Gooshie, fire up the Accelerator and take me to Jane's Story Page, because I've got a hot date with Al Calavicci in another story.
She was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, and she pressed up against Sam Beckett like syrup pouring over homemade pancakes. His eyes widened, and he could smell musk perfume as her scarlet lips approached, then--inevitably--he was swept up in the dizzying turmoil of yet another quantum leap into yet another body in his own past. For a moment he could swear he heard Al, his best friend, groaning something about "talk about coitus interruptus," but that wasn't possible, because he always left Al behind when he leaped. Al and the computer, Ziggy, would be back at the lab, frantically trying to center on him so Al could figure out when he was this time.
He could still smell the musk when the multicolored haze around him faded, but Sam knew she had to be gone, and tried to orient himself to his latest incarnation. Leaping seemed instantaneously to him, but anywhere from three to ten days would've passed for Al, and possibly many decades for the blonde woman who had been about to kiss him. There was no use regretting what he'd lost. The important thing was that he had helped Mitzi Harder turn away from a life as a porno movie queen and into a career with the Kinsey Institute; now he had to figure out where and when he was leaping to, and what needed to be fixed there.
Wait a minute. Something was wrong here. Sam shook his head once, hard, as if trying to shake some sense into it. From what he could see, he was in some sort of stodgy, pseudo-Victorian study, but he was looking down on the wooden bookshelves and leather-bound books from a great height. Was he some sort of basketball player this time around?
Slowly at first, but picking up speed, the bookshelves began to revolve around him, like a merry-go-round out of control. Sam squinted, trying to stop the vertigo, then looked down.
It couldn't be, but it was. He was floating a good three feet off the varnished wood floor, and the room wasn't revolving: he was.
"I've got you now, my pretty!" a high voice screeched.
Desperately wishing he had a Dramamine, Sam tried to track the cackle between increasingly rapid revolutions. An elderly woman wearing black fishnet stockings and a black cocktail dress was waving an old-fashioned straw broom at him, and an eldritch stream of purple light poured from the bristles, forming an almost palpable spinning halo around him.
Sam gulped hard and squeezed his eyes shut. It didn't seem to help. There was still some sort of witch in the middle of the study, shrieking curses, and he was still madly pirouetting in mid-air. Something must have gone very wrong with the leap. Either he was somehow stuck between worlds, or in the body of a serious mental case, or in the middle of a special-effects scene from a remake of The Wizard of Oz, or--or something, though he couldn't think what.
"Al! Where are you when I need you?"
There was no answer, of course. It always took Al longer than this to track him down through the multiple parallel universes his time-traveling seemed to be creating. Sam had no choice but to open his eyes again. It wasn't easy. Even though he had managed to survive one incarnation as a trapeze artist, he still felt queasy about heights.
He tried to focus on the hag, but caught only quick glimpses of her as he turned, so that what followed had the jerky quality of one of those simple gum-card stories he'd played with as a child, where you riffled the deck and the stick figures drawn in the corners seemed to move. The woman, spittle foaming in the corners of her mouth, thrust the broom toward him. She was so focused on swatting him down that she didn't see the young man sneaking through the study doors behind her, but she twitched convulsively when he bellowed, "I'll save you, Mickey!"
Even as he shouted, the young man snatched the outstretched broom from the witch's hands. The purple haze shut off at once, as if a light switch had been turned off. Sam stopped spinning and instead plunged straight to the floor. Every bone in his borrowed body seemed to be jarred loose as he hit.
Slipping into unconsciousness, Sam had just enough strength left to moan a heartfelt, "Oh, boy...." and was gone.
As he drove his rented car into the quiet Canadian suburb, Jack Marshak tried for the tenth time that morning to stop worrying about his partners. Ryan and Micki would be fine. They'd rescued over thirty cursed items between them, battling voodoo loas, Druids, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts in the process. In fact, despite being amateurs, they'd been so successful that Satan himself had tried to suborn them. Today, all they had to do was buy back an old broom that had belonged to a Salem witch but was now in the hands of a feminist writer. As the young female owner of a successful antique shop, Micki would charm her, plus she had the advantage that she was proving to be quite a talented student of wicca herself. It was going to be perfectly simple. What was there to worry about?
With his thumb, he pushed back his battered tweed walking hat and sighed. For one thing, for all their puppy-like enthusiasm, Ryan and Mickey were amateurs. They hadn't his decades of experience in the occult. Over the years, he had dabbled in--or at least studied--every variation of the occult, starting with simple stage magic when he was barely out of toddler pants. In fact, he'd read Lewis Vendredi his first Tarot, getting Lewis interested in the supernatural, which probably started this whole awful mess. Now Lewis's heirs had to track down every antique he ever sold from CURIOUS GOODS, because he had sold his soul to the Devil, and everything that passed through his hands carried a deadly curse. Who know what the broom might do, if wielded by someone who had succumbed to temptation? The curses on Lewis's antiques were all different. Perhaps it would let the owner possess someone, or give her the ability to fly, or--
Well, there was no point in fretting over it. Between the two of them, Micki and Ryan had more than enough pluck and intelligence. Right now, he had to concentrate on the business at hand, which was retrieving an old-fashioned transfusion unit that Lewis had sold to a prominent surgeon. A little research in newspaper morgues proved the surgeon had died in a bizarre operating room fight with scalpels when other doctors accused him of unnecessary surgery. "Blood-letting" was the term they'd used, actually. Clearly, the curse had claimed another victim.
Yesterday, Jack had tracked down the much-younger widow of the late surgeon, who had sold her husband's belongings in a massive garage sale. Luckily, her maid had written receipts and kept the carbons. Jack glanced at the yellow sheet of paper laying on the seat beside him. The new owner, who sounded sweet but rather--well, Micki would term it "ditzy"--on the phone, had been more than willing to sell the unit at a profit. With any luck, he could drive straight back to the Heights and help Micki and Ryan get the broom tonight, before anything could happen.
Realizing what he was doing, Jack snorted. "Stop worrying so," he told himself firmly. "They're perfectly capable of looking after themselves."
Almost there. He spotted Derleth Drive coming up on his right and turned down it, shading his eyes with one hand when a stray sunbeam glinted off the massive signet ring on his left hand. Jack grinned ruefully at this reminder of his biggest failure in life. His dear wife, who had left him when she couldn't stand his constant traveling around the world on bizarre quests--the Marshak wanderlust, inherited from his seaman father--would never believe Jack Marshak had settled in one place for over two years and was finally gainfully employed as a respected businessman. He was the treasurer of the Antique Dealers' Association, no less. The very idea would have left her speechless, for once. It was too bad she hadn't stuck around long enough to see it happen.
Lewis's cursed antiques usually had a wanderlust of their own, driving their owners to increasingly gory sacrifices until the owners themselves were consumed, and the deadly object passed on to another victim. At least Mrs.--he checked the receipt again--Mrs. Mary Jo Liese seemed to have escaped contamination so far. He'd tracked down the I.V. unit just in time.
She lived in a neighborhood of brick ranch-style homes that had once been middle class but were beginning to sag into blue-collar neglect in their old age. Her home was a one-story, somewhat sprawling corner house, with a fenced in vacant lot beside it that had once aspired to park-like gardens but was now straggling with weeds. Even the front lawn was overdue for mowing. Jack stepped onto the porch, removed his hat respectfully, and reached for the doorbell, but the front door was already opening.
"Yes?"
"Mrs. Liese? I'm Jack Marshak. We spoke earlier...?"
For a moment she stared at him blankly, from a face that was much like her home: what had once been a Barbie-doll plastic beauty was now settling into wrinkles around her too-pink mouth and eyebrows that looked like McDonald's arches during a brown-out. Then the somewhat glazed blue eyes focused on him, and she smiled.
"Why, yes, of course, I'm expecting you, aren't I?" She swept the street with an anxious, myopic stare. "There isn't anyone with you, is there?"
"No, my associates are busy in the Heights, trying to buy an old broom."
"I'm so glad." She stepped back, gently tugging him in by his left arm. "I made tea, you see, but there's only enough for the two of us. Do come in, won't you?"
"I'm afraid I can't stay."
"Oh, but you must!" She made a moue that must have been quite fetching thirty or forty years ago. "I got sticky buns to go with it. They have the most marvelous sticky buns at the bakery round the corner." The smile was coquettish as she fastidiously patted what was presumably her stomach, swathed in the billowy folds of an out-of-style pink taffeta dress. "Of course, I don't often indulge--my figure, you know--but this is a special occasion, now, isn't it?"
She tried to maneuver him to a dumpy sofa studded with a gaudy pattern of crimson roses, but Jack stiffened his knees. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Liese--"
The aging ingenue clicked her tongue reprovingly. "You must call me Mary Jo. Everyone does. I just don't think of myself as a Mrs., you know? Even when my dear late husband was alive, I was Mary Jo to just everyone, not Mrs. Liese at all. Mrs. Liese was my mother-in-law, and she was much older than I am, of course."
If he didn't act quickly, he'd be stuck with this flirtatious biddy for the rest of the afternoon, and Micki and Ryan would be left on their own. Jack pulled out his wallet and said firmly, "I'd like to see the I.V. unit now, Mary Jo. You do have it, don't you?"
Mary Jo rolled her eyes. "That old thing. Of course I have it. I never throw anything out, don't you know. Frank--that was my husband, Frank--he always bragged about the way I could pinch a penny until Lincoln squealed. In fact, that's how I got it. You see, I've always gone to garage sales--you can get the most incredible bargains, if you're willing to haggle a little bit, except that those ritzy neighborhoods are the worst. They always sell the most awful old things, all moldy or broken, and they try to charge you top dollar, which is why I was so surprised to get that I.V. thing at such a good price. And just when I needed it, because of Frank's condition." She heaved a sigh, remembering.
He cleared his throat. "His...condition?"
Her hands fluttered aimlessly in the air, then clasped demurely at her waist. "Well, yes. It was rather nasty, really, but they showed me how to do it at the hospital, and we saved so much money, you can't imagine what it costs to hire an LPN these days, and I'm sure Frank was much happier at home with his loved ones. Don't you think?"
It was like drowning in a sea of excess verbiage. He grabbed at the momentary pause in her monologue as if it were a lifesaver. "The I.V. unit?"
Mary Jo shrugged and pointed toward the hallway. "It's in his bedroom, of course. We always shared a bedroom, you know, but after Frank took sick and needed all those transfusions and medicines and icchy things, I set up the guest room as a sick room, just for him. Now that he's...gone, I keep it just the way it was, except without him there. As a sort of memorial." She gazed up at him through black false lashes. "It's hard to think of me as old enough to be a widow. But then, they do say you're as young as you feel, don't they?"
Jack nodded helplessly and inched toward the hallway. "Could I just get the I.V. unit? I don't want to keep you, Mary Jo. I'm...er...sure you must have a busy social schedule to keep up with."
"Why, how nice of you to say so!" She fluttered down the hallway after him. "You have a way with women, you know, just like my Frank did. But actually, since Frank...passed on, I've kept to myself. He didn't leave me with very much, really. That's why I was so glad. About your call, I mean."
His shoulder brushed a black-velvet painting of a big-eyed little girl clutching a handful of posies, and she lingered to straighten it as Jack hesitated by a closed door. Straight ahead was the open door to a bathroom done all in pink. To his left was a half-open door leading to a room that smelled like an old perfume factory. Hesitantly, he touched the doorknob to his right.
"That's right. You go on ahead, dear."
Jack opened the door and stepped inside the sickroom. Compared to the rest of the house, it was rather skimpily decorated, with only two pictures hung on the sickly yellow wallpaper: one of a group of laughing dogs sitting around a poker table, the other a Norman Rockwell print of a doctor's office. On the near wall was an oval mirror in a plastic frame sprayed a sort of walnut color, looking like a mirror hung inside an old-fashioned horse collar. His nose wrinkled a bit. Even a too-generous spraying of a floral air freshener couldn't remove the sickroom stench. That would have betrayed the room's last use, even if the only furniture hadn't been a four-poster maple-framed bed, a portable refrigerator, and an ornately-decorated metal pedestal with a plastic bag handing from its outstretched arm. He didn't really have a chance to study it, because that's when his head seemed to explode.
He didn't lose consciousness, but at first he was only conscious of the pulsing waves of pain. It was rather like that time in Australia when he'd astral-projected: he was aware of his body, yet detached from it, unable to make any of the parts move. Dimly he was aware of being manhandled, dragged, and of hearing a shrill voice drone monotonously in his ears.
What had happened? Had he suffered some sort of stroke? Jack battled to control the pain. Why was he seeing double?
"...so much weight," the voice was saying cheerfully. "My Frank lost so much weight, it was like moving a great big doll, at the end."
He blinked. His fingers twitched, then strained to touch his aching head, but his arms, outstretched over his head, refused to move. When he tried to lower them, plastic sheets beneath him rustled. Jack struggled to raise his head and focus on Mary Jo, who was at the foot of the bed, fumbling with his ankles.
"What--?" he croaked.
"It's so fortunate that I didn't bother to get rid of these after I finally lost Frank, isn't it?" she asked, deftly fastening the last manacle on his left ankle. "Of course, I had no idea that I'd need them again so soon, but that's always been my way, saving absolutely everything, because you just never know. A regular packrat, you might say."
The blow to his head must have concussed him, for he saw two middle-aged women straighten up and walk briskly to the I.V. unit. He groaned when Mary Jo reached for the needle, and she gave him a reassuring smile.
"Oh, I know how to insert this, don't worry about a thing. Relax. It'll hardly even hurt. See?"
My God! He writhed desperately, trying to swing his arm out of her reach, or to tense the muscles against the needle, but Mary Jo deftly slipped it into his wrist. "No--please, you mustn't--"
"I knew this thing was old, an antique and all, but I had no idea what it could do, until the day I got a teeny bit careless changing bags and spilled just an eensy spot of Frank's blood on the money I got out for the paper boy. Would you believe it? I saw a one dollar bill change into a ten dollar bill, right before my very eyes."
Horrified, Jack watched a single crimson drop roll slowly up the tube and into the flat, empty plastic bag. Blood. His blood.
"Well, of course, I experimented, but Frank wasn't the goose that laid the golden egg. I mean, it wasn't his blood that was magic, it was this machine. His blood only changed money when I took it with this I.V. The more blood you use, the bigger the bills you end up with, but it took such an awful amount of blood! And Frank was a terrible patient, don't you know. So ungrateful. He wouldn't cooperate at all. I guess he was always a bit of a miser at heart." Smiling benevolently, Mary Jo watched a second drop of blood flow through the tubing, and a third. "I didn't have near enough money stored up when he up and died on me. I swear he did it out of spite. And what was I supposed to do then? I was going to try going out on the highway to pick up some hitchhiker, but that can be so dangerous these days. You just never know what sort of psycho you might pick up that way, now, do you? So you calling about the I.V. unit is sort of a godsend for me. I really am grateful." Her happy smile grew as the tube swelled with a steady stream of his blood. "You're much bigger and stronger than Frank. You're--why, you're just perfect!"
It was ironic, really. He'd worried so about Ryan and Micki, and now, stupidly, he was the one who was going to die....
"Mickey? Mickey, you're gonna be all right."
It was a combination of aches and the somewhat panicked croon that drew Sam Beckett back to consciousness. Was he going to be all right? As his eyelids fluttered, he realized he was being gently rocked in a pair of strong, very masculine arms.
(Oh, boy. Well, I guess I'm sort of overdue. I've been young, old, black, white, male, female...I should've expected to find myself a gay man one of these leaps.)
He gulped, then tried to sit up, still feeling as though he had barely survived a leap into Wile E. Coyote at the end of a Loony Tunes' Roadrunner cartoon. Looked like he wouldn't be able to avoid the classic line in this sort of situation.
"Uh, where am I?"
The grip on his shoulders tightened. "In the shop," the other man replied, sounding taken aback.
"Oh. Right. The shop." Sam glanced up to find the skull of a long-horned steer smirking at him. It definitely wasn't the library where he'd been levitating. The only similarity was the musty smell and the dim lighting; here, the quiet was broken only by the steady ticking of a grandfather clock. "Where else would I be, right?" Since he wasn't near a mirror, he surreptitiously glanced down at himself, noting that he was stuffed into a tight silver lame tee-shirt and matching skin-tight slacks. Great. He was a homosexual with taste in clothing that was even worse than Al's.
The dark haired man holding him was more conservatively dressed, despite the earring in his left ear, and his brown eyes were very worried. He squeezed Sam's shoulders, then eased away.
"Listen, Mickey, you stay here on the couch and relax. I'll make you some coffee, okay?"
"Sure. Coffee. Good idea."
With a distinctly worried expression, the young man rose and walked to the rear of the store, glancing back over his shoulder once. When he was gone, Sam studied his surroundings more carefully.
It looked like an interior decorator's nervous breakdown. The gold-brocaded couch he was nestled in stood on a faded damask Persian rug, but the antique brass lamp in the far corner was standing on a small tan-and-black Navajo blanket. Straight ahead was a polished, fat, contented ivory Buddha statue that was suddenly, miraculously haloed with a flickering neon white light. Sam blinked, rubbing his forehead.
"Sam, tell me, why do you always have to be such a looker?" Buddha demanded in tones of despair.
"Very funny, Al."
His partner stepped right through Buddha's ample belly and tapped his portable computer link. The shimmering doorway to the Imaging Chamber shrank down to the floor and vanished. Al cocked his head and grinned, waggling his unlit cigar toward the couch.
"No, really. It's not fair, Sam. You know how it bugs me when I...uh...start feeling `that way' about my best friend. I'll end up going back to Dr. Beeks for more therapy, and she isn't talking to me since she found me and Denise in my bedroom that night." Before Sam could speak, Al raised both hands, elaborately innocent. "We were working on her book about me, all right? Doing research. Denise is very conscientious about knowing her subject intimately."
"This really isn't funny, Al. I thought you were a lady's man. I mean, you've been married a dozen times--"
"Five, but who's counting, other than my divorce attorney?"
"I just didn't think your taste ran to--well--guys like me."
"What are you talking about? Sam, you look yummy." Al appeared to walk down four wooden steps, to the front of the store, gesturing to Sam to follow. "Here, look at yourself. You've got a figure even my fifth wife, Maxine, would be jealous of. And besides, you know I've always had a thing for redheads."
The somewhat dusty display case was an inadequate mirror, holding a Dresden tea caddy crammed with antique ink bottles and salt-and-pepper shakers, but he could make out enough of his reflection to realize Al was right. Instead of his familiar masculine features, or some other man's features, Sam was sporting a mass of auburn hair combed to one side and pinned with a silver-feathered comb. The tee-shirt that had seemed so masculine on his hairy chest was now swollen provocatively, the silver pants outlining a lean but curved body. Startled, he looked back at Al, beaming proudly, in a metallic gold jacket with a big collar, a black shirt shot with gold lightning bolts, and tight black velvet pants. They were a matched set.
First, to his shame, Sam was overcome with relief to learn that he wasn't gay, but then he groaned as new misery hit home. "Oh, God, Al, I'm a woman again!"
"Tell me about it! I should be lucky enough to date a woman like you, Sam. I mean, a real woman like you, not you." Al's smile turned queasy, and he fumbled with the handlink. "I think I'd better tell Verbena to put me back on her counseling schedule."
"I'm not a Mickey, I'm a Micki." Sam turned from the reflection to his partner. "Why am I here?"
Al shrugged. "Ziggy's a great machine, but she needs at least a last name to start with. What's the name of this place, anyway? Never mind, I'll look for myself." He walked through the front wall of the store, choosing the doorway out of habit but not bothering to reach for the doorknob. When he stood outside and stuck only his head back in, Sam automatically winced. Even though he knew Al was just a hologram and couldn't be physically affected by anything here, it made his head ache worse than it had before. "It's called CURIOUS GOODS, Sam."
"Well, that seems to be an appropriate name."
"What's an appropriate name?"
Sam whirled quickly to smile at Ryan. "CURIOUS GOODS. I was, er, just thinking what a good choice the name was."
Ryan gave him a strange look. "Well, I figure we wouldn't have sold too many antiques if we called it CURSED GOODS or GHOULISH GOODS or AWFUL ANTIQUES."
"He's got a point there." The rest of Al's body joined his head inside the shop, frowning at the lights zipping along the computer link. "You're an antique. No, that can't be right, you're too young to be an antique." He whammed the side of the hand-link with his palm. "You're an antique dealer. According to this, CURIOUS GOODS is owned by a Ryan Dallion and Micki Foster--that's you, Sam. It was willed to them by a Lewis Vendredi."
Ryan touched Sam's shoulder. "Micki, are you feeling all right?"
"Sure. I'm just a little shaken up. I mean, it's not every day a guy--a girl--gets levitated and dropped on her head."
"Around here, it is almost every day." Ryan handed him a steaming cup of coffee. It was a delicate bone china cup, hand-painted, no doubt quite valuable. "Don't worry about that broom. I locked it in the vault as soon as we got in."
"Oh, good. That's...reassuring. I guess."
"What broom, Sam?"
How could he explain it to Al, with Ryan standing here unable to see or hear the holographic image of his partner? "I was pretty surprised when that woman pointed her broom at me and I started spinning in mid-air like a top, I'll have to admit."
"You did? That sounds like fun."
Ryan swallowed half his cup at one gulp, then did a little gasping dance as the too-hot beverage burned all the way down. When he got some control of his voice again, he said, "Well, Jack did warn us there was no telling how the curse would work on it. Me, I think we're lucky it didn't turn into a magical flame-thrower or something."
"The curse," Sam repeated. "Right."
"Curses don't work, not really," Al pronounced, shaking his head. "If they did, my wives would've killed me off years ago." Then he reconsidered. "On the other hand, how much more unbelievable is magic than you leaping through time, righting wrongs, with me tagging along like this?"
"You believe in curses? In magic?"
Both men answered simultaneously.
"When I was ten, I ran away from the orphanage--I was going to work my way to the Middle East and find my dad--and I ended up living for a couple weeks with this Gypsy. She didn't wanna take me in, on account of me being a gajo, but I gave her that puppy-dog look and cried about how mean the nuns were, and she read the cards for me, and finally she let me stay. She was a lot older than me, of course, but gorgeous, and she was psychic, too. I mean, she taught me how to work the scams with the fake crystal ball and stuff for the marks, but she also used to get these psychic flashes." Al stared down at his cigar, suddenly disconcerted. "Come to think of it, she told me I'd meet you some day and you'd change my life. Except she didn't know your name--she called you a chameleon, and I wasted a lot of time in pet stores after that, looking--"
It was hard to hear Al over Dallion's incredulous outburst. "How can you ask that? What's gotten into you, Micki? After traveling through time, and fighting Dracula himself, and getting resurrected by that coin, and studying witchcraft every week with that coven of yours, now you're having doubts?"
"Well, no, I'm not having doubts--"
Still reminiscing, Al absently shook the handlink. "One day, she got mad at this New York cop who put the moves on her, and she put a curse on him instead of paying up. It was a doozy, Sam. See, after that, he lost his interest in girls, and he broke out in this excruciating itch in a lot of embarrassing places, and he belched all the time, so he came back and asked us to--"
The young man gripped Sam's shoulder and gazed into his eyes. "Micki, are you just worrying about Jack? Is that what this is all about?"
"Aha! Jack!" Al triumphantly brandished the computer link. "Ziggy found a newspaper article dated one week from today that says the body of a Jack Marshak, an employee of CURIOUS GOODS, was found drained of blood, wrapped in a plastic sheet, and left on the side of the highway just north of here."
Sam said quickly, "That's it, Ryan. I'm really worried about Jack. I think he's in terrible danger."
"Well, you can forget it. Come on, Micki, you know that wily old fox knows more about magick than both of us put together. He taught us everything we know, and we're okay, right?" He picked up their empty cups. "All Jack had to do was track down some old I.V. unit, and we know he's not dumb enough to join a blood drive, so he'll be fine. Relax. There's absolutely nothing to worry about."
No matter how he writhed and pulled, Jack Marshak couldn't escape. It was mortifying, considering his stage magician appearances with the Great Jandini, but his lockpicks were in his coat pocket instead of up his sleeve, and there was no way he'd ever reach them now. Finally, exhausted, he could do nothing but lie there watching his life's blood trickle down the tubing to the cursed I.V. unit.
If he had to die, why did it have to be at the hands of a self-centered, money-grubbing, idiotic housewife? He'd risked death in so many more heroic ways, from his stint in the Merchant Marines to battling an immortal samurai. Why must he die now, in such a foolish fashion?
His mouth felt uncomfortably dry, and watching the blood flow made him feel woozy. Jack closed his eyes and remembered.
It was 1945, and he was supposed to be leading an international commando team, investigating reports that Horst Mueller was experimenting on helpless POWs, but he'd stupidly gotten himself caught. Mueller was even madder than they'd suspected, obsessed with black magick, and he didn't like being called names; that's how Jack had gotten himself introduced to Karl Rausche, "the Butcher." A mix of gloating enjoyment and icy efficiency, Rausche started the interrogation by yanking out every other one of his toenails, then driving splinters under the remaining nails. Finally he jammed both feet back into the boots, and left Jack to watch others being tortured while his feet swelled. That was when the real nightmare began.
The floor was wet with blood and vomit. Across the room, an earnest soldier, in a parody of a concerned dentist, struggled to yank out a prisoner's teeth with pliers. Others dragged out a half-nude, blood-drenched corpse, its head lolling, gaping at him in passing from gouged-out sockets instead of eyes. Jack's ears rang with screams. His fingers clawed at the arms of his chair as he tried not to join in that chorus.
Snapping his swagger stick against his gleaming boots, The Butcher returned. "Guten tag, Herr Marshak," he purred, patting Jack's cheek with the stick. At a brief nod from Rausche, a guard unlocked the chains pinning him to the chair. Very conscious of the guns all around him, Jack didn't move. The Butcher, smiling, exchanged the stick for his trademark, a polished barbed wire garrote. "The weak are easily led," he said. It had been one of Mueller's remarks last night. Or was it still night? In this charnel house, time meant nothing.
Deftly, Rausche crossed his wrists, wrapping the jagged wire around his victim's throat. The wire was very cold, but he didn't--wouldn't--shiver. That would give Rausche too much pleasure. Softly, The Butcher said, "Komm mit mir, Herr Marshak." It was a death knell. "Komm mit mir."
He knew he was about to die, and not at all pleasantly.
But Jack had forgotten the contrary nature of his squad. They had orders not to attempt a rescue, of course, but Jean was a mule-headed Frenchman, and Lefty never listened to anyone who wasn't a baseball coach. The moans and weeping and gurgles of pain around him were drowned out by gunfire and triumphant shouts as his squad rushed in on a suicidal mission so insane that it actually worked.
Startled, Rausche half-turned as the doors were kicked open, and that was all he needed. Jack lunged from his chair, wrenching the loose garrote from his neck, and spun The Butcher around, wrapping the wire around its owner's neck. Rausche clawed at it, but Jack twisted it savagely, almost slicing The Butcher's head off, as if that were the only way to be sure both the man and the nightmare were dead forever....
Overcome by a wave of dizziness, Jack opened his eyes again to stare at the ceiling.
He'd won a medal that night. There were no medals for the rest of the squad, but then, they probably deserved a court-martial for disobeying orders, and they didn't get that, either. It didn't matter to that motley bunch whether they got a medal or a court-martial: the important thing was saving their friend.
He had always been able to count on his friends, or at least he had kept telling himself that, even after betrayals by friends like Lewis, or Jerry, who tried to sacrifice him to a cursed object in exchange for a cure to a horrible fatal disease.
Micki and Ryan had saved him from decapitation by samurai sword, burning to death in a Druidic ritual, a stabbing by a cursed scalpel--all sorts of untimely ends brought on by his obsessive curiosity. Like his Army buddies, they had never failed him. Despite the age difference, they were his friends.
Where were his friends now?
Take a flying Leap to the second part.
Gooshie, fire up the Accelerator and take me to Jane's Story Page, because I've got a hot date with Al Calavicci in another story.
I want to Leap to the main page to talk to the author or to check out the guestbook and links--maybe even buy QUANTUM LEAP books at a discount.