Semple was on her in an instant, kicking her in the side as she bent over. Suchep grunted and rolled over in the dust, winded and hurting. Semple kicked her again, and again Suchep rolled, but this time she came up with the collar in her hand. Semple backed off, grinning. “So what are you going to do now? Fight me with one hand or let go of a fortune?”
It was in this moment that Semple overreached herself, though she didn’t realize it until Suchep’s left hand came up and shot a well-aimed cloud of dust into her face. In the instant that she was blinded, the trumpets brayed a new updated warning. “Zero minus ten minutes and counting.” But Semple didn’t hear them. Now she was the one taking the punishment. Suchep’s experienced fists were pounding her chest and stomach. The woman had wrapped the collar around her right fist and was using it like a set of gold knuckles. Semple staggered back, giving ground in the face of the onslaught. She could taste blood in her mouth. The crowd was roaring and the odds were in motion again. A few moments earlier, when Semple had looked so good, a newcomer couldn’t have hoped to get into the action at better than evens. Now it was anybody’s guess. Semple took a stunning blow to the side of the head and, as her knees buckled, Suchep grabbed at her skirt and tugged. Before it pulled free, the skirt acted as a hobble around her legs, and Semple fell heavily. Even her blurred vision told her that Suchep was standing over her with a look of triumph on her face.
“Now I’m going to finish you, you stuck-up harem bitch.”
***
The first gray streaks of a false dawn were beginning to show in the eastern sky as Jim moved gratefully up onto dry land. His boots squelched water and more trickled down the inside of his leather jeans. He was soaked to the skin, but since the night was as oppressively warm and humid as Orlando in high summer, it hardly mattered. A clean crisp shirt would have been turned into a damp dishrag in a matter of minutes, even without repeated immersion in the swamp. He was just pleased to be able to walk without having to drag every second step from seven inches of suction. The trees that surrounded the old spooky mansion were directly in front of him, but before he could reach them he had to struggle through a fringe of undergrowth where the water met land. Primitive mangrove and a tangle of some kind of organic barbed wire-with wicked two-inch and toxic-looking thorns-represented the worst and final obstacle. As he gingerly eased and squirmed his way through the flesh-threatening foliage, he rejoiced that he had never abandoned the Lizard King affectation of leather pants. He only regretted he didn’t have the matching jacket. Although his legs came through unscathed, the thorns ripped his shirt and drew blood from long scratches to his hands, arms, chest, and back.
When he’d finally battled his way through these defenses, he found that, once under the trees, he was walking on a soft carpet of shaggy moss, growing lush on the mulch of fallen leaves and pine needles. More signs of humanity presented themselves. Over to Jim’s right, the rusting remains of a huge automobile lay stranded without wheels like a beached whale, perhaps a Lincoln or a Pontiac or a Buick Rocket 88 that, in its heyday, must have been equal in magnificence to Long Time Bob Moore’s Caddy. Most of the hulk’s paneling was now nothing more than red, flaking rust, corroding away from the chassis, but here and there patches of faded pink paint were still visible. His first thought on seeing the remnants of a pink paint job was the mammal’s remark that Elvis might once have occupied the house. The immobile hunk had surely rested there for sixty or seventy years; a fairly substantial conifer had grown up through the interior, punched through the sunroof, and continued to grow for another forty or fifty feet. Logic suggested it was some long time since Elvis could have graced this sector of the Afterlife, except this Jurassic was in such a state of time flux that logic could not easily apply.
His main objective was still the dark bulk of the mansion, but Jim made a detour to take a closer look at the remains of the car. Even the outside chance of an afterglow Elvis presence wasn’t something one happened across too often. When he reached the dead two-door, he placed the flat of his hand on the pitted and discolored hood. Right then, worn out as he was, he could have used a strong jolt of Elvis magic, but the ruin of the car failed to deliver even the faintest residual slapback. More than a little disappointed, he turned his attention back to his primary target. One of the ground-floor lighted windows was on the side of the building directly facing him. An elaborate bay was surmounted by stone gargoyles with sculpted fangs and scales, holding up a heraldic relief, a coat of arms that bore the insignia of a key and an open hand with an eye in the palm. No detail seemed to have been spared in this homage to the intricate conventions of the Morticia Addams school of architecture.
Jim approached the lighted bay window with caution. He definitely wanted to see the inhabitants of the house before they saw him. He covered the last few yards to the house in a full crouch; then, with one hand on the carved stone of the sill, he slowly raised himself and looked inside. The spectacle that presented itself was hardly one of domestic tranquillity. The walls of the room were paneled in a dark walnut and hung with a half dozen paintings of grimly aristocratic men and women in flowing robes, posturing with dogs and falcons, against backgrounds of storm clouds and mountains. Aside from the paintings and the paneling, the room itself was dominated by a huge and magnificent fireplace, an edifice in black marble streaked by veins of yellow and green and with carved basilisks supporting a wide mantel. A log fire blazed in the grate, which might have invested the room with a modicum of hominess had it not been burning with bizarre blue-purple flames. Even more bizarre was the single figure standing motionless in the corner farthest from the fire. Jim couldn’t tell whether it was a man, woman, or even a lifelike replica, since it was covered from head to foot in a swarm of moving, jostling live bees.
Jim let out a low whistle. “What the hell do we have here? Jean Cocteau meets Edgar Allan Poe?”
As if his low whistle had triggered it, a door just within Jim’s field of vision opened and a woman came into the room. Jim instinctively ducked as the woman glanced in the direction of the window, even though he was convinced that, all other things being equal, she would be unable to see him lurking in the twilight beyond the light reflected in the window glass.
“Maybe Jean and Edgar meet Leopold Sacher-Masoch.”
Although she wore no furs, the woman was unarguably Venus. She was dressed-encased-in a cat suit of scarlet leather, pulled skin-tight to accentuate her decidedly statuesque figure by sets of lacings that ran from armpit to ankle on either side of her body. The ensemble was completed by a matching pair of platform spikes that elevated her height to well over six feet, long cocktail gloves with similar lacing, and a voluminous chiffon bridal veil in the same color. Her hair was jet-black with a bluish sheen, styled to recall the coifs of Jane Russell and Wonder Woman. As she turned to face the window, Jim saw from her ghost-pale face, with somber eye shadow and imperious scarlet mouth, that innocence had long been displaced by hard-won experience.