translation:

 

Oh! Amon Ra, Oh . . .
God of gods . . .
Death is but the doorway to new life.
We live today. We shall live again . . .
In many forms shall we return . . .
O mighty one . . . 

 

The screen flickered.

It more than flickered; it ran through all 1,024 variations of the monitor's color settings in about twenty seconds.

I blinked and looked up from the monitor. And saw a stranger sitting across the room.

Except it wasn't my room.

A moment before I was sitting in my crowded little study. Now the room was cavernous. Panels of dark, gleaming wood replaced the bookshelves. The fireplace had grown into a giant, stonework affair that suggested the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: you could walk around inside without bumping your head.

An elderly man sat upon an antique chaise lounge across from me. His legs were elevated and hidden beneath a colorful stratum of quilts and comforters. He wore a maroon velvet smoking jacket with white edelweiss embroidered upon the lapels and a blue cravat or scarf that all but obscured his shirt. His white hair was sparse and his moustache wispy enough to be almost invisible. His head was round and vaguely he put me in mind of a Peanuts cartoon character—Charlie Brown some sixty years hence and waiting for a visit from his grandchildren. Snoopy's master grown sharp and crafty with age. . . .

"Mr. Cséjthe," the stranger began. I would have thought his speech without accent was it not for his pronunciation of the hard consonants in my name. " . . . please forgive this unorthodox intrusion but I simply must speak with you. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Pipt."

"What's up, Doc?" I growled, though I suspected that this was going to be a one-way conversation.

"As you may have already surmised, I am not actually here," the apparition explained.

As if to underscore the point a clown fish from my aquarium wriggled up to the old man as if in search of a handout. Finding none, it turned and disappeared.

"I have embedded this message in the code strings and algorithms of the computer message so that I might have a better chance of making my case," Pipt elaborated.

In other words, a pop-up mpeg that played inside your head. This was damned impressive!

He brought a slender hand from beneath the coverlets and smoothed a stray wisp of hair behind his ear. "I am a scientist who has spent his whole life unlocking the secrets of the human condition. I pioneered genetics research years before the discovery of the double helix ignited scientific curiosity in the rest of the world. I have devoted my entire life to one, great and overriding goal!"

As he paused to lean toward me, I considered how "have" sounded more like "haff" as it fell from his wrinkled lips.

"And do you know what that goal is?"

I went for the most obvious choice: "Creating microburst hypnotropic flash-spam on a global scale?"

"Immortality, Mr. Cséjthe!" he exclaimed.

Oh, too bad . . .

Tell me that you've invented the next big marketing technology of the twenty-first century and you've got my attention. But "Immortality"? Why not throw "World Domination" in and cackle like a demented madman?

Demented madman—now there was a nice redundancy . . .

"Yes," he continued, "I know it seems quite the hoary cliché. But clichés are based upon universal truths and immortality has been the dream and desire of the human race since ancient times! The idea—the Ideal—is so old that it is the basis of myths and stories from every proto-culture, every race and clime of recorded history. Science and technology may create this or invent that, but the motivation for every social, technological, and medical advance is rooted in the goal of extending life! Reducing the wear and tear on the human body so that it can last longer! And—" He paused and seemed to gather himself. "But I rattle on like an old skeleton. My time is limited and I must make my point quickly and succinctly."

He straightened his spine, striking an almost regal pose. "How old do you suppose that I am?"

That's the problem with advanced age. Genetics and/or quality of life—diet, exercise, stress—could tweak the physical signs either way. There were fifty-year-olds who looked seventy and seventy-year-olds who could pass for sixty. Since Cyrus the Computer Virus was making the pitch for his immortality research, I could guess that he was probably older than he looked.

"I was born on March sixteenth . . ." He paused for dramatic effect. " . . . in the year 1911!"

The second pause for dramatic effect was far more effective. If I could believe what he was saying.

"But longevity is not the same as immortality," he continued with a gesture that took in his blanketed lower extremities. "I have made my most significant breakthroughs too late to keep me in this vessel much longer. I shall continue . . . but my next transition is not one I would choose if I could find an alternative . . ."

"And heeeeere's the pitch . . ." I murmured.

"You, Mr. Cséjthe, are that alternative."

Bingo.  

"You have something to offer that would cost you very little and would benefit me very much." His deeply set brown eyes widened and seemed unusually alive in his less than lively body. "And, through me, the human race!"

Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling: the alarm bells always go off when folk with vague and mysterious agendas invoke the human race. Call me paranoid but my experience with telemarketers was bad and my track record with paranormal power mongers even worse. Put 'em together . . .

And, speaking of bells, somewhere off in the distance, I heard my front doorbell chime.

"In return, I believe I can offer you two very precious gifts," Pipt continued, ignoring the sound of the chimes in my hallway. "I would like to meet with you to discuss these matters." He shrugged. "Alas, I do not believe you would make the journey on hearsay so I propose to send an emissary to meet with you and discuss our mutual interests."

He gestured and a dwarf dressed in lederhosen came into view, carrying a wooden box.

"I'll get it!" Deirdre called from the other room. The front door, I supposed, not the box.

The box was nearly square and about sixteen inches to a side in all three dimensions. Brass hinges gleamed brightly against the dark, lacquered wood and Pipt took possession of it as if delicate glassware were stored inside.

"I have just a few moments left. This messaging technology is still in its infancy and is somewhat limited. Plus, I must apologize in advance for the aftereffects. I do hope you are not susceptible to migraines—the headaches usually last only a few hours." He turned the box in his hands and braced it against his chest. "But I could not simply tell you—I had to show you." He fumbled at a catch and swung the side of the box out and open so that its contents and interior were visible. "Here is how you shall know my emissary and that the gifts I promise will be true!"

It was a head.

A human head.

Theresa Kellerman's long, dark tresses had been trimmed to shoulder length—a slightly miscast phrase as she no longer had any shoulders.

Her eyes blinked.

Her mouth opened as if to speak.

But she had no lungs and her voice box had been damaged if not lost when the machete had taken her head off in the voodoo hounfort last year.

"You son-of-a-bitch!" I said as Pipt, the dwarf, and the still-living head of Theresa Kellerman flickered and disappeared.

A full-blown migraine on steroids rushed in to fill the void in my own head.

Deirdre appeared in the study's doorway. "Somebody sent you a valentine," she said.

"What?" I blinked. Ow. Blinking hurt.

"I got to the door too late to catch the messenger. But they left something for you, special delivery."

I tried to focus. Ow! Focusing hurt!

Deirdre was walking toward me. Closing the distance helped. But not the motion. I tried focusing again when she stopped right in front of me.

She was holding something. A jar.

A three-quart glass jar.

Filled with a clear liquid substance.

And a heart.

The heart was still beating!  

And this time I wasn't dreaming.

 

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Framed