CONTINUING THE FIRST STORY, “HEY DIDDLE, DIDDLE, THE CAT’S ON THE GRIDDLE”.

NTERLUDE: SVEN AND THE FREAKING IDIOTS

Sven awoke to find himself chained to a human in a dark, dark place. Utilizing his incredibly mediocre wombat night vision, he was unable to tell anything about the man, except that he was skinny and smelled very bad, like a dead goat exhumed from a swamp and soaked in rum.

He heard a click somewhere above him, and a sliver of light grew as a door was opened. Then whoever it was flipped on the lights, and he got a good look at his surroundings. It appeared to be some kind of basement, with boxes and ratty furniture and large quantities of nudie magazines. There was a huge snot-green couch in one corner, and a television, and four cheeses in various states of catatonia.

The three male-looking ones were lying about on the floor, passed out. The stinky one was slowly losing coherence, sliding across the floor in an ever-widening puddle of ooze. Tired of smelling him, Sven thrust his little wombat hips forward and pissed across the room onto the sleeping limburger, saying a prayer to Reagan, the wombat god of distance-pissing.

The other two males were snoring beside the TV, one on top of the other. The huge black one had been repeatedly raping the skinny shiny orange one, and had finally fallen asleep, the giant pinning the skinny one to the floor. The skinny one's hands, feet, and head were swelled where his insides had been squeezed into his extremities.

The Fourth Cheesemaker, the female one, lay on the couch, sleeping very lightly. She was apparently made of Swiss cheese, riddled with holes and very pale. She was the only one of them who wore clothing, a long black robe, and she was also the only one with hair, cut in a short business-like style.

At the sound of Sven's whizzing, she awoke, her pale eye scanning the room. When she spotted the other three Cheesemakers, she stood and walked over to where they lay, drawing a huge carving knife from her robe. With this she quickly and efficiently cut off each of their heads. "Freaking idiots," she said to herself, and left, slamming the door behind her.

PART THREE: WOMBATS AND WEREWOLVES AND DEATH, OH MY!

XXI. The Musings of an Immortal Anthropomorphic Archetypal Being of Immense Power

Death was pissed off.

Death was really pissed off.

She had better things to do than sit around in some God-forsaken basement watching a wombat piss all over Pestilence. And Pestilence -- she'd never seen the bloated idiot belch and break wind so much in all their countless millennia together.

She couldn't believe War, either. Just the sight of Famine had driven him into a sex-crazed frenzy. War had always been impulsive, but raping his brother for seven hours straight was a little over the top even for him.

So, she had killed them all, which was also a bit out of character. Sure, she had killed people, but she usually just showed up to direct the souls of the dead to wherever they had to go, and she’d certainly never enjoyed killing anyone. Well, except for that little Fromage wench, but since it was all her fault anyway, Death figured that was all right.

She should just kill herself, she thought. Horsemen -- as they were known to everyone but that dairy-crazed Fromage chick -- never really died; they just reformed on their own little demiplane in the Halls of Judgment to wait for the next summoning. Still, it took a while to reform, and she wanted to get even with whoever had forced her to manifest as a big, yet shapely and oddly compelling, hunk of Swiss cheese.

It couldn’t have been the girl, Death thought. She was too weak and inexperienced to have summoned even the slightest of Immortal Anthropomorphic Archetypal Beings of Immense Power. Somebody was backing her, and Death intended to find out who.

She smiled as she wiped the cheese off of her knife. Here was as good a place as any to start.

XXII. The Baboon Liberated

"I thought we were going to Texas," Trout said, gripping his seat like a codependent barnacle as Erica Mann drove the Mercedes through a blue-haired mob of old ladies in front of the Social Security office.

"We are."

"Then why are we going east?"

"I have a stop to make first." She yanked the wheel to the left, narrowly missing a gaggle of Basilian monks on their way to the rave club. "It won't take a minute."

She made a sharp right that was apparently a complete surprise to everyone involved and swung into a parking spot in front of the county jail. The fact that the spot had already been occupied mattered not at all to the massive Mercedes, which had been designed with the controversial "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!" chip that made it seize territory whenever it could.

Leaving Trout and the Aryan juggernaut at the curb, she ran through the wreckage of the parking space's previous occupant and entered the building, her skirt riding up and her chest heaving, which was an impression she liked to make.

The room in which she stood was an exact re-creation of the sheriff's office on The Andy Griffith Show, except for the huge oil painting of a matronly and apparently constipated woman hanging over the desk. That, and the slightly manic baboon leashed just inside the door.

"Kin ah help ye, ma'am?" a tiny croaking voice asked from somewhere under the desk.

"I'm looking for Royedjobilijim."

"Well, ma'am, ah reckon ah'm Sheriff Roy Ed Joe Billy Jim Wombat." the owner of the voice emerged, small and thin and wrinkled and smelling of Altoids and Vick's Vap-O-Rub.

She did not answer; she only pulled her machete out and, before the antediluvian lawman could react, hacked him into stringy little bits. She untied the baboon and fed it the pieces; he expressed his joy by furiously humping her leg all the way out to the car, completely destroying the already grievously wounded shoes.

XXIII. How to Seduce a Wombat

The real Royedjobilijim was not digesting in a baboon's gullet in the back of a Mercedes. He was trying his best to get Sally drunk enough to have sex with him. Unfortunately, when he had given Sven the gift of Really Incredible Persuasion, he had lost it himself for some reason.

The streets of Mobile, Alabama were wet and quiet, as if awaiting patiently the arrival of a big soft fluffy towel to dry them off and send them to bed. Only the occasional chatter of semi-automatic weapons fire broke the sweet stillness of the peaceful Southern night.

In the absence of a big fluffy towel, Royedjobilijim was attempting to dry the streets himself, rolling and writhing on the asphalt like a peyote-saturated Quaker. This was the latest wombat mating dance, which Sally unfortunately had never seen and was deathly afraid of.

Utterly worn out, he crawled to the curb and sat staring at his horribly cute little feet. "Why won't you sleep with me?"

"You're weird," she replied, holding her machete in front of her in the legendary Grumpy Arthropod stance.

"I'm the god of war. That kind of affects a guy's behavior."

"You didn't even pay for dinner."

"I'm the god of famine. You're the goddess of things wombats eat. Seemed to make sense, you paying. At least how I did the math."

She sighed, letting the machete fall into the subtler but no less deadly Khaki Coyote defense. The other goddesses had tried to warn her about him, but she was the oldest and most powerful of the Seven Great Goddesses of the Wombats, and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the others. She had to admit, though, that they'd been right; Royedjobilijim was a pig, even if he was a very attractive and powerful pig.

"I sent someone on an Epic Quest for you."

"You what?"

"I sent someone on an Epic Quest. I did it for you. I pulled this little wombat out of his nice comfortable life and thrust him out into the cold cruel world away from everything he ever knew. I gave him my Really Incredible Persuasion, too."

"You did?"

"Yep. I did it just for you. He doesn't even have a noble purpose. I just sent him out so he'd start praying to you and you'd think better of me."

"You did all that just for me?" The machete shifted slightly to the Creepy-Crawly Lizard position, which wasn't very effective but showed off her little wombat teats very nicely.

"Just for you." He saw an opening. "You think we could just … uh … talk a while?"

"Why bother? Let's just screw like wild monkeys, you great handsome wombat war god, you."

XXIV. Mrs. Lester's Lovers

Dances with Whores woke from a very odd dream in which he was locked in a basement, chained to a wombat, and wearing Princess Diana's wedding gown. He was relieved upon waking to find that he was not, in fact, wearing Princess Diana's wedding gown, because that had been one nice gown and he'd hate to see it get dirty.

The first things he noticed when he finally opened his eyes were the wombat, the nudie magazines, and the three piles of cheese. The wombat was sleeping. The cheeses were dead. The magazines were his. All this he realized in the first second or two. Then the smell hit him.

"What the hell smells so flowery?"

A voice from above him answered, "Welcome to my world, Dances. This is the most floral of the 784,901 charted levels of the Netherworld." A figure came hopping down the steps.

"This is Amsterdam?"

"Not the Netherlands. The Netherworld. This is the afterlife, Dances, and you're all mine." The figure appeared directly in front of the prostrate shaman. Even in its hunched-over, tree-frog-like stoop, it towered over him. It was pale and waxy, with great staring eyes and a ragged, very pathetic goatee. Dances with Whores recognized the voice.

"Hello, Murt."

"Hello, Dances."

"Look, don't take this the wrong way, Murt, but having, y'know, only talked to you on the phone and all, I never realized it, but you are one ugly demon. I mean, ugly. Not like Hester Lester ugly; I mean, she was ugly but you are just even more ug --"

"I HEARD THAT YOU BASTARD!" The air was rent by a shrill scream as Mrs. Lester leaped down from the top of the stairs to land on Murt's spiny back. She appeared to be dressed in the nothing but the remains of a T-shirt that had once said "I Shot J.R. Ewing", and pieces of her anatomy that Dances with Whores had never had any desire to see in broad daylight were bouncing and hanging from underneath. She climbed from the abused demon's back and crouched between the Indian's feet. "Not so big and bad now, are you, Mr. Dances with Whores? Or, should I say, Rocko? Or do you prefer Ben Dover?"

"Oh my God," he said, rolling his eyes, "you're that Mrs. Lester."

"Oh yeah, prophet-boy. Betcha didn't see this coming, did you?"

He quickly, mercilessly, and impolitely kicked her in the throat, sending her sprawling into the astonished Murt. She didn't stir.

"So anyway," Murt said after a moment, "now that that's out of the way, lemme get those chains off of you." He snapped the chains like sickly twigs and helped Dances with Whores to his feet. "We've got to talk before I kill you."

XV. An American Wombat in London

The wombat had been in the queue at Heathrow for seventy-five hours. He had hibernated for forty-three of those hours. He'd spent the next seven hours reading a Portuguese newsletter on license-plate collecting. Then he'd counted his ears, over and over, until he got the same number twice, which occupied another three hours. The last twenty two had been devoted to writing songs. He'd written three.

The first one went like this:

"Hey diddle, diddle,

the cat’s on the griddle;

the cow's now a porterhouse steak.

The little fish laughed

until it, too, was fried,

and the salad, I'm fixin' to make."

The second was somewhat shorter:

"There was a young lady from Nizes

whose breasts were of two different sizes.

One was quite small

and shaped like a ball;

the other was large, and won prizes."

The third one was his favorite:

"Well, I've never slept with pythons

and I've never plucked a nose hair

and I've never played the banjo at a Hebrew shopping mall,

and I've never waxed a rabbit

and I've never slapped a nun back

and I've never been to Boston in the fall."

"Oh, do be quiet," a very tall woman said after the 403rd time he'd run through his playlist.

"Aye, an' ifn ye don't, I'll take yer wee bulbous nose and shove it up yer arse 'til yer bloody ears bleed like me dear sainted mother's goiter, ye wee daft beastie," a Scottish army captain added.

"Oh, the hell with this airport," Joe Spooky said. "I'll just teleport there." And so he did.

XVI. The Sad Tale of Steve

When Murt first approached Steve the bartender, the man was a distraught wreck. Having accepted that he was forever stupid, he had learned that idiocy was not as easy as he he'd have thought.

The day after Dances with Whores had cursed him, he had taken inventory at the bar, noticed the two missing bottles of rum, and decided to fire the employee responsible. Since he was the only employee, the bar had been closed ever since. Then he met Flipper.

The dolphin was living in a murky slough on Peckerwood Lake, drinking Pabst and chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. He had two new tattoos; the one on his tail said "Kiss My Redneck Ass" in huge red letters. The other, on his chest, was a crude Confederate flag with the words "Lee Surrendered...I Didn't!" around it. He had given himself that one, through careful use of the taser and liberal application of two cases of beer.

Flipper became Steve's new best friend; the ex-bartender had been overjoyed to actually meet a celebrity, and the dolphin was just happy to have someone else buy the beer for a change.

The two of them sat on the banks of the slough day after day, listening to Flipper's 8-tracks and talking about ways to get rich so they could retire from the stress of the working life.

One day they were sitting around when Steve mentioned Dances with Whores. The dolphin would have perked up his ears in interest if he'd had any, which he didn't, externally anyway, so he just crushed his beer can, which amounted to the same thing.

"Good bounty out on that'n," Flipper said, scratching his four-day stubble. "I thought about goin' after 'im, but he mostly stays on land, so it'd be hard 'til I get my truck fixed."

"What kinda bounty?" Steve (whose real name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, if anyone had asked) asked.

"The money kind, you dumb sonuva --" He paused just in time to sing along with the tape. "Ah heeear that train a comin', it's rooollin' 'round the bend, and ah ain't seen the sunshaaaahne since, ah don't know wheeeen…" It was the only part of the song he knew.

"You don't want to go after Dances," Steve said, sucking down his beer. "He's some kinda wizard or something."

"He's a shaman, the bounty said. That means he's a witch doctor or somethin' like that."

"He's somethin' like that. He's the one what cursed me to bein' stupid, y'know."

The dolphin belched. "Hell, Steve, your drunk-ass momma did that to you." He scratched his belly and lit a cigarette. "You got a truck, ain't you, Steve?"

"Uh, yeah."

"You know where he lives?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well, hell, let's go, then. Some fool name o' Murt's offerin' twenty-five thousand for that boy, an' I aim to get it. Back that truck up here and grab that case o' Blue Ribbon. We're goin' after his ass.”

So Dances with Whores had been caught and the reward split between them. Flipper had gone back to Hollywood to star in Cannonball Run 3, and Steve had returned home, pockets full but heart somehow empty.

Then he had seen the ad in Barely Legal Spanking Lesbian Viking Farmgirl Biker Sluts, his favorite magazine. WEREWOLF ESCORT SERVICE, the ad read. FOR THE NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE! ALL PLEASIN' NO TEASIN'! ONCE YOU'VE HAD A LYCANTHROPE, YOU'LL NEVER GO BACK! He had no idea what a lycanthrope was, but he figured it was kind of like a Cuban girl, so he called the place.

The lycanthrope showed up the next night at seven, wearing four strings and a piece of orange fabric the size of a small, sickly toad. "Hi, sugah," she crooned, and then changed into a huge furry ravening beast who ripped him open, broke his back, and was about to eat him when she realized how greasy he was. Disgusted, she left him lying there, infected with her ancient curse, as she sashayed away.

He lay there for three days, unable to move or remember the number for 911. He would have died if the demon hadn't found him.

"Hello, Steve."

"Uh, hello. I can't get up right now. I'm paralyzed and I think I've turned into a werewolf."

"Yes, I know. You're also very greasy. Would you like some help?"

"Sure."

"Would you give your soul for it?"

"Uh, okay."

"Let's go, then." Murt picked him up and carried him back to the floral netherdimension, where he was the best bartender the demon had ever had.