Worlds Away and Worlds Aweird Page 5

  Suddenly the girl pulled away from his throat. He turned to look at her, her face was pale and contorted and she was gasping for breath. As he watched, she collapsed.

  With a great effort, he levered himself up off the floor and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  Later he was to wonder at his reaction, but at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable.

  The girl managed to gasp out, “Garlic! Have you been eating garlic? It’s poisonous to me.”

  Kelly remembered the dinner he had eaten. “Yeah, there was a ton of garlic in the scampi alone, let alone the other food. What can I do to help you?”

  “I didn’t drink too much before it hit me.” She paused to catch her breath. “If I can just get somewhere safe and out of the sunlight and sleep it off for a day or two, I think I’ll be okay.” Another pause for breath. “Please, you’ve got to help me.”

  “Of course. Wait there.”

  Kelly dragged himself to his feet and started searching. In a nearby room he found a supply of doctor’s and nurse’s uniforms. He brought back several and helped her get dressed. Even though he could barely stand himself, he dragged her to her feet, and the two of them weaved toward an exit. There was a uniformed officer there, but Kelly flashed his badge and mumbled something about one of the civilian nurses assisting in the stakeout being taken sick. The officer not only let them pass, but went to the curb and summoned a cab for them.

  At the apartment, Kelly laid the girl on the bed. He carefully closed the bedroom drapes, then went into the living room and collapsed on the couch without even removing his shoes. He was asleep in minutes.

  The morning sunlight shone in his face, waking him. He had the idea that the sunlight might be bad, but he couldn’t think why. Then he remembered. Venetia! The vampire girl! Her bite should have turned him into a vampire. The sunlight didn’t seem to be hurting him, but he went around the apartment and pulled all the drapes just in case.

  The last room he checked was the bedroom. The drapes there were closed, just as he remembered. Venetia was lying in the bed. He tip-toed over, and just as he reached her, she opened her eyes and said, “Thanks.”

  “Oh, it was nothing. I always rescue damsels in distress.”

  Suddenly it dawned on him that it wasn’t nothing. She was a robbery suspect, and he was a cop, and he had helped her escape. If this got out, he was in deep shit!

  “It was a courageous act, the act of a hero, rescuing me when I got garlic poisoning. But why was a nice Irish cop with a name like Lou Kelly eating so much garlic?”

  “Lou is short for Luigi. My mother was Italian, and I developed a taste for the food. I still binge out once in a while at Mama Magnifico’s. Say, you said your bite would make me a vampire. I was out there in the sunlight, and nothing happened. How come?”

  “That was the garlic too. The same garlic that made me sick prevented the ‘infection.’ You won’t become a vampire unless I bite you again, perhaps not even then. The garlic may have reacted with my bite to form antibodies, making you immune. It’s happened before. But you’ll never know until I bite you again.”

  Kelly thought about that for a bit. Then he realized that she had been talking for several minutes, and her voice, while quite pleasant, was not causing the intense sexual arousal it had before. He mentioned it to her.

  She nodded. “You’re probably immune. I had forgotten that side effect. Now that the eroto-hypnosis has worn off, what are you going to do about me?”

  “Do? Oh, you mean if you can’t enchant me, you expect me to turn you in or throw you out?”

  “Well, you are a cop, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am, but right now I’m not sure that counts for all that much. Being a man seems more important.” He reached down and pulled the covers off her.

  In her sleep, the loosely fastened garments had come off, and she was nude again. He looked down at her. She was beautiful. He realized that he was beginning to feel arousal from normal causes.

  She saw it too and smiled. “Well, there have been cases of vampires and humans living together in the past. And if we work at it, a few small bites now and then, perhaps we can overcome your immunity and confer vampire immortality on you yet. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  He nodded and started to remove his clothes. When he finished, he slid into the bed next to her. He kissed her, noticing that the fangs made it feel a little funny. But, he told himself, you’ll get used to it. And he did.

  No Easy Way Out

  [Clarence never had this much trouble with George Bailey]

  THE CAR WAS RENTED, and had been paid for with a stolen credit card. It was a Cadillac, a real luxury car. He had been shocked when he heard the rental rates, but it was worth it to go in style, and anyway, it wasn’t his money.

  He ran down his short checklist. Doors, locked. Seatbelt, fastened. A half mile ahead, the road reached the edge of the cliff and veered sharply to the left, with big yellow signs warning motorists not to exceed ten miles per hour on the curve. There was a guard rail of sorts along the cliff side of the road, but when he had checked it a few days earlier, he had almost been able to push it over by hand. He hadn’t, though, fearing that the highway department might put up something stronger if they found it knocked down. Everything ready, motor running.

  Left foot on the brake, he slipped the car into drive and floored the gas. He could feel the car pull against the brakes. When the engine was screaming at top speed—he shuddered at what it was doing to the transmission, glad that it didn’t really matter—he released the brake and felt the car shoot forward.

  By the time he reached the curve, the speedometer read ninety-five. There was a brief shock as he hit the guardrail, and then the car sailed off into space.

  He had wondered how the car was going to hit, if all those scenes in the movies were accurate or just some kind of camera trickery. Now he found that the car—this car at least—was nose heavy. It slowly tipped forward until he was looking straight out the windshield at the rapidly approaching ground in front of him. This is it, he thought, at last!

  The ground was hard and uncomfortable, and the flames of the burning car were too hot, even from twenty or thirty feet away. He got up and moved further from the wreck. Then suddenly it hit him. He was alive! Simultaneously with this realization, he heard a voice just behind him.

  “Are you okay? Good thing I was on duty, or you coulda gotten hurt, maybe killed. What happened, anyway, Jimmy Bob? Gas pedal stick? Brakes fail?”

  James Robert Morton—James, not Jim, not Jimmy, and absolutely not Jimmy Bob!—turned slowly to face the now familiar figure. Black sideburns, tight jeans, fancy jacket. The idol of millions of lovesick girls of the fifties, as slim as he had appeared at the height of his career, without all the excess pounds he had put on before his death.

  “No, damn you! I tried to commit suicide, just like last time, and the time before that. Will you please go away and let me die?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that, Jimmy Bob. Like I told you, I’ve been appointed your guardian angel, and I gotta help you until I earn my wings. Just like that movie fella, Clarence. Now, why don’t you tell me what your real trouble is, why you want to kill yourself?”

  “If I didn’t already have a reason, this little stunt would give me one. I rented the car on a stolen credit card and wrecked it. The cops’ll be after me in no time at all.”

  “Hmm, that does sound mighty bad, Jimmy Bob. Let me just take a look…” He stared off into the distance for a moment, then looked back at James. “Nope, you’re in the clear, Jimmy Bob. Finding that wallet with the credit card on the floor of the john wasn’t exactly stealing it, and anyway, the guy that lost it was plastered. He just now woke up, with a hangover so bad it’ll be hours before he thinks to report it. And the girl at the car rental, well, she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and you were just a blur to her. Nobody’s gonna suspect a thing, ’specially if you get away from here before the fuzz arrives. So I’ll just give you
a lift back to town…”

  Before James could protest, the world dissolved into a swirl of colors around him, then reformed into his apartment. He looked around to make sure that his guardian angel hadn’t followed him, then sank into his favorite chair and buried his face in his hands.

  James Robert Morton was a success. James Robert Morton was a failure. It all depended on your viewpoint.

  James Robert Morton had a law degree and a junior partnership in one of the most prestigious law firms in the city. He had a small inheritance, almost enough to have lived on without working, so he had the freedom to pick and choose his cases. He picked well, and had gained a reputation for always winning his cases—a slight exaggeration, but not too much so. In another year, two at most, the firm would probably add “and Morton” to its name. In the eyes of his friends and his coworkers, James Robert Morton was a success.

  But James Robert Morton could not sing. He was one of those unfortunates who could not carry a tune in a bucket. He had tried to take singing lessons over and over, but invariably the instructors threw up their hands and invited him to leave during the second or third lesson, sometimes even during the first. And James Robert Morton wanted desperately to sing. He wanted to sing in clubs, on the Broadway stage, on records. In his own eyes, James Robert Morton was a failure.

  The final straw was when his favorite bar started karaoke during Happy Hour. James handed in a request slip for one of his favorite songs, then sat impatiently while several moderately poor, and moderately drunk, singers did their numbers. Finally it was his turn, and he stepped happily up to the mic. Four bars into the song the howls of protest started, and after another four bars, the KJ cut the music and his mic.

  James started to protest, but the KJ pointed to the manager and said, “He told me to cut it. Talk to him.”

  “Sorry, pal,” the manager told him, “but if I let you keep on, I wouldn’t have no customers left. Just to show there’s no hard feelings, the next drink is on the house. But no singing.”

  James finished the drink he had been working on, and the free one, and quite a few more after that. Since he normally had only one or two drinks, he was exceedingly drunk when he left the bar. That was when he decided to commit suicide. There was nobody close to him, he was sure it was humanly impossible for anyone to save him, when he stepped off the curb directly in front of a speeding bus.

  He was right, but the arms that pulled him clear of the bus were inhumanly strong and quick. He turned to look at his rescuer, then did a double take. He shook his head, trying to clear it of the effects of all those drinks, but nothing changed. The man who had saved him looked exactly like the biggest rock star of the fifties—tight jeans, black leather jacket, black sideburns.

  “Are you okay?” the man asked. “You should have been more careful stepping off the curb like that. You could have gotten killed.”

  James looked at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Oh, not Hell at all, I’m from the other place. I’m your guardian angel, appointed to take care of you, so I can earn my wings. They told me it had to do with music and singing, so I was the right one for the job. By the way, you are James Robert Morton, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, and you are—”

  “Yep, that’s exactly who I am. Or more exactly, that’s who I was before I died. But hey, we may end up spending a lot of time together, and that name sounds a little stuffy. Let me just call you Jimmy Bob, that sounds a lot friendlier, okay?”

  “But—”

  “No, don’t worry about it. Well, I have to get back upstairs now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on you. So long, Jimmy Bob!”

  The side-burned figure vanished before James Robert Morton, who hated nicknames, could say anything.

  James shook his head, still trying to clear it. Then he hailed a cab back to his apartment to sleep it off. The next morning, he had a terrible hangover and a strong conviction that the whole thing had been a dream.

  A month later he tried suicide a second time. He had gone to a new bar for Happy Hour, several new bars, but they were all putting in karaoke, and they all refused to let him sing. This time he was in the lounge of a fancy penthouse restaurant. It was at the top of a forty-story office building, and an open air terrace gave a marvelous view of the city for good-weather dining. When the KJ cut him off halfway through the second line, James strolled out onto the terrace and climbed over the railing. A forty-story fall was long enough to reflect on the unfairness of life, and to prepare oneself for the end.

  At the second story level, he hit the safety net and bounced. After several more bounces, he came to rest lying in the net, looking up at the familiar figure of his guardian angel, this time wearing a white sequined jacket.

  “Howdy, Jimmy Bob. Feeling all right?”

  James groaned. “How did this net get here?”

  His angel gestured to a large sign on the building across the street. Street Circus, it read, Free performances three times daily.

  James looked around, and sure enough, there was a high wire above the net, and other circus apparatus nearby in the street. Barricades sealed off both ends of the block.

  “But, but, but, this wasn’t here when I went up. The street was open and full of traffic. How did you—?”

  “Oh, just a minor miracle, Jimmy Bob. The City Council was thinking about having this circus, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. I just changed their minds about a month back so I could save your life with this net. Now, you just crawl over to the end and go down that ladder, okay?”

  Driving the Cadillac over the cliff had been the third suicide try, and the third failure. After his angel had returned him to his apartment, James sat for an hour or more, thinking. This time, he had been pulled from the car without any attempt to preserve appearances. The circus and net had been a “minor miracle.” Was this one less of a miracle because nobody was there to witness it, or more of a miracle because it had not the faintest trace of a natural explanation?

  James finally decided he had no way to judge the magnitude of a miracle, or exactly what his guardian angel might be able to accomplish on his behalf. He leaned back in the chair and yelled “Help!” at the top of his lungs.

  He was rewarded by the instantaneous appearance of the familiar figure, who looked around, then said, “You have a problem, Jimmy Bob? I don’t see any danger.”

  “Yes, I have a problem! Why do you think I’ve been trying to kill myself? My problem is I can’t sing, and that’s all I really want to do with my life. So all you really have to do is one more little miracle, just make me able to sing. That’ll get you your wings for sure.”

  “Sounds good, Jimmy Bob, just let me check it out with the head office upstairs.” He stood staring off into space for at least five minutes while James fidgeted. Finally he turned back to James, a bemused look on his face. “Jimmy Bob, I’m really sorry, but what you’re asking is out of the question. Making you able to sing would be a bigger miracle than parting the Red Sea and raising Lazarus put together. All the guardian angels now on duty working together couldn’t do that, let alone me by myself.”

  James sat there for a moment, shocked. Then he said, “Well, then I guess you’d better just let me kill myself. Sorry about your wings, but maybe you can get a new assignment.”

  There was silence for a moment, then the angel spoke. “Jimmy Bob, what do you think of your own singing? Do you hate it too, or is it just everyone else?”

  “Oh, my singing sounds fine to me. I don’t hear anything wrong at all. It’s everyone else that has problems with it.”

  “Good! I just had an idea. We can’t do much about you, but maybe we can do something about a few fellows in the right place in the music industry…”

  James Robert Morton and his companions, along with their agent, stood backstage just out of sight of the audience. On stage, the announcer was saying, “And now, for their Carnegie Hall debut, we bring you ‘Jimmy Bob and the Off-Keys.’”

  The agent s
aid, “I still don’t believe how you guys lucked out. Showing up just as a producer was looking for something completely different, and starting this whole craze. ‘Rotten Singing, Worse Than Punk!’ It must have taken a miracle to convince that guy you were what he wanted.”

  The group ran out onto the stage and took their places, James at the lead mic. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “Before we start, I have one small favor to do for a friend.” He pulled a bell from behind his back and rang it. “You know the old saying: whenever a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. I hope that bell did the job. And now, on with the show.”

  He signaled for the music to start, and the group burst into song, every singer in a different key.

  The Ghost in the Bookstore

  [Want to spend the afterlife in a shopping mall?]

  MOST SHOPPERS FIGURED the girl in the gay nineties outfit was a publicity stunt. True, she wasn’t handing out leaflets, and a few noticed the strange “where-am-I?” look on her face, but none of them realized that they had seen a ghost.

  ~Melanie~

  Melanie Baker was bewildered. She was in a big building with stores on the inside. The lights were very bright, and music came out of nowhere. Some of the stores had familiar things like clothing and books, while others contained nothing she had ever seen before. What was “radio” and why was the store called a “shack”?

  And the people. Some of the clothing they wore made Melanie blush. Girls and women exposing their arms, their legs, their—she couldn’t even say the words. For many, their entire garb was less than Melanie wore as undergarments. Eventually she became accustomed to it and stopped blushing.

  She explored the building, having nothing else to do. She found shops that sold food, and she worried because she had no money to buy any, but somehow she never became hungry.