THE FOURTH STORY, “BLOOD AND BUD: A TALE OF UNMURDER”

The girl looked at Aaron Couvujour's palm with myopic intensity. She was trying to maintain an aura of mystical superiority, but was doing a very poor job of it. Nothing in Ethel Fromage's experience had prepared her for something like this. In fact, since her experience consisted almost entirely of a weeklong palmistry course at the Y, she wasn't prepared for much of anything.

"Umm, well, this is very..." she started.

"Interesting?" the pale man offered with a smirk.

"Uh, I was gonna say 'weird'," Ethel replied. She picked a battered paperback out of her bag and began flipping through it frantically.

"What's that?"

She showed him the cover, which was unreadable because of all the batter. When she had picked most of it off, he was able to read "Palm-Reading and a Couple of Other Stuff, by Hong Wang Spankweiler" through a thin film of vegetable oil.

"I thought he only wrote about werewolves," said Aaron.

"He, uhh, wrote this one before he got obsessed." She resumed her search through the yellowed pages until she apparently found what she was looking for.

"Found what you were looking for?"

"Umm, no." Once again she began flipping pages, as if she expected to find the object of her search by sheer luck. Which, as it turned out, she did. "Well, according to this," she said, pointing to an entirely wrong line on his palm, "you're a vampire." She looked up at him expectantly.

The man looked down at the fingernail on his left pinkie, which he'd been using for the last twenty minutes to clean his long, well-formed fangs. "Well," he said dryly, "duh."

"Umm, and you're gonna die soon. I mean, even though you're already dead. Undead. You're gonna undie. Or something."

He thought about this for a moment. He had no doubt that the girl was an idiot, but for some reason her words rang true. It may have been his respect for the works of Hong Wang Spankweiler, or the fact that his friend Ferris had recommended her, but in any case, he believed her prophecy to be true.

"How?"

"Unmurder," she said, for the first time sounding sure of herself.

"Who?"

"You wanna know his name?"

Aaron was surprised, though he maintained his composure. "Of course I would."

"It's...Ngaio S. Beatitudes." She slumped down in her chair, attempting a passable imitation of an exhausted medium, but only managed to look extremely uncomfortable.

Ngaio, S. Beatitudes, he thought. A name to conjure by, a name to...he realized this train of thought could not only go on for a long time, but might also get a bit stupid. He shook his head. "Thank you, Miss Fromage," he said, rising from his chair and laying a hundred-dollar bill on the table before her. When she didn't answer, he turned and left, not bothering to shut the door behind him.

When she heard his car pull out onto the main road, Ethel sat up and pulled a tiny receiver from her right ear. "He's gone," she said to the empty room.

The door from the kitchen opened to admit a tall man with long black hair and a four-day beard. He walked over to Ethel and put his hands on her shoulders. Smiling, he said, "Thanks, cuz," and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

She grimaced and stepped back, nearly tripping over her ex-boyfriend's pile of nudie magazines. "You're welcome." She handed the greasy book back to him and added, "Tell Aunt Kathy I said hi."

"I will, little Ethel-bird." Still smiling, the man walked through the open front door and disappeared into the shadows.

Ethel sighed and sat back down, picking another book up from the floor as she did. Palmistry bored her beyond all belief, and wouldn't help a bit with her boyfriend troubles. Summoning circles, on the other hand...yeah, that was the ticket.

A week later, Aaron was talking to Ferris about her prediction.

"Hmm," Ferris hmmed solemnly. "I've never known Ethel to be wrong before." He didn't add that he'd never known her to be right, either. "She's always been reliable." Reliably stupid, his mind said.

"Anyway," Aaron sighed. He had once been French, and could still sound very Gallic when he sighed. "What would you suggest I do?"

"Well, let me tell you a story. Long ago, off in India somewhere, this village was getting their money together to buy a new cow, since the old cow was getting too old to give milk. "So anyway, the elders shopped around and told the people they could either get a cow from Delhi for twenty-thousand rupees, or a cow from Lahore for one thousand rupees. Neither cow seemed any better than the other, so they got the one from Lahore.

"When they got it back to the village, they decided to try and breed her with the village bull. Every time the bull would get behind her and try to mount up, though, she shifted to the right. When he came at her from the right, she'd just shift to the left. This went on all afternoon.

"Finally, that night they went to the wise man who lived way out in the woods to see if he could help them. They told him about her shifting around and the trouble they were having getting her bred, and asked them what they could do.

"The old man said, 'I have heard your story, and I know your problem. You bought this cow in Lahore, didn't you?' They were all amazed, since nobody had even mentioned Lahore to the old man.

"He continued. 'And I know how to solve your problem. Take strong rope and tie her feet down, so that she can't move away. She will not breed unless she is tied down.'

"They thanked him and went back to the village. The next morning they tried what he'd told them, and it worked like a charm. The elders went back to the old man to thank him. There was one thing they were all wondering, though. How did he know the cow was from Lahore?

"He sighed very sadly and said, 'The same way I knew that tying her down would work. You see, my wife is also from Lahore.'"

Aaron sat patiently, waiting for Ferris to finish the story. When he realized it was finished, he looked confused for a moment, then yelled in a very non-Gallic way, "Just what was the friggin' point to that story?"

"Hell if I know," Ferris replied, sipping his blood-and-tonic. "I just heard that story last night and I've been dying to tell somebody.

There was still and hour left before dawn when Aaron got back to his apartment. His mind was mulling over Ferris' story, trying somewhat futilely to find some hidden meaning. While Ferris was sometimes terribly irrelevant, Aaron knew he was also very intelligent, in spite of his reputation among the still-living as just another stupid redneck.

Aaron was lost in thought as he checked his lightproof shades and doors, which somewhat accounts for his not noticing the huge Nordic man standing in his bathroom.

He finally did notice, however, when the man lunged at him, snarling and brandishing a dagger that, to Aaron's vampire senses, glowed faintly. Damn, he thought, silver. Stepping lightly out of the behemoth's path, Aaron brought his clenched fists down on the man's neck, felling him. The man struggled to get up, but fell again and lay still, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps. After flipping him over, Aaron saw why. The man had fallen on his dagger; only the hilt protruded from the spreading red stain on his chest. The would-be assassin looked up at him with an expression of utter surprise.

"Who are you?" Aaron asked, squatting beside the man's head. He pulled at the dagger's hilt, causing the man to scream. Bloody foam flecked the blonde mustache.

"Nuh-Ngaio Sven Beatitudes," the man spat. Aaron was surprised; he certainly hadn't expected someone with a name like "Ngaio" to be giant Swede, nor had he expected to beat the prophecy so easily.

"Who sent you?" He really had no idea what to say, so he fell back on the lines he'd heard on TV. Beatitudes didn't answer; he only rattled slightly in his throat as he eyes rolled back and he died.

Damn, Aaron thought. He'd satisfied his thirst over at Ferris', so he didn't want Beatitudes' blood, but it seemed a shame to waste it. With much grunting and straining, he managed to get the body hung in his shower and slit its throat to drain. He climbed into bed just as the sun rose, and his last thought before falling asleep was, Well, at least that's over.

That night, he disposed of the body and went to Ferris' to tell him about the incident.

"Well," said Ferris, "I guess that's over with, then."

"I guess so," Aaron agreed, sipping his blood-and-tonic. "I still wish I knew why he came after me, though."

"I told you Ethel was good, though, didn't I?"

"Yeah, she was right on the money. Except she said I'd be killed, and I wasn't."

Ferris rose with a grunt and walked to the refrigerator. "Well," he said, writing something on a dry-erase board, "I wouldn't worry about it. Prophecy's never a hundred percent."

"Maybe I should go see Ethel again," mused Aaron, not seeing the sharp look Ferris gave him.

Aaron stood in front of Ethel's house the next night and listened to the undeniably demonic voice coming from inside. "Okay, look," the voice said. "You can stay at my place. My mold's out on a job right now, so you can stay in his demiplane."

"Well," a feminine voice answered, "as long as there are no wombats."

"Do I look like the kind of demon that would have wombats in his dimension? Come on, follow me."

Before Aaron's fairly amazed eyes, a huge white tree-frog-like demon squeezed out through Ethel's front door, followed by four beings who seemed to be made entirely of different types of cheese. The demon waved and smiled at the vampire as he passed; the other four simply ignored him as they all seemed to disappear somewhere behind his car.

Accepting all of this with a very Gallic sort of resignation, Aaron waited until they had all disappeared, then went into the house.

The place was apparently a monument to the use, misuse, and abuse of dairy products. There were blocks, rivulets, crumbs, chunks, slices, drips, gratings, smears, lumps, piles, shards, stacks, gobs, slicks, drifts, masses, and balls of cheese all over the main room of the tiny house. A smell hung in the air that greatly resembled that of a Marine barracks after a ten-egg breakfast. He could barely make out the remains of an intricate circle drawn on the floor, apparently also in cheese. Parts of the circle were obscured by large patches of slowly congealing milk, and by the body of Ethel Fromage.

Her pale, thin young body, liberally sprinkled with pimples and bruises and smeared with an assortment of cheeses, sprawled in an extremely dead manner in the very center of the circle. Aaron was surprised at just how dead she looked, but then remembered that she'd looked that way when she'd been alive, too. Thus, he reasoned, by virtue of looking very dead, she actually looked extremely life-like. Weird.

There was a book on her chest, and Aaron picked it up. It was So You Want to Summon Immortal Anthropomorphic Beings of Immense Power, by David Portugal. Aaron opened the cover and read the inscription on the title page:

Ethel,

Don't know why you'd want this old thing, but here you go. Be careful.

Uncle Dave

Below that, there was another inscription:

DON’T SCREW WITH THE HORSEMEN.

--DEATH

Making a sudden and sincere resolution to not screw with anything vaguely Horsemanlike, Aaron left, carrying the book with him.

He'd almost made it to his car when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of metal. Jumping back with preternatural quickness, he dodged the flash of metal, which he could now see was an elaborately-etched spearhead. Having seen this, he was not at all surprised to find that the elaborately-etched spearhead was attached at the butt-end to a spear. In fact, only three things surprised him about his present situation.

The first was that someone was throwing spears at him. He was, in quick succession, shocked, dismayed, and then angry about this. He was mostly angry about the second surprising thing, which was that the spear had punctured his left front tire. Hell, he thought, this thing doesn't even have a real spare. Just one of those little donut things.

The third thing that surprised him was the sudden arrival of the apparent spear-thrower beside him. "Damn it," said the apparent spear-thrower.

Then he turned to face Aaron and extended his right hand. "Jambo," he said. "My name is Ngaio Suwadabike Beatitudes." For a moment, Aaron was too stunned to react.

"Excuse me," the man said, walking over to his spear. The new Beatitudes was African, about five-foot-six, and weighed maybe eighty pounds. He looked like a Kenyan marathoner, except much skinnier.

He pulled at the spear, but it stuck and he again turned to Aaron. "Excuse me, could you please help me with this?"

Aaron stared at him for a moment. "Your name is Ngaio S. Beatitudes?"

"Yes."

"You threw that spear at me?"

"Yes."

"Trying to kill me?" He walked over to where Beatitudes was crouched.

"Yes." The man was smiling; the smile seemed incredibly broad on his emaciated face.

With a swift jerk, Aaron pulled the spear out of his tire and examined the head. It was silver, alright. It positively glowed in the faint moonlight. "With this spear?" He jammed the spear point first up into the man's jaw until it poked through the top of his nappy head.

Beatitudes fell, still smiling and trying very weakly and spasmodically to pull the spear from his head. Sometime after Aaron jacked the car up, but before he got the donut on, the man stopped struggling and died grinning.

"Ethel," said Aaron one night, in response to Ferris' question, "is no longer with us." He sipped from the tea he'd just made. It was Celestial Seasonings' Type O Negative. He wasn't sure if it had been named for the blood type or the band, but he liked it. If anyone knew how to make good, bloody tea, it was Celestial Seasonings.

"Are you sure?" asked Ferris, sitting up quickly in his chair.

"Well, I wasn't at first, so I double-checked. She was most definitely deceased. Apparently, she tried to summon something not of this world. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but that's just crazy. The place was also simply awash with cheese."

"Yeah," Ferris said, settling back with a somewhat worried look on his face. "She always had this weird thing about dairy foods. Cheese, milk, yogurt...she was just obsessed with yogurt for a while."

Aaron sipped his tea. "Well, I guess she's over that, now."

"I guess."

"I didn't tell you the worst part, though."

"What's worse than my--than Ethel getting killed?"

"I almost got killed. By Ngaio Suwadabike Beatitudes." Aaron recounted the events as Ferris listened and looked more and more worried.

"I, uh, I thought you were done with that."

Aaron finished his tea and got up to make another cup. "So did I. But there's more. I had to drive back on that damned donut, so I could only go about thirty-five the whole way back."

"You can go faster on those things. I've done it."

"Yeah, well, it's a two-hundred mile trip and I didn't want to take any chances. Anyway, needless to say, I didn't make it back before dawn, so I pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot and covered myself up in the back floorboard."

"That works?"

"I've had to do it a couple of times." Aaron brought his fresh cup of tea back into the living room. "Anyway, I woke up to find that my car had been stolen."

"With you in it?"

"Of course. I peeked out from under my blanket and saw this guy driving my car. I thought it was you, at first, before I quite woke up; he had black hair and very pale skin and he was very tall. Then I realized he was listening to the Cure."

"I hate the Cure."

"I know. Finally I noticed that his hair was shorter than yours, and his lips and nails were painted black. He must have heard me moving, because without looking back he grabbed a 9mm out of his lap and pointed it at me and said 'Don't bloody move' in a very bad British accent.

"'Why not?' I asked him. 'You going to shoot me if I do?'

"He turned and looked at me like I had just asked politely to screw his mother. 'What the hell do you think, you stupid git? Of course I'm going to shoot you.'

"'With that gun?' I asked.

"'Bloody well right with this gun,' he said.

"'Even though it won't hurt me?'

"He just laughed and turned back to look at the road. 'Oh, it'll hurt you, alright. I got silver bullets in that thing. Take your bloody head off, it will.'

"Well, by then I could see where this was going. 'So you didn't just steal my car,' I sad, 'someone sent you to kill me.'

"He didn't answer, so I asked, 'I suppose your name's Ngaio S. Beatitudes?'

"'Shadoe,' he said. 'S-H-A-D-O-E. Ngaio Shadoe Beatitudes.'

"'Nice to meet you, Shadoe,' I said. 'I'm Aaron.' Then I kicked really hard against the back of his seat and grabbed the gun while he tried to regain control of the car. I put the gun to his head and told him to pull off on the first dirt road I saw. 'Well, Shadoe,' I said, 'you are now well and truly screwed. You've got one chance to save your pathetic little Cure-listening, Goth-wannabe, faux-British life. Who sent you to kill me?'

"He just sat there looking terrified until I got so annoyed that I decided to just shoot him. Then I realized how hungry I was, so I drained him to death instead. I hadn't had anything at all the night before, you know. Suwadabike was so starved he didn't seem to have any blood at all, and Ethel I didn't touch because I'm lactose-intolerant and I didn't want to take any chances."

Ferris sat sipping his blood for a moment. "So anyway, you finally made it here."

"Well, actually, there's still more. I got stopped by a state trooper about twenty miles from town. His name tag said 'Ngaio "Sam" Beatitudes', so I just shot him without waiting to see what he wanted. Then I stopped at FoodMax to get this tea and this skinny guy in a ninja suit jumps me while I'm walking back to the car. I shot him in the leg and asked him what his name was. He just cursed and spat at me in Quebecois French, so I shot him in the other leg. When he finally stopped screaming, he told he it was Stefan. 'Thank you, Stefan,' I said, and shot him in the head. That's his blood you're drinking."

"Damn," was all Ferris could say.

Aaron was behind the counter at the Stop-N-Go about a week later, idling away the time by painting lewd murals on the counter with EZ-Cheez. No one disturbed him; Mizell, Alabama wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis at its busiest hour, which two a.m. wasn't.

He was exploring some rather whimsical ideas for the Sistine Chapel ceiling when a man walked in carrying a cheaply-made silver-plated tai-chi sword. The man was a tall Oriental wearing little round eyeglasses and New Balance running shoes and precious little else. "You're Aaron Couvujour?" he asked.

"Yeah. Let me guess. You're Ngaio S. Beatitudes, and you're here to kill me."

The man stared at his shoes, which had little pink heart stickers all over them. "Yes and no," he said. "I'm Ngaio Sun-tzu Beatitudes, but I'm not here to kill you. I want your help."

Aaron was pleased to note that he was actually surprised by this; he'd been afraid that the events of the last couple of weeks had left him completely jaded. He said nothing.

"You see," said Sun-tzu, twirling his long drooping Fu Manchu mustache with one hand, "I know what happened to the other Ngaio S. Beatitudeses that've come after you, and, to be honest, I don't want to end up like that." Aaron resumed his painting while he listened, mostly to avoid having to look at the mustache, which unfortunately grew from a location somewhat south of the man's face.

"So leave," the vampire said, adding a rather less inhibited version of Botticelli's Venus to his increasingly randy Sistine Chapel.

"Well, that's the thing. The contract pays very well if I kill you, but if I don't, I forfeit my fee...and my life." He stopped playing with his mustache and began picking his nose intently. "I've just got too much to live for."

Aaron thought about this, then smiled broadly and looked up at Sun-tzu. "So you want me to protect you from...what was his name again?"

Fishing what appeared to be a fossilized caterpillar out of his nose, the man replied, "Ah nebber god hith name."

"I see."

"Heeth a...wait a thecond." With much grunting and pulling, the man finally extracted something long, conic, red, and soft from his nasal cavity. It was completely unidentifiable.

"What the hell's that?" asked Aaron.

"I don't know," replied Sun-tzu. "It's completely unidentifiable. It's been bugging me for days, though. He wiped his nose on his mustache. "Anyway, what I was saying was, he's a vampire."

Aaron refused to give the man the satisfaction of seeing him shocked. "And you want me to protect you from this vampire?"

"Yep."

"So what's in it for me?"

"Well, I won't kill you."

Aaron smiled again; his fangs were glistening now in the fluorescent lights. "But you can't kill me anyway," he said, "or you wouldn't need my protection."

Sun-tzu started to nod agreement before he realized exactly what Aaron had said. Then he looked very worried. "Uh, yeah, well, you could look at it that way, I guess..."

"I'll tell you what," Aaron said, resuming his artwork. "You tell me who's hiring NSBs, and I'll see about protecting you from him."

"Yeah, but--"

"You know who it is, Sun-tzu, so don't bother trying to lie to me again."

"Yeah, well, okay. His name's--"

At that moment something came hurtling through the door of the store, spraying glass everywhere and striking Sun-tzu hard enough to smash him into the beer cooler. By the time Aaron realized that the hurtling thing was Ferris, Sun-tzu's throat had been ripped out and he lay dead in a rapidly-spreading pool of Bud and blood.

Aaron said nothing for a moment, then yelled, "What the hell did you do that for?"

Ferris looked at him, a confused expression rising on his face. "'Cause he was gonna kill you, fool. Jeez." He turned back to the corpse and began draining the blood from it.

"He was going to tell me who was doing this to me!"

Slurp. "Aw, well, it's probably over with anyway. This is, what," slurp suck slurp, "number seven?"

"Six," Aaron replied, sitting down heavily. "When you're finished with that, you can help me clean this mess up."

"Okay." Slurp. "Nice Sistine Chapel, by the way."

The next evening, Aaron bought a .22 pistol on the way to work. He was forced to use his vampire hypnotism to avoid the waiting period, but he wanted to be prepared. Besides, no one believed in vampires, anyway.

At about three a.m., he used it to kill a fuzzy blonde Englishman named Ngaio Swinbourne Beatitudes.

"Hello?"

"Aunt Hortense?"

"Oh, hey, sweetie. I got your message."

"Where've you been? I've been trying to find you for over a week now."

"Well, I've been a little busy. Something's happened to Ethel."

"I know. That's why I've been trying to get ahold of you. Do you know who did it?"

"Yes, but it's no one I can do anything to. Everyone involved is dead."

"Sorry."

"It's not your fault, sweetie. Was that all you wanted?"

"Well, I had a question for you. Remember that thing I was telling you about?"

"Which thing?"

"The-other-vampire-that-I-want-to-get-rid-of-thing."

"Oh, that. Did you try what I told you?"

"Well, yeah, but I didn't know any palmists around here, so I sent him to Ethel."

"You what?"

"I was there the whole time, in the other room. I gave her that Hong Wang Spankweiler book on palmistry and one of those little earphones so I could tell her what to say, and let her tell him."

"And what happened?"

"She told him, and he left. About a week later, I sent an NSB to kill him--"

"A what?"

"An NSB. A Ngaio S. Beatitudes. That's the name I used. You said get something unusual."

"Where'd you get that name?"

"From the palmistry book. He was some old fortune-teller in England about fifty years ago."

"I know who he was, sweetie, and he wasn't just some old fortune-teller. He was a very powerful magician. My second husband was his student for a while."

"I didn't know any of that. Anyway--"

"Anyway, this Aaron killed the first one, then the second, then the third, and so forth. How many have you sent?"

"Uh, seven so far. I'm damn near broke from hiring the losers."

"Well, don't hire any more. It's a waste of time."

"Why's that?"

"Well, sweetie, when you brought Ngaio S. Beatitudes' name into it, you probably got the attention of some powerful...things. You turned your little trick into an actual oracle. Ethel was right about how Aaron's going to die. It's just that it'll have to be the real Beatitudes who does it, not one of your fakes."

"Damn. Are you sure?"

"Pretty much, sweetie."

"Hmm...okay. Thanks, Aunt Hortense."

"Anytime, Ferris. Bye now."

"So it was you," Aaron said as Ferris hung up the phone.

Ferris jumped in surprise and turned to face the other vampire, trying to remain calm. "Hey, I didn't hear you come in. It was me what?" he asked innocently.

"You what? You who've been trying to kill me, you country bastard! Why?" Aaron was a delicate shade of pink, which was as close as a vampire ever got to being red in the face. "Why? I thought you were my friend!"

"Oh, please, man. We're vampires. Evil bloodsucking creatures of the night. We don't have friends." Though he wanted to reach out and wring the little leech's neck, Ferris held back. If Aunt Hortense was right, he'd just get himself killed if he tried. "Look, it ain't nothing personal, alright? It's just how I am. I don't like other vampires coming around crowding me. Especially little geeks like--" That was all he got out before Aaron, bound by no prophecies, tore his head off of his shoulders.

Less than a year later, Aaron was in London, trying to stop the divine ascension of Keith Richards, when he was struck by a car. The impact knocked him into a woodcarver's shop, where he was impaled on a life-size carving of Noel Coward and died instantly. The driver of the car, a fat, elderly man named Ngaio Simon Beatitudes, reached him just as he dissolved into a handful of smoking dust.

NEXT MONTH: We begin the next-to-last story in the Enter the Wombat saga, entitled, “The Three Ex-husbands of Hortense”. Find out what happened to the surviving Chi Naugha werehookers, what Dances with Whores and Hong Wang Spankweiler have in common, and just who that “Dave Portugal” character is. Be back for Chapter Nine, or you’ll never know!