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

INTERLUDE: SVEN'S DELIVERANCE

There came from amongst the dead cheeses a sound much like the Three Tenors saying "quood" together. Beside Sven appeared a radiant and sweaty wombat whom no one at all, even if they had noticed, would have recognized as Joe Spooky.

The god of evolving sweat glands freed Sven and, donning a pair of little round John Lennon sunglasses, disappeared to the sound of Lyle Lovett yelling "Makalakabooboo!"

PART FOUR: OOH, BABY I LOVE YOUR WAY

XXVII. Goebbels, in Particular, Hated Him

In 1941, Hitler appointed his cousin Rolf Lichtenfarb to the High Command. He did this because he'd promised his mother that he'd help Rolf find a job. To keep the singularly inept Rolf from becoming involved in any way with the actual workings of the Reich, however, Hitler made him Minister of Human Rights.

Rolf quickly developed a reputation among the Nazi elite as idiotic yet somehow bloody annoying. Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend, was the only one who could stand him; she would sit with him during High Command meetings, feeding him preposterous amounts of fudge and listening to him say, "Meep meep meep" to tunes that would one day become hits for the Beatles. Goebbels, in particular, hated him. The mere sight of Rolf walking into a room, bare-chested and carrying the bright pink abacus he called "Housecat", would send the Minister into a fit of sputtering fury.

After the war ended, Rolf was captured by the Russians, but as no one knew the true identity of this man who called himself "Woo-Woo the Fuzzy-Bunny-Slipper-Man", they let him go, believing that the laws of natural selection would catch up with him soon enough.

He became a janitor for Daimler-Benz in 1947, and by the late 80's he had worked his way up to ... actually, he was still a janitor, but due to some freakish chain of events which no one has ever cared enough to satisfactorily explain, the man now known as "Herr Meep-meep" was named head of a top-secret research team. While with this team, he devised the most powerful and controversial artificial intelligence system in history: the "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!" chip.

It was designed to rid the world of Jews, homosexuals, and other perceived dangers to humanity by converting Mercedes' exquisitely-crafted precision driving machines into exquisitely-crafted precision killing machines. The moment it suspected its driver or passenger of belonging to one or more of the groups programmed into the chip, the car would find a way to kill that person, even to the extent of destroying itself.

What this all meant to Hiram Stackpole Trout was that while he was boring Erica by listing and commenting on each of his incarnations, the car heard him mention "Jewish lobster" and took the appropriate actions. Trout and Erica died instantly when her rented Mercedes rammed into the Northwest Louisiana Home for the Really Shaky, toppling seven patients and severely rattling thirteen others.

XXVIII. Coke in Hell

"So why exactly do you want to kill me, Murt?" Dances with Whores asked, wishing he had an Oreo.

"Well, Dances, it's like this. When you die, I'm your next incarnation." Murt looked at the old Indian, gauging his reaction. There was none, so he continued. "Now, I'm not ashamed to tell you that my life pretty much sucks. I mean, I'm almost as old as the universe, and what have I got? My own dimension of Hell, which is full of flowers because the last demon to rule it just loved flowers and now I can't get rid of them. I can warp reality with a thought, control mortals with ease, and generally make almost everything just the way I want it." He paused and, to prove his point, gave Dances with Whores an Oreo. Acid-laced. "Except," he continued, "I've got this huge backlog of bad karma that keeps things from turning out the way I want them to. So I did some checking. You know what I found?"

The only answer was a wet crumbling kind of sound, as Dances with Whores inhaled half the cookie through each nostril. "With ah hat thumthin to wath thith thown with."

"Here," said Murt, handing the shaman a can of Coke.

"Thants."

"Don't thank me yet."

Leaning far back, Dances with Whores began pouring the Coke up his nose. After only a few drops, though, he snapped forward again, spewing, gurgling, and cursing in several different accents. It took him nearly a minute, but he finally stopped hacking and regained his composure. Taking a deep, ragged breath, he glared at the demon.

"Truly, thou art a devil insidious," he said in very passable Elizabethan. "Ah'm goan bust a cap in yo ass." He reached for his shotgun, then remembered it was in his bedroom, back in his home universe.

"As a great philosopher once said, 'The human brain is like an enormous fish. It is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see.' There's nothing but New Coke here, Dances. It's my own little personal touch. I wanted to make my hell really hellish."

XXIX. Trout's Fate

Trout opened his eyes to find himself in the old familiar Place o' Judgment. The Judge's voice boomed hollowly, making Trout's ribs rattle like it always did. Everything was exactly as it had always been, except for one small detail. Trout was not in his accustomed place in front of the Judge. Instead, the Judge was standing before him. Trout sat behind the high bench looking down on the erstwhile judge, who was shaking ecstatically in some kind of weird dance, or possibly an epileptic seizure. He was also cackling, and he looked a lot like Buddy Ebsen.

"Hiram Stackpole Trout," the Judge boomed up at him between cackles, "I've waited 85,000 years for this moment." Cackle, cackle.

"What are you talking about? What's going on?" Trout felt his topknot turn a radiant shade of cyan, and his left ear fell off in horror.

"Trout was your fiftieth incarnation, your last chance. Now you've got to be the judge until some other idiot comes along who can't get it right." He cackled, and his cackles boomed hollowly as he turned to leave.

"Wait! You can't do this! Where are you going?"

"I'm a free man now. I'm going to Disneyland!"

XXX. A Couple of Things Happen

"Well," Dances with Whores said disgustedly, "it worked." He held one nostril closed and shot a stream of brownish, crumb-filled mucus to the floor, where it lay quivering and sighing.

"So, do you know what I found when I checked with the Karma Bureau?"

"Not a clue."

"I found that I had been, in my last life, a prophet and pharmaceuticals dealer who called himself Dances with Whores. Before that, I was a bartender named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom everyone referred to as Steve."

At that moment, a couple of things happened.

As if on cue, a huge furry slavering beast in a second-hand wheelchair burst through the wall to Murt's left, drooling and growling. Even in its seated position, the werewolf was taller than the Indian, and as he feverishly spun his wheels, he released a cry of brutal rage that stopped the shaman in his tracks for a moment.

Dances with Whores could not help but notice that the werewolf was very, very greasy. Hester Lester, who had been creeping up behind Murt and Dances with Whores, dove at the Indian, brandishing a 12th century Scottish claymore and screeching like an army of disgruntled cicadas. Just before the sword connected, Dances with Whores ducked, and Mrs. Lester flew over his head like a flabby, murderous albatross. She landed on Steve, whom she hacked in various fatal places before he ate her head.

A previously unnoticed Swiss cheese, dressed in a long black robe and possessed of a certain lithe beauty, jumped from the shadows and tore the souls of Hester Lester and Steve out of their still-twitching corpses. Tossing them carelessly to the floor, she drew her knife and turned to Murt. "Finish your story," she said.

"Anyway," continued the demon, ripping off one of Steve's arms and munching it thoughtfully, "when Steve here died a few seconds ago, he had pretty average karma. A little surplus on the bad side, maybe, because he was so stupid, but nothing that couldn't be balanced out in a couple of years of clean living. When you died, though, you had so much bad karma that I've been trying to work it off for about ten billion years, and I'm not even halfway there yet."

Dances with Whores thought about this. "Woo," he said.

"Double woo," added Death.

"So when you were born, I decided to steer you right. I tried everything. I arranged for you to have the gift of prophecy, thinking you'd go all Old Testament and maybe become a monk or something. Then I got you hooked on drugs so maybe you'd die before things got too bad. Then I started the phone thing to drive you crazy, so you wouldn't be held responsible for what you'd done. Nothing worked, so I'm just going to have to kill you now and hope for the best."

"So I'm not actually dead yet?"

"Nope. I just brought you here to Florida a little early because it's kind of hard for me to manifest on your plane."

"Florida?" asked Dances with Whores.

"Florida?" asked Death.

"That's what I call my dimension, on account of all the flowers."

"We anywhere near Paris, Texas?"

"Hell, no. That's the dimension of the wombat gods. It's almost a thousand planes away from here."

XXXI. Erica's Fate

Erica Mann opened her eyes and looked out over a grassy, sunlit field dotted with wildflowers and filled with the buzzing of bees and the gentle burbling of a nearby stream. Her sister was sitting cross-legged in front of her.

"Hello," said Anita.

"Hello," said Erica.

In contrast to Erica's voluptuous charms, Anita was sylphlike and waifish, except for those rare occasions when she chose to be sylphish and waiflike. She smiled at Erica and said in a voice full of love, "You're a damn fool."

"What?"

"You're a damn fool. All that crap about me being the nexus of all realities and being kidnapped by some town and all that. Where did you get all that?"

"I was trying to help you --"

"I've been dead for six years! I wasn't a nexus; I was a waitress! I choked on a chicken bone in Macon, Georgia! Do you know how much trouble you've caused?"

Tears were rolling down Erica's cheeks. "Is this Hell?" she asked.

"No, this is Heaven. I just had to get all of that out of the way. I really am glad to see you. Now, come on and see Kotanga. He's been driving us all crazy wondering when you'd get here.

Erica Mann rose and followed her sister across the Elysian landscape, wondering if the afterlife was really this confusing or if it was just her. Then something chased all other thoughts from her head. "Did he bring his mask?"

XXXII. No Wombats in the Book of the Revelation

"So where does Erica fit into all of this?" Dances with Whores asked, beginning to piece things together into something almost entirely unlike the actual story.

"I used her to get rid of Trout. Also, she gave me the idea of using a wombat to get rid of the cheeses."

Death shrieked and slashed at Murt. "It was you, you bastard! You were behind that Fromage chick! You did this to us!" Dances with Whores had never seen a cheese flushed with rage before, but he kind of liked it.

"You know," he said, stepping back so as not to be filleted by the maniacal anthropomorphic incarnation, "I've never seen a cheese flushed with rage before, but I kind of like it."

Murt managed to wrest the knife away and subdue her, though she fought him with every calorie in her supple, calcium-rich body. "Now," he ordered when she'd finally settled down, "listen. I had no idea that Ethel would summon you as cheese. I was hoping for the usual Four Horsemen stuff, but Ethel was a seriously not-well girl. The only one I really wanted was you, but I knew the other three always got summoned first, so I had to get rid of them. Now, I didn't know this until Erica told me, but wombats tend to aggravate whatever tendencies the Four Horsemen happen to have at the moment. That's one of the reasons there are no wombats in the Book of the Revelation. So anyway, I sent Helen out to pick up this wandering wombat I found and put him in the room with you, knowing that you'd eventually kill the other three."

Dances with Whores spoke up. "Who's Helen?"

"That's what I called Hester Lester. I've always hated the name Hester."

"So why did you need Death?"

Murt finished with Steve's arm and began picking his teeth. "Y'see, to kill somebody in Hell, you have to have an actual avatar of Death present to take the soul. It's one of those old bylaws that only pops up when it's inconvenient for you, but I've got a lawyer friend who told me about it." He belched, sending a cloud of glowing gas and wolf hairs toward the other side of the room, illuminating a previously unseen shambling green mold lurching in a corner.

"Hey," the old Indian yelled, "that's my mold!"

"Sorry, Dances," Murt said. "The mold's been working for me since the beginning. I loaned him out to Erica so she could do that getting-the-phone-in-and-moving-it-around thing, but he's always been my boy." He smiled at the mold, which squoolmed and made a happy little grulpulling noise. "So now I'm going to lock you both in a cage while I go watch Xena." And, having said so, he did.

XXXIII. The Baboon's Fate

The baboon survived the crash unscathed and became an itinerant drifter, eventually making his way to New York City. There a friend introduced him to Eddie Van Halen, and the rest, as they say, is history.

XXXIV. These Are a Few of My Favorite Cheeses

Dances with Whores sat beside Death, acutely aware of her creamy-smooth bosom heaving as she struggled to contain her emotions. "You know," he ventured, "Swiss has always been one of my favorite cheeses." She merely turned and glared at him.

"So," he tried again, "what did Murt mean about the brain being like a fish? I can’t figure that one out."

Completing her glare, she turned her head back to its original position. "Nothing," she replied, adding, "it's just something off an old Monty Python record."

"Oh." An uncomfortable silence settled over the cage. The tension was thick enough to cut with a knife, except Murt had taken the knife.

Finally Death broke the tension by punching the Indian in the side of the head. "What other cheeses do you like?" she asked demurely.

Dances with Whores, never one to turn down a violent advance, answered smoothly, "Government cheese."

They fell immediately into one another's arms, he seeking comfort in his final moments, she looking for the forgetfulness that only an emaciated corpse-like precognitively-advantaged old Indian drug addict could give.

XXXV. The Lord High Mapmaker's Fate

No one came to feed him, so he starved.

XXXVI. Deus ex Machina

The two of them stood before Murt, Death once again flushed, and Dances with Whores just tired. "Are you ready to die?" asked Murt.

The shaman tried his last desperate gambit. "Uh, no," he said.

"Too bad, Dances." Murt raised his massive gnarled fist and was about to bring it down when a thunderous voice rang out behind him.

"CEASE AND DESIST, FOUL HELLSPAWN. THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH." A mighty wombat clad in a blinding white toga reached over the demon's head and grabbed his hand, lifting the astonished Murt completely off of the floor.

"Ag! Ag! Ag! Ag! Who are you? Ag!" Murt screamed, trying in vain to chew his own arm off.

"I AM ZEUS, MOST HIGH GOD OF THE WOMBATS. MINE PEOPLE CRY OUT FOR VENGEANCE!" Zeus drew a thunderbolt out of thin air and used it to shave off Murt's pathetic goatee.

"Hooga chocka! Hooga chocka! I didn't mean it! Please stop!"

"I SAY THEE NAY, VARLET!" Zeus began tickling the demon mercilessly with the glowing bolt of pure energy.

"Ooh, baby I love your way! I shot the sheriff! Nooooo --!" Murt's wailing died suddenly as the thunderbolt pierced his body, splitting him like a huge pale tree-frog-like fish. Calmly, Death reached out and yanked his soul from the already-rotting carcass, dropping it on the floor beside Steve's and Mrs. Lester's.

"Um, thanks, um, Zeus," Dances with Whores managed.

"NO PROBLEM, SKINNY ONE. IT DOTH GIVE ME GREAT PLEASURE THAT MINE QUEST FOR VENGEANCE HATH PROFITED YOU THUS. MAY I RETURN THEE TO THINE OWN REALM, O MASTER OF FILTH?"

"Well, if it's no trouble ..."

"TROUBLE, SAY THEE? WORRY NOT, YE STUPOROUS! AM I NOT ZEUS, MOST POWERFUL OF THE MIGHTY WOMBAT PANTHEON? TRULY, I AM A VERITABLE BADASS!"

XXXVII. The Mold's Fate

Left alone in Murt's recently-vacated hell, the mold grew to enormous proportions, devouring all of the flowers in Florida. It then undertook a war of conquest, taking over the two nearest planes of Hell (Newark and Poland) and renaming the whole place Groolp. It was eventually destroyed by the fearsome warlord Lysol in the Second Great Mildew War.

XXXVIII. To Make a Short Story Long

Zeus, it seems, had taken the wombat gig when the Greeks stopped returning his calls. He was almost embarrassingly happy to take Dances with Whores back to Parasauropholous County, where the Indian was confronted by a mean rake-wielding Satanist demanding blood. After Death dispatched the geezer with a quick knife stroke, she decided to stay.

Death and Dances with Whores were married two weeks later when they crashed a Wiccan fertility rite and demanded that the guy in the hat made out of pine cones perform the ceremony. By a strange coincidence, he had performed a similar service for a pair of wombat deities the week before, so everything went smoothly. The couple spent their honeymoon spearing dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, looking for one with a lot of tattoos and fin rings, but with no luck.

EPILOGUE: SVEN'S FATE

Sven returned home to find that Nikeshia had left him and taken everything except his beer and his 1984 Wollongongawallabaroo High School Yearbook, so he drank himself silly and tried to imagine what he could have possibly learned from all this.

Of course, it was not long after that he undertook the slaying of Richard Petty and became the wombat god of being jerked around by more powerful beings, but that's another story entirely.