Home Improvement: Undead Edition (23 page)

He led me up the stairs to the loft-bar. There, old polymer countertops in dreadful puddle shapes, everything rounded and looking like tongues, lapped around too-thin high-backed chairs with pointed, stamped metal moons crowning the backrest. The chairs seemed eager to do someone an injury.

He led me to the railing overlooking the dining floor.

“We put musical guests on the rising platform,” Mastiff said, pointing to the central Dr. Frankenstein rig on its chains. He gripped the rail like an admiral surveying his battleship from the bridge in a storm. “Or go-go dancers on singles’ night. I know an absolutely brilliant troupe from the Twin Cities, two succubi and a harpy—”

“In short there’s simply not, a more congenial spot . . .” sang the golden stickpin. Clearly the spirit inside was blind, deaf, and mad.

I only half-listened as it sang on. Singles’ night! Arse-over, I was trapped in an eighties grease-and-grind meat market. All that was missing was a backlit sign featuring two Regency silhouettes and a name like
Snugglers
.

The crowning insult to the eye was the centerpieces on every table in the bar: lolling skulls with bloodred wax candles atop, dribbling down on both skull and tabletop. I leaned over to get a better look.

Arse-over.
“Is someone filming a metal video tonight?” I asked.

“Tee-hee, dearie,” Mastiff said, losing a little of his lordship’s air.

This sort of excess had been popular for about ten minutes in some London and New York and L.A. clubs two decades back, a mixture of an old Universal horror set and furniture shaped like various pieces of the human digestive system. It lingered now only in Tokyo, where the Japanese translife put their own twist on it by adding enough neon to represent the Human Genome Project and pumping up the technopop.

It stuck out in the rolling hills of the Mississippi River Valley like high heels on a cow.

He’d sent me his numbers. Unless his accountant was as cluelessly skeevy as his decorator, a few customers were still braving the fugly to eat here every week. Perhaps the service staff and food would be the Skyline’s salvation.

“I’ll want to watch a service tonight,” I said. “And we’ll still need to see the kitchens.”

Last, food. It can be an easy fix, or it can be like tunneling in wet sand. All depends on the staff and owner. Mastiff took me downstairs into the old pigpens. His kitchen crew was already at work.

A golem ran the kitchen with the help of two zombies.

My heart sank.

If there’s anywhere you don’t want a golem, it’s managing a kitchen. As for zombies, they have their uses, but not where food’s being prepared. You don’t want earlobes sloughing off into the mustard.

Mason Mastiff was inordinately proud of his golem and the great expense a Jewish Kabbalist in Marseilles had charged to create it. To his mind, with a golem all the cost was up front. It worked for free from then on, often for decades, without needing much more wizardry, barring accidents. I suppose it looked impressive enough, this mountain of copper and tin, ladles, skewers, pans, and tongs. A pair of blue butane lights serving as eyes regarded me across a slab of stainless steel.

Look on the bright side, Woolsley,
I told myself. At least there wasn’t the usual suspicion when I was introduced to the chef of a troubled kitchen.

“Let’s see it make me an omelet,” I said.

Mastiff stuck his tongue in his cheek in thought. “You’re serious?”

“It’s supposed to cook. I didn’t ask it to fart out the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”

“Chef Cuivre, an omelet if you please.”

The golem clanked into motion. A nine-inch pan clicked out of its forearm and the mountain of cookware and utensils turned to the stove.

“Butter. Eggs,” it said. It took me a moment to realize it was talking to the zombies.

They stood there in their hairnets, stupidly, faces even more green when contrasted with the kitchen whites. They wore baseball caps advertising what were local radio stations, I assumed.

“Buck! Tooth! You heard the chef,” Mastiff said. “Sorry, everyone is used to orders being printed out on a ticket.”

“Is that the problem?” I said.

Thanks to dropped eggs and butterfingers, my two-egg omelet took five from the fridge. Why do Americans insist on refrigerated eggs?

The golem extruded a silicone spatula and went to work on the beaten eggs. It worked well enough, but moved with such deliberate, noisy concentration I wondered what would have happened if I’d asked for bacon, fried tomatoes, and toast to go with it.

It did cook the omelet perfectly, going by my eye and nose. Taste would tell . . .

Then one of the zombies picked it up with a black-nailed finger and set it on a plate.

“Bollocks,” I said, and Mastiff fled back upstairs.

The sight of that put me off eating. I watched the kitchen activity for as long as I could stand it. After seeing his kitchen staff doing their prep work, I was afraid to use the toilets for fear of what I might find floating in the bog. I returned upstairs.

“What did you think of the kitchen, then?” Mastiff asked, resetting a dripping candle atop a skull.

Maybe meeting some of the front staff would lift the growing sense of doom. “I’m trying not to. Do you have a hostess?”

“I take care of that, dear Woolsley,” he said, his hand disappearing behind his back again. An operatic gesture toward the little stand by the door next to a case of cuisine trophies (I later examined them and found out they were all antiques from other restaurants) showed a little lectern on a podium so he could greet his guests from an intimidating height. “I like to attend each customer and tell them about the specials. One should treat each customer as an individual, no? Noblesse oblige.”

Maybe that was the source of his mania for this place. He ran on fear. By serving translife, he was empowering himself over them.

The rest of the staff arrived. A bent, aged vampire named Ravelston served as the headwaiter. And the only waiter, considering how slow business was at the moment. He worked with the aid of two polished, animated skeletons. That I approved of. They looked clean and worked quickly, sounding like rolling dice as they worked.

I took a liking to Ravelston. He had grandfatherly wrinkles all about the eyes and smelled of lime talcum powder and extra-strength breath mints. “How ARE you, sir?” he said in a deep Southern accent upon being introduced. He had an interesting habit of both emphasizing and drawing out his verbs. “I HAVE heard about you. We ARE so PLEASED you made the trip. IS that an Irish accent I detect?”

We chatted a bit about my home county. He knew Dublin and Cork but didn’t lecture. He did make one feel special, as though you made his day by simply walking through the door.

Still, he seemed willing to talk until the restaurant opened, leaving the skeletons idling like waiting cabs. I broke away from him and found Mastiff in his office, checking an Internet news site.

“Why in God’s country are you using zombies, Mastiff?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Well, they’re reliable, my dear. They never leave the premises, as a matter of fact. So they work as a security system as well, if you think about it.”

“And they’re cheap,” I said.

“Well, yes. I am running a business.”

“Into the ground. Look, I see the strategy, but sometimes, with zombies and animated skeletons and all that, it hurts you in day-to-day tactics. You lose all ability to have staff that thinks on its feet. Reacts to new situations.”

“You haven’t met my bartender yet. She’s sharp as a spinning slicer, my dear. She doesn’t come in until just before opening. Besides, now you’re here. You’ll get things put right, won’t you? I’m entirely at your disposal, my dear.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” I said.

“Consider yourself at home!” sang the golden skull as we shook.

I gave myself an unreality check. I’d taken a dislike to Mason Mastiff and his restaurant. Could I give fair value in consulting to a man I despised?

Perhaps it was his human nature. I like humans—especially served seared and roasted with butter and an herb crust of rosemary, sage, garlic, and parsley—and usually have little difficulty dealing with them. Mastiff rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps it was his eagerness to court the translife world. I’d take a Templar, even a Black Templar, over a human who was so eager to profit on the preparation and consumption of his fellows. Since the soulrift, it’s been them and us, or them versus us I should say, alternating roles as hunter and prey for millennia. This recent mixing of life and translife—put me down as Not a Fan. It won’t end well.
The farmer and the cowman won’t be friends,
as that demented little stickpin might put it. I can guarantee that each little story and encounter is being transcribed for the Templar archives. They’re paying attention. Organized. We in the translife world spend too much time in a navel-gazing funk, or jealous of the fleshies and their daisy-chain lives.

Everyone served anywhere.
Wisconsin was an anywhere and Mason Mastiff an everyone. Luckily for the world, everyone didn’t wear a goldbraided smoking jacket and strut around a barn like Mussolini with three feet of PVC up his arse, thinking the world’s ugliest dining room was some kind of tribute to Christo and H. R. Giger.

THE SERVICE THAT
night, such as it was, depressed me. Few customers ordering fewer entrées. I tried a bit of the cuisine. A medical school lab equipped with a microwave and a salt shaker could have come up with a tastier dinner. The specials were an Unattended Death paella—an old lady and her cat, by the look of the kitchen bin—and Quad Cities suicide scramble.

Ravelston, the vampire waiter, spent more time talking to his friends among the clientele than shuttling food and drink. While I admired the gentlemanly charm and the smattering of knowledge and interesting anecdotes he could summon up on almost any subject, each involved him planting his feet at the edge of the table for ten minutes. The original thirdwheel waiter.

Mastiff was serving emergency room food at private clinic prices. Twat.

Most of the clientele sat in the bar, chatting with each other or the barmaid. A pair of werewolves in purple Vikings jerseys hooted at the television.

Traffic died early in the bar. Strange for a place catering to translife, but then, it was a long drive back to any of the cities.

The barmaid was the one bright spot in the whole front of the house.

She was clearly out of the Eastern heritage of translife. Young, beautiful, pale green skin, and wide red lips. She had six arms and a graceful walk, gliding behind the bar from bottle to tap while wiping, placing coasters, and picking up money. I guessed she was a Devi.

“How did you manage to make it to the West?” I asked her.

“Mastiff petitioned the Secret Eyes,” she said.

“That must have taken some doing.”

“He never fails to remind me of that,” she said, a red-green smile traveling across her face as if it were in a hurry to get elsewhere.

“What’s your name?”

“Call me Megha.”

“Devi?”

She gave me that brilliant smile. “I didn’t sew these arms on.”

“How do you like Wisconsin?” I asked.

She gave a matched set of shrugs. “It’s pretty. The air and water are wonderful. No pollution. You can’t imagine how bad India is with the exhaust these days.”

“Like bartending?”

“I’ve always been a listener, and I’m proud to say the bar never gets behind.” She checked the screen on her electronic assistant, opened a fresh jar of olives, and replaced the ice scoop. “Our patron, he’s something of an old letch. Those wigs should come with goat ears. I think he brought me over because he liked the idea of a girl who could rub his prostate, give him a reach-around, and fill out his taxes all at the same time. But I get tired of the bar. He wants a glamour girl here.”

She reached up with two of her arms and adjusted her fleshy breasts in their dressy bustier. “Regardless of what you’ve heard about minor Devi girls, we don’t all go for the stage makeup and jewels. Doing six sets of fingernails three times a week is tiresome. What’s a human life span again?”

“I give Mastiff three more decades, at best.”

“Vishnu’s discus,” she said. “These last two years have felt like ten. I don’t suppose you have American citizenship through the Secret Eyes.”

“Not even a green card,” I said.

THE PLACE HAD
possibilities, no question. But at the moment, Mason Mastiff was playing checkers with some very expensive chess pieces, moving his queen like a pawn while his bishops sat back tossing off.

“This weekend will be better,” Mastiff insisted, as we talked over the dismal dinner service. “I’ve something special to celebrate the rebirth of the Skyline.” Mastiff let out a titter.

I HAD TO
ride and think this through.

In all my travels I’ve yet to find a perfume sweeter than horse lather, and, given my nature, I doubt I ever will.

I found a small farmette surrounded by promising, moonlit fields. Their stable, under a buzzing incandescent floodlight coated in spiderwebs, didn’t even have a lock. Inside a chestnut mare dozed.