Plankton We Have Heard on High, Page 3

fondling a mermaid’s foamy loins. “No fancy gear. Just a discount-store mask, my own damned lungs, and a pair of balls like you couldn’t aspire to in a lifetime of Red-Bull lattes and Jagermeister-induced bravado. So don’t give me any pseudo-slumming academic buttercup, twinkle-headed crap about what can be done and what can’t. I know what I’m capable of, goddamnit!” He was roaring now. “I KNOW WHAT I CAN DO!”

  He stumped back to his piano, took a swig from an ancient pewter ale stein, and began to tickle the ivory anew.

  I felt a heavy arm on my shoulder and turned to see, grinning down at me, a face freckled and youngish, though slightly haggard, topped with long blond serpents of oleaginous red hair that had nearly turned to dreadlocks.

  “Don’t let old Nelson’s Navy get you down, bro.” He handed me a full mug of amber beer, astonishingly cold to the touch, and said, “Let your buddy Slasher buy this round.”

  “Slasher?”

  He held out his hand. “Slasher Wendell Holmes, Erie Community College Law School, 2008.”

  Oh, lovely. Another lunatic. “Whatever,” I said, grasping his hand. “I’m Charlie Edwards. PADI Open Water course, Molly O’Hara’s Dive Shop, 2003.”

  His grip was fierce, and to my surprise, he pulled me halfway across the bar in a couple of seconds. I stumbled after him, somehow managing to finish off my entire mug of beer along they way.

  “Okay, I won’t take that nutty piano guy seriously,” I said. “But what do you make of those creeps I was sitting with a moment ago. Did you notice them?”

  “All I can tell you is that you need this next beer.” In his hand was a long-necked something-or-other. Still gripping my arm hard, he held the bottle firmly against my lips until I took it with my own hand and began to swig deeply, gratefully, and thoughtfully.

  When I had nearly emptied the bottle, I asked, “You’re not going to turn out to be crazy, too, are you?” although I was already pretty sure he was a few sparkplugs short of a four-stroke.

  “Not on your life,” he said. “Tell me of your predicament.”

  “Slasher, my friend, I have a problem. My wife is somehow missing within these walls, and I believe she is frightened of something or someone. The fact that nothing anyone here says to me makes a lick of sense – well, that has begun to scare me, too.”

  He nodded. “This way.” He took me by the arm – somewhat more firmly than I would have liked, and marched me back toward the archway that led into the dining room.

  “Ummm, not that I really want to go into that black pit behind the rear archway,” I said, “but I don’t think that out there—” I pointed toward the dining room and the coffee bar beyond “—is the place to find my wife. I don’t think she went back out. I think she went further in.”

  He kept pulling me. I would have put up more resistance, but I was holding out hope that Slasher might be someone with whom I could actually reason.

  He stopped at the bar and ordered another round, this time something that had the color of Bushmill’s whiskey, but tasted like Clamato juice. I didn’t care. It went down nicely.

  He stood still, holding my upper arm firmly.

  “Um, Mister Slasher, sir…Is there any reason why we’re just standing here?”

  His only response was to tighten his grip.

  I took a deep breath and a deep swig and slowly scanned the room for any sign of Allison. Waiters milled, customers with new and different outlandish outfits arrived at tables. Others stood and made for one archway or another.

  Then, in the great tarnished mirror above the fish tank behind the bar, I suddenly saw Allison staring straight at me, or rather at my reflection. A youngish blond guy, vaguely familiar, was standing next to her, a little too close for my liking. They must have seen me looking back at them, but did not react in the slightest.

  I turned around to look at the spot where they ought to have been, but they were nowhere. Indeed, the entire view looked quite different from the barscape I’d just been studying in the mirror. I searched in utter bewilderment for Allison or the blond man, but the only familiar faces were the middle-aged couple who’d visited medieval Turkey.

  I spun around to look in the mirror and spotted Allison again, but she had moved, and the blond man was following her.

  And again, I turned to see a different scene than the one in the mirror. Allison and the other people I’d been watching were gone, and so was the time-traveling middle-aged couple. The Lee Marvin guy’s piano seemed to have lost a leg and had tilted over.

  I took a few steps, looking around in disbelief.

  Then, just at the edge of my vision, in the archway that led to the dining room, I once more spotted Allison. Slasher had been right. Somehow, she had made her way out toward the front door of the restaurant.

  I bolted toward her, calling out at the top of my lungs, yet she did not turn her head.

  Then there was a familiar tugging on my arm. Familiar, but stronger than before; almost violent. When I turned to shout at Slasher to let me go because I’d found Allison, he was smiling, as friendly as ever.

  Then he was shoving a beer bottle in my face, using it to force open my mouth, and pouring the stuff down my throat.

  I resisted at first, but the beer tasted better than anything I’d ever ingested before in my life. Indeed, I felt a thousand times better, less desperate. The light in the room now seemed amplified, as though someone had turned up a rheostat. I grabbed the bottle with my own hand and chugged and chugged. Something far from ordinary was going on here, something dangerous, and it seemed that one of the rules of this little Wonderland trip was that beer gave one the power to see one’s surroundings and navigate around obstacles. The thought certainly seemed crazy when it struck me, but it also seemed undeniable. And I needed to see and think clearly in order to find Allison.

  So I drank.

  I looked toward the archway again and couldn’t find her.

  Slasher didn’t seem to notice. “Did you use to watch Max Headroom?” he asked, and went into a stunningly perfect imitation of the jerky, repetitive-head-movement routine for which that bygone cyber-character was once famous.

  “Before my time,” I said. Then after another swig, I broke free of his grip and began calling out to Allison, but my voice was drowned in the bar’s ambient clamor, which had suddenly leapt higher by a great many factors of ten.

  Once again, Slasher caught up with me and stuffed the neck of a cold bottle between my lips. His strength was impressive.

  I marveled at how quickly I had forgotten the simple principle that I needed to keep swallowing the beer in order to find my way around this bewitched place.

  I drank, my spirits lifted, my vision improved.

  This time, Slasher walked with me, marching me through the archway, into the relative brightness of the dining room. The crowd had thinned out, and there seemed to be fewer tables.

  Had I been in that ghastly bar so long that the dinner crowd had mostly finished and gone home?

  As we crossed the room, getting nearer to the coffee bar, I had a distinct sense of the entire place twisting, rotating on an axis.

  I remembered what the crazy couple had said about the Templars, Mozart, and that elusive subatomic particle. Was it possible that they weren’t crazy? Could something be happening to the universe itself? Whatever the case, finding Allison and getting out of this place remained my first priority.

  Slasher, still fiercely gripping my arm, looked at me and said, “I think we’re going to need a bigger saloon.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “And when you stop making sense, I really begin to worry.”

  “A lot of people have it worse than you,” he replied somberly.

  “What?” I cried, dismayed at hearing him lapse into babble.

  “A great man people indeed….”

  “Maybe,” I snapped, “but that’s more or less irrelevant at the moment, isn’t it?”

  “I met one guy,” he conti
nued, “who said he was a fourteen-hundred-year-old vampire. When he was human, he used to teach Old English as a Second Language. Then he was turned, and he just kept up the same old line of work throughout the centuries. He taught the Anglo-Saxon language to families of Norse and Danish raiders who’d settled into the Danegeld region of the English midlands. Later he taught it to Norman spies, and after the Normans had taken over, he taught Norman traders who needed to do business with English merchants. Nowadays he spends six months of the year in Alaska. It’s dark most of the time then, you see. Better for his kind. Anyway, he’s a very burned out guy. Has six or seven shots of rum and starts moaning, Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m still doing the same stinkin’ job after all these years.”

  I replied, “A.) That’s still nonsense. Vampires don’t drink booze. B.) More importantly, it’s still irrelevant. I need to find my wife immediately. I think something’s happened to her. C.) If what your friend said is true, and he taught the Anglo-Saxon language to Norman spies, then he was a despicable traitor, so why should I feel sorry for him?”

  “Your point?” Slasher asked.

  “My point?” I thought for a moment. He had stumped me there. I was beginning to forget my sentences before I’d finished them. “As long as you get us out of here, I don’t care what makes sense and what doesn’t. But what do you make of the fact that there are now two versions of that psycho piano player, and that one of them now distinctly resembles the Ghost of Christmas