Book II
How the Transdimentional Portal Saved Christmas
copyright Audita Sum 2008

Eight

The Price of Greatness

Tomorrow would be the first boys’ basketball game, and there wasn’t a pep assembly as usual. Instead, a small but loyal sector of the student body showed up after school hours in their fashionably furry-hooded winter coats to a bonfire. There, an old scraggly alley cat would be sacrificed. But first, they all took turns pouring butter onto the fire from long, elaborately-carved ladles.

Abdulhabib had snuck into the ranks of the band and was now standing by Karen. “Brains?” he asked.

Karen gave him a plastic shopping bag, and he smiled. It was heavy and rounded at the bottom, surely containing a severed human head. He could see dark hair through the translucent white plastic, and blood was slowly trickling from one of the seams.

“Don’t eat it all in one sitting,” said Karen. “I’m not a brain factory.”

“I’ll eat most of it tomorrow,” he agreed. “I’ll need the energy.” Karen nodded. As the cat screamed, having been thrown into the fire at last, the flames danced and twitched in her red, demonic eyes.

Abdulhabib slunk away and ate some of the hindbrain, carving it out with a plastic fork that he found in the parking lot. Uncooked brain was kind of disgusting, but he hadn’t gotten to eat any for the past few days. After using one of the school’s bathrooms to wash his face and hands (the sleeves of his shirt, covered with old and new bloodstains, were beyond saving), Abdulhabib got in his Buick and retrieved his secret stash of fairy dust from the glove compartment. He tapped the end of the thermos it was in to make a little pile of it fall out onto the dashboard. It glowed like fine, golden sand.

He got out a dollar bill, rolled it up, and snorted the fairy circle through it. Almost immediately, he could feel his limbs becoming lighter. He strapped himself down with the seatbelt, and began his drive home.

Within a few minutes, he had trouble focusing his eyes on things beyond the windshield. How delicate were the snowflakes swimming up its surface, and how brightly the frost glittered in the wan yellow light of the streetlamps! As he somehow maneuvered the car down familiar roads to his house at the end of the main road, he thought of brains. Deep-fried brains simmering in grease. Roast brains with carrots and mashed potatoes. Barbecued brains. Brains in a honey-mustard sauce. His heart began to beat rapidly, and blood rose to his face as he imagined...

But none of these dishes would never be his, he realized with a pang of sadness. When he got home, he would only be able to stick a bit of cerebellum in the microwave. Abdulhabib didn’t know how to cook, and his strictly religious mother would certainly not be accommodating. Human flesh wasn’t halal. Hell, if his family ever figured out he was undead, they wouldn't even be allowed to touch him without ritualistically washing themselves afterwards.

The car stopped. He stared out the windshield with blank, bloodshot eyes, and figured out after a while that he’d ridden up over a curb and hit a stop sign. He floored the gas pedal and flattened the sign, easing quickly back onto the road. He didn’t think anyone had seen him. Even he couldn’t see what he was doing.

When he came in out of the chill, a cheetah was waiting for him in the living room, sitting in the old armchair with a rolling pin in his paw like a disgruntled housewife.

"You Franky's man?" Abdulhabib asked.

"You bet your ass I am," said the cheetah. "You got some 'splainin' to do." He leapt to his feet in one fluid motion. "Where's the dust? Franky said you'd struck gold. He saidja had a sweet deal."

"Yeah, I'll get it to you. Just give me time!" said Abdulhabib, stalking into the kitchen. He ripped some brain out of the plastic bag and slapped it onto a plate.

"Time's runnin' out, kid."

After starting the microwave, Abdulhabib turned his bleary eyes back on the cheetah. "Look, man, I said I'd get the dust. I've just... I've just used it all. But I'll... oh god, I don't know what I'm supposed to do." "Great, kid; just keep spahklin', and things'll turn around." The cheetah was fading out now, and Abdulhabib began to wonder if it was just a hallucination. "Spahkle. Spahkle for me, sweetie baby. Honey, spahkle. Spahkle like a..."

Flowerpot.

The Kindly Clown

Lorain was down in her basement, which was cold, moldy, and dry as a crumbling ham sandwich. She was on the treadmill, Nikes pounding out an unstable rhythm, as her mp3 player buzzed reassuringly in her ears. Her womb, full of Antichrist, sloshed about uneasily, but Lorain had almost come to terms with it. After all, since she was pregnant now, her boobs were getting bigger! She was going to burn off the rest of the excess fat before it could even settle. Maybe if she starved herself enough, she'd miscarry.

"You're not going to lose the weight," said the Kindly Clown, without moving his mouth. After all, he didn't have one.

"Sure I am," said Lorain. "The first step is to think positive."

The Kindly Clown, though vaguely sinister in appearance, was kind of like a large and generally immobile friend. It was a face, as long as Lorain's entire body, that had come to being on the basement wall when several different paint jobs-- yellow, white, and red, had worn away. Lorain had had an inherent distrust of clowns since early childhood, and the slant of this one's eye could be taken as menacing, but once, when Karen had been over, she'd called it the Kindly Clown. The name had stuck.

Lorain had reached the point in her exercise when her heart rate rose to its peak and her breathing became labored. The feeling that came along with it was good, though she knew she hadn't been running long enough to get a real runner's high.

"Having fun?" asked the Kindly Clown dubiously.

"Stop being such a creeper," said Lorain.

"How's Karen doing?"

"I don't know. Fine. Do you want me to call her?" The pink cell phone in Lorain's jeans pocket seemed to grow heavier with every thump of her feet.

The Kindly Clown shook his head absent-mindedly, his huge yellow afro twining between the cracks of the cinderblock walls. "I was just thinking... She's secular, right?"

"She goes to church."

"And you're secular as well," said the Kindly Clown. "Your friend Samuel, the self-denying gay boy who's not integral to the plot...?"

"Baptist."

"But he must be struggling to reconcile that with his faith. America Broadway?"

"I think she may go to the same church as Karen-- United Methodist. They're secretly Wiccan though-- half my friends are."

The Kindly Clown's empty, scarlet eye socket seemed to twinkle in the sheen of the solitary yellow bulb above them. "The tides they are a-changin'."

"It's 'the times they are a-changin', isn't it?" Lorain's pace was starting to fall, and her lungs burned, but she decided to keep a steady pace. The treadmill said she'd been on it for ten minutes.

"Got any news about the curse?"

"No," said Lorain, wiping her sweaty brow and reaching for her water bottle. "I think I've given up."

"You could ask the Whale about it, like I've suggested."

A Zombie's Best Friend

"Hey, Karen, you saw that, right?"

Karen looked up from her Blackberry, with which she'd been searching for trans-dimensional code. She had long given up on finding a design student to encode her portal for free. "No, I'm afraid I'm..."

Abdulhabib, unlike his unundead comrades, was not shiny with sweat, and instead of smelling like B.O. he smelled like decaying human flesh. "Well I totally sunk a three-pointer and won us the game at the last second of overtime."

"Wow," said Karen, her eyes focused again on the scrolling words on her screen. "I thought that only happened in Disney channel movies."

"Yeah, well, the game's done if you haven't noticed."

She stood and stuffed the Blackberry in her pocket. She saw now that the stands were mostly empty. "What, do you need a ride home or something?"

"No. Coach said if we won, he'd take us out to Sukhmet's Temple of a Thousand and One Babies."

"Oh, that little Italian place downtown? Sukhmetio's, we call it on the North Side." "Yeah, aptly named for its towers of babies."

"Sure, I guess I'll go." Karen hadn't eaten anything this evening except a stale tray of shitty stadium nachos.

As the friends walked and, in Abdulhabib's case, shuffled out the stadium, Karen changed the subject. "Oh, I figured out why you're not all non-autonomous and groaning."

"Oh yeah?"

"You're not the typical zombie of American canon. You're a voodoo zombie, under the control of the Whale."

"Now that I think of it, I do feel the flippers of fate guiding me at every turn."

"I'm sure. Only thing is, voodoo zombies have never been described as eating brains, or exhibiting decay."

"I think you're reading too much into this. I'm a generic zombie. Get over it."

"Hey! Don't talk that way to the hand that feeds you."

The Creepy Old Man Laments

Son, if you ever go an' eat at Sukhmet's Temple of a Thousand and One Babies, know this: ravioli is a sordid bitch. When I done ate there in '82, the sight of all them fetuses sent me a-faintin' into my meal. Clean burned my eyebrows off is what it did, and gave me some bad burns on my left facecheek. You want my honest to Whale recommendation?

You can never go wrong with gettin' yer salad tossed. Yeah. Tell Claudia you want yer salad tossed. She's the one with the big orange wig and the mole on her lip.

Dining and... Stomach Lining? Yeah, I'm really running out of clever titles.

The towers of babies at Sukhmetio's, due to Thunder Country's high abortion rate, were actually more like pillars of first-trimester fetuses. The translucent, dead little humans floated in some sort of greenish liquid, and could barely be seen through the smoked glass of the pillars. Lorain had once remarked that the sight put her off her appetite, but Karen found herself unmoved by the vague, flesh-colored shapes.

"Hey my name's Claudia I'll be ya serva tsoday ah ya ready ta owda," said their waitress in one monotone breath. She had a big orange wig and a mole on her lip. For some reason, Karen got the sudden urge so say 'ANARANJJJJJADO,' but she didn't.

"Uh... I think we need a few more minutes," said Karen.

"Ukay what about bevwages."

"Do you guys have spinal fluid?" asked Abdulhabib.

"We only sewve pepsi products, ice tea, an' watah."

"Crapdamnit. I'll just have some water, then."

"Same here," said Karen. "And can you bring us some breadsticks?"

"Goddit."

Now that Abdulhabib was, as it were, unfuckable, Karen found that she no longer felt uncomfortable around him. During their respective meals of penne pasta and brain parmesan, they talked about various local issues. Abdulhabib, a staunch environmentalist, had recently joined the student organization called S.A.D.O.-- Students Against Destructive Orbs (of power)-- and was complaining of its impending merge with a similarly-minded group, M.A.S.O.C.H.I.S.M. -- Mothers Against Supervillains Creating Havoc In (a) Silly Manner.

Karen felt like she could really relate. She'd been having trouble with Speech and Debate this year ever since realizing that, no, she wasn't just getting bad scores because the judges were incompetent. And, as always, there were a lot of slackers in band who never practiced. Mostly brass players. How she hated them! But then, there had never been real peace between brass and woodwinds. The rivalry was not unlike the never-ending conflict between Israel and every other Middle Eastern country, but Karen didn't bring that up because she felt it would be somewhat awkward, Abdulhabib being Muslim and all. If Thunder Countrymen were anything, they were politically correct.

After their meal, they walked out to the parking lot. There was frost on the ground, and the black sky smelled like winter.

"Actually, I do need a ride home," said Abdulhabib. "I mean, I could get my parents to pick me up, but I'd rather not..."

"Yeah, that's fine," said Karen. It's on my way home anyway, so..."

"There's something I wanted to ask about," said Abdulhabib when the red Saturn had stopped in his driveway. "Do you have any fairy dust left in your car from that one time?"

Karen shrugged. "I think most of it sort of dissipated into the air. We can look under the hood. Why? You're not addicted to the stuff, are you?"

He half-smiled and opened the passenger side door. "I'm looking to sell, actually. I told my friend Franky that I'd struck gold, which I had, but then I accidentally snorted it all. Since my blood is all coagulated, it takes a lot more to get high on it now than it used to."

"Sucks," said Karen, also getting out. She opened up the hood of her Saturn, revealing a gold dusting on its giblets. "Well whaddaya know," she said.

"Hang on," said Abdulhabib. "I'll get my thermos."

Alliteration FTW

Deep in the dismal depths of the tunnels, Lorain, recalling the recommendation of her Kindly Clown cohort, prostrated her fervently fecund self before the Whale. The cetacean surged from her soporific slumber with a feeble flapping of fins. "What is it, child?" said the calm translation, quieter than usual, as the Orca emitted an effortful "Eeeeee."

“I know you’re in hibernation, and you probably have better things to do with your time--”

“For fuck’s sake, spit it out.”

“I’m cursed. Can you lift it?”

“Yes, I can see the curse floating about in your aura like a vengeful jellyfish, or an egg yolk in water,” mumbled the voice.

Lorain sighed heavily. “Why me?”

“When you were but a squalling babe, the Spirit of Christmas thought you were too beautiful for words or some shit like that. He put a curse on you so that no man could ever kiss and tell. Since I’m tired as hell and I don’t want to deal with your petty shit, I’m just gonna give you a general rule about curses. There’s not a curse in the world that can’t be cured by ‘love,’ or the corny Disney equivalent. My advice? Romance before the taking off of the pants.”

“But that’s impossible!” said Lorain, a quiver of querulous qualm in her voice. “I can’t build a relationship without intimacy.”

“Then you must ask yourself: for whom would you ‘go gay?’”

“There is but one,” said Lorain in awkwardly formal dialogue, rising to her feet.

“Then go to her!” cried the exasperated, angry, and obviously ovulating Orca. “You have my blessing.” Lorain turned to go. “And one more thing,” called the cool voice. “Next time you’re in the neighborhood, could you slaughter a virgin or two in my name? Or maybe a newborn calf. Sheep. That sort of thing.”

“It will be done,” said Lorain. She hesitated at the stairs. "The antichrist--" she said as a final thought-- "do you know who the father is?"

"It's the Tallmadge devil," said the Orca irately, with a yawn. "He magically impregnated more than one promiscuous ho-bag that day when his team unjustly defeated me. What do you think the point of that abstinence assembly back in November was?"

Lorain nodded. "Goodbye then," she said. "And I thank thee, O Whale of the Ages, for rewarding me with thy wacky, whimsical wisdom.”

“Don’t push it, kid.”