Little Doors (25 page)

“Never again, but not yet!”

Jack threw himself into his slateslab chair, thinking to crush the grim bird, but it leaped nimbly atop Jack’s skull. By Saint Fora- minifer’s Liver, those scalp-digging claws hurt! Quickly Jack stood, prefering to let the bird roost on his hump. Obligingly, the Worrybird shifted back.

“Oh, Motherway,” Jack implored, “what a fardelicious grievance has been construed upon us! What oh what are we to do?”

Motherway made inutile answer only by a plangent sympathetic whuffle.

* * *

The first thought to form in the anxious mind of bird-bestridden Jack Neck was that he should apply to the local Health Clinic run by the Little Sisters of Saint Farquahar. Surely the talented technicians and charity caregivers there would have a solution to his grisly geas! (Although at the back of his mind loomed the pessimistic question, perhaps Worrybird implanted,
Why did anyone suffer from Worrybirditis if removal of same were so simple?
)

So, leaving Motherway behind to guard the apartment from any further misfortunes which this inopportune day might bring, Jack and his randomly remonstrative rider (“Never again, but not yet!”) clabbered down the four flights of slant stairs to the street.

Once on Marmoreal (where formerly friendly or neutral neighbors now winced and retreated from sight of his affliction), Jack turned not happy-wise left but appointment-bound right. At the intersection of the Boulevard and El Chino Street, he wambled south on the cross-street. Several blocks down El Chino his progress was arrested by the sloppy aftermath of an accident: a dray full of Smith’s Durian Essence had collided with one loaded with Walrus Brand Brochettes. The combination of the two antagonistic spilled foodstuffs had precipitated something noxious: galorping mounds of quivering dayglo cartiplasm that sought to ingest any flesh within reach. (The draft-animals, a brace of Banana Slugs per dray, had already succumbed, as had the blindly argumentative drivers, one Pheon Ploog and a certain Elmer Sourbray.)

Responding with the nimble reflexes and sassy footwork expected from any survivor of Drudge City’s ordinary cataclysms, Jack dodged into a nearby building, rode a Recirculating Transport Fountain upward and took a wayward rooftop path around the crisis before descending, all the while writing a hundred times on the blackboard of his mind an exclamation-punctuated admonition never to mix internally his favorite suppertime drink with any iota of Walrus Brand Brochettes.

Encountering no subsequent pandygandy, Jack Neck and his foul avian passenger arrived at the Health Clinic on Laguna Diamante

Way. Once inside, he was confronted with the stern and ruleacious face of Nurse Gwendolyn Hindlip, Triage Enforcement Officer. From behind her rune-carven desk that seemed assembled of poorly chosen driftwood fragments, Nurse Gwendolyn sized up Jack and his hump-burden, then uttered a presumptuous pronouncement.

“You might as well kill yourself now, you old mummer, and free up your GGGB for a younkling!”

Jack resented being called a mummer—a mildly derisive slang term derived from his union’s initials—almost more than he umbrigated at the suicidal injunction.

“Shut up, you lava-faced hincty harridan! Just take my particulars, slot my citizen-biscuit into the chewer, and mind your own business!”

Nurse Gwendolyn sniffed with bruised emotionality. Jack had scored a mighty blow on a tender spot with his categorical comment “lava-faced.” For Nurse Gwendolyn’s scare-making and scarified visage did indeed reflect her own childhood brush with a flesh-melting disease that still occasionally plagued Drudge City. Known as Trough’n’Slough, the nonfatal disease left its victims with a stratified trapunto epidermis. Nurse Gwendolyn forever attributed her sour old- maidhood to the stigma of this pillowpuff complexion, although truth be told, her vile tongue had even more to do with her empty bed.

Snuffling aggrievedly, Nurse Gwendolyn now did as she was bade, at last dispatching a newly ID-braceleted Jack to a waiting area with the final tart remark, “You’ll surely have a long uncomfortable wait, Mr Neck, for many and more seriously afflicted—yet naytheless with a better prognosis—are the helpseekers afore you!”

Coercing his fossil leg into the waiting room, Jack saw that Nurse Gwendolyn had not been merely flibbering. Ranked and stacked in moaning drifts and piles were a staggering assortment of Drudge City’s malfunctioners. Jack spotted many a one showing various grades of Maskelyne’s Curse, in which the face assumed the characteristics of a thickly blurred latex mold of the actual submerged features beneath. The false countenance remained connected by sensory tendrils, yet was migratory, so that one’s visage slopped about like warm jello, eyes peeking from nostrils or ears, nose poking from mouth. Other patients showed plain signs of Exoskeletal Exfoliation, their limbs encased in osteoclastic armor. One woman—dressed in a tattered shift laterally patterned blue and gold—could only be host to Dolly Dwindles Syndrome: as she approached over months her ultimate doll-like dimensions, her face simultaneously grew more lascivious in a ghoulish manner.

Heaving a profound sigh at the mortal sufferings of himself and his fellows, Jack sat himself saggingly down in a low-backed chair that permitted the Worrybird to maintain its grip upon Jack’s hump, and resigned himself to a long wait.

On the 749th “Never again, but not yet!” Jack’s name was called. He arose and was conducted to a cubicle screened from an infinity of others by ripped curtains the color of old tartar sauce. Undressing was not an option, so he simply plopped down on a squelchy examining table and awaited the advent of a healer. Before too long the curtains parted and a lab-coated figure entered.

This runcible-snouted doctor himself, thought Jack, should have been a patient, for he was clearly in an advanced state of Tessellated Scale Mange, as evidenced by alligatored wrists and neck poking from cuff and collar. Most horridly, the medico dragged behind him a long ridged tail, ever-extending like an accumulating stalactite from an infiltrated organ at the base of the spine.

“Doctor Weighbend,” said the professional in a confident voice, extending a crocodile paw. Jack shook hands happily, liking the fellow’s vim. But Doctor Weighbend’s next question shattered Jack’s sanguinity.

“Now, what seems to be the matter with you, Mr Neck?”

“Why—why, Doc, there’s an irksome and grotty Worrybird implacably asway upon my tired old hump!”

Doctor Weighbend made a suave dismissive motion. “Oh, that. Since there’s no known cure for the Worrybird, Mr Neck, I assumed there was another issue to deal with, some unseen plaque or innervation perhaps.”

“No known cure, Doc? How can that be?”

Doctor Weighbend cupped his dragonly chin. “The Worrybird has by now slyly and inextricably mingled his Akashic Aura with yours. Were we to kill or even remove the little vampire-sparrow, you too would perish. Of course, you’ll perish eventually anyway, as the lachrymose-lark siphons off your vitality. But that process could take years and years. ‘Never again will you smile, but not yet shall you die.’ That’s the gist of it, I fear, Mr Neck.”

“What—what do you recommend then?”

“Many people find some small palliation in building a festive concealing shelter for their Worrybird. Securely strapped to your torso bandolier-style and gaily decorated with soothing icons, it eases social functioning to a small degree. Now, I have other patients to attend to, if you’ll permit me to take my leave by wishing you a minimally satisfactory rest of your life.”

Doctor Weighbend spun around—his massive tail catching a cart of instruments and beakers and sending glassware smashing to the floor—and was gone. Jack sat wearily and down-in-the-dumpily for a few long minutes, then levered himself up and trudged off down the aisle formed by the curtained wards.

Almost to the exit, Jack’s attention was drawn between two parted drapes.

On a table lay the Motorball Champion Dean Tesh! Bloodied and grimacing, his signature cornucopia-shaped head drooping, sparks and fizzles spurting from his numerous lumpy adjuncts, Jack Neck’s hero awaited his own treatment. Assuredly, that day’s game had been a rumbunctious and asgardian fray! And Jack had missed it!

Impulsively, Jack entered the Champion’s cubicle. “Superlative Dean Tesh, if I may intrude briefly upon your eminence. I’m one of your biggest fans, and I wish to offer my condolences on your lapsarian desuetude.”

Dean Tesh boldly smiled like the rigorous roughrider he was. “’Tis nothing, really, old mummenschanz. Once they jimmy open my cranial circuit flap and insert a few new wigwags, I’ll be right as skysyrup!”

Jack blushed to be addressed by his union’s highest title, in actuality undeserved. “Your magnificent spirit inspires me, lordly Dean Tesh! Somehow I too will win through my own malediction!”

Dean Tesh’s ocular lenses whirred for a better look. “Worrybird, is it? I’ve heard Uncle Bradley has a way with them.”

“Uncle Bradley! Of course! Did he not design your own world- renowned servos and shunts? If medicine holds no answers to my problem, then surely Uncle Bradley’s Syntactical Fibroid Engineering must!”

And so bidding Dean Tesh a heartfelt farewell replete with benisonical affirmations of the Champion’s swift recovery, Jack Neck set out for Cementville.

* * *

Soon Jack’s trail of tiny archless footprints—outlined in fast-growing sporulating molds and luminescent quiverslimes—could be traced through many an urban mile. Behind him already lay the evil precincts of Barrio Garmi, where the Stilt-legged Spreckles were prone to drop rotten melons from their lofty vantages upon innocent passersby. Jack had with wiles and guiles eluded that sloppy fate. The district of Clovis Points he had also cunningly circumnavigated, wrenching free at the last possible moment from the tenebrous grasp of a pack of Shanghai Liliths, whose lickerish intention it was to drag innocent Jack to their spraddle-skirted leader, Lil’ Omen, for the irreligious ceremony known as the Ecstatic Excruciation. For several blocks thereafter he had dared to ride the Henniker Avenue Slantwise Subway, disembarking hastily through his cars emergency exit and thence by escape-ready ladder-chute when he spotted a blockade across the tracks surely erected by the muskageous minions of Baron Sugarslinger. Luckily, Jack had had the foresight to obtain a transfer-wafer and so was able to board the Baba Wanderly Aerial Viaticum for free, riding high and safe above the verdigrised copper-colored towers and chimney-pots, gables and garrets of Doo-Boo-Kay Flats.

At last, as a pavonine dusk was o’erspreading the haze-raddled, swag-bellied firmament, Jack Neck and his endlessly asseverating Worrybird—its face like a hairless druid’s, its folded wings gloomy as a layoff notice from Krespo’s—arrived at the premises of Uncle Bradley. The largest employer in gritty Cementville, the firm of Bradley and His Boyo-Boys, experts in SFE, ran round the erratic clock all thirteen moons a year, turning out many and many a marvelous product, both luxuries and essentials, the former including Seductive Bergamot Filters and the latter notable for Nevermiss Nailguns. Renowned for accepting any and all engineering challenges, the more intractable the more alluring, Uncle Bradley represented Jack’s best hope in the Worrybird-Removal Department.

At the towering portal to the lumbering and rachitic nine-storey algae-brick-fronted manufactory that occupied ten square blocks of Dimmig Gardens, Jack made free with the bellpull: the nose of a leering brass jackanapes. A minidoor opened within the gigundo press- board entrance, and a functionary appeared. As the employee began to speak, Jack noted with dismay that the fellow suffered from Papyrus Mouth: his words emerged not as ordinary vocables but as separate words printed in blearsome bodily inks upon shoddy scraps of organic- tissue paper.

Jack sought to catch the emergent syllables as they spelunked buccally forth, but some eluded him and whiffed away on the diddling breezes. Nervously assembling the remaining message, Jack read: Business state Bradley please with.

“I need to solicit dear Uncle Bradley’s genius in the area of invasive parasite disengagement.” Jack jerked a thick split-nailed thumb backward at his broodsome rider.

A gush of flighty papyri:
Follow Bradley Uncle free see if me.

Most gladfully, Jack Neck entered the dynamic establishment and strode after the Papyrus Mouther. Through humming, thrumming offices and sparky workshops—where crucibles glowed with neon-tinted polymeric compounds and, under the nimble fingers of Machine Elves, transistors danced the Happy Chicken Trot with capacitors and optical-fluid valves—Jack and his guide threaded, until at last they stood before a ridged and fumarole-pocked door with a riveted steel rubric announcing it as UNCLE BRADLEY’S CARBON CAVE.

Wait here.

Alone, Jack hipper-hopped nervously from toe to toe. He prayed to all the Saints whose names he could remember—Fimbule and Flubber, Flacken and Floss, Fluffie and Farina—that Uncle Bradley possessed the secret of his salvation—and at a price he could afford.

After an almost unsquingeable wait, the Papyrus Mouther returned.

with Bradley will now you Uncle meet.

“Oh, thank you, kind underling! A myriad blessings of the Yongy-bongy-bo descend upon you!”

Into the fabled Hades-embered Carbon Cave now, whose inward-seeming rattled Jack’s sensory modes. The walls and ceiling of the vasty deep were layered with snivelling encrustations of Syntactical Fibroid Engineering at its most complex. Flickering readouts and mumbling speaker-grilles obtruded their cicatrice-bordered surfaces from amongst switches and pulls, toggles and knife-throws, fingering- holes and mentation-bands. Innumerable crystal monitors studded all surfaces, displaying upon their garnet and amethyst faces scenes from across Drudge City. For a briefer-than-brief second, a shot of Marmoreal Boulevard—right in front of Boris Crocodile’s!—flashed acrost one, and Jack nearly wept for the nostalgic past of mere yesterday!