¡LIMEKILLER!
EDITED BY GRANIA DAVIS & HENRY WESSELLS
The book you hold in your hands is a ticket to the exotic shores of British Hidalgo, a tiny Central American land of jungles and coral reefs, wonderful people and strange customs, strong rum and sunny skies. Collected here for the first time, Avram Davidson’s six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is “a place that you can put your arms around,” welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast. Afloat and ashore, Jack Limekiller, master of the working sailboat Saccharissa, encounters ghosts of the colonial past and monsters far older.
The tropical paradise where Avram Davidson lived and wrote in the 1960s no longer exists in our world, but, as Lucius Shepard writes in his introduction, “That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you — a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves…”
¡Limekiller!
FIRST EDITION Stories Copyright © Grania Davis, Proprietor, Avram Davidson Estate. All Rights Reserved. “The Adventures of Jack Limekiller in a Far Countrie” Copyright © 2003 Grania Davis. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Copyright © 2003 Lucius Shepard. All Rights Reserved. “Jack Limekiller” Copyright © 2003 Peter S. Beagle. All Rights Reserved. “Dragons in San Francisco — A Sequel” Copyright © Grania Davis. All Rights Reserved. Afterword Copyright © 2003 Ethan Davidson. All Rights Reserved. Cover Art Copyright © 2003 Douglas Klauba. All Rights Reserved. Sloop Art on half title page Copyright © 2003 Robert T. Garcia. All Rights Reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from both the author and copyright holder, except by a reviewer who may want to quote brief passages in review.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Bloody Man” (Fantastic Magazine, August 1976). “Manatee Gal. Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1977). “A Good Night’s Sleep” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1978). “There Beneath the Silky-Trees and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me" Other Worlds 2, edited by Roy Torgeson. New York: Zebra, 1980;. “Limekiller at Large” (Asimov's, June 1990). “A Far Countrie” (Asimov’s, November 1993). “Along the Lower Moho The Iguana Church” (The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2000).
PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publisher would like to thank Peter S. Beagle. The editors would like to thank The Avram Davidson Society
Published by: Old Earth Books Post Office Box 19951 Baltimore, MD 21211-0951www.oldearthbooks.com
Book design by Robert T. Garcia Garcia Publishing Services Post Office Box 1059 Woodstock, Illinois 60098 wwnv.garciapublishingservices.com
ISBN: 1-882968-26-3
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICABy Thomson-Shore Dexter, Michigan
CONTENTS
The Adventures of Jack Limekiller in a Far Countrie
by Grania Davis
Introduction
by Lucius Shepard
Jack Limekiller
by Peter S. Beagle
Bloody Man
There Beneath the Silky Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me
Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight
Sleep Well of Nights
Limekiller at Large
A Far Countrie
Afterword Section
Along the Lower Moho (The Iguana Church)
Dragons in San Francisco — A Sequel
by Grania Davis
Afterword
by Ethan Davidson
For
Faustino Zuniga, J.P.
Alan E. Nourse, M.D.
Kathleen Redman
“among the great company of the dead, who increase around us as we grow older.” (Ommaney, The Shoals of Capricorn) and, among the great company of the living,
Ethan Davidson H. Austin Miller Burton Moore
THE ADVENTURES OF JACK LIMEKILLER IN A FAR COUNTRIE
The late, great Avram Davidson (1923–1993) lived enough for many lifetimes and wrote enough for many lifetimes. During the 1960’s, he lived and wrote in the former colony of British Honduras. In his unpublished travel account Dragons in the Trees, he described it as “a place that you can put vour arms around.”
British Honduras became the Central American nation of Belize, famed for its Mayan ruins, beautiful coral reefs, and friendly ecotourism. Avram's experiences in that timeless tropical land became a series of magical realist tales, recounting the amazing adventures of young Jack Limekiller in the somewhat-more-than- colony of British Hidalgo.
The Limekiller series drew an enthusiastic following, and three of the six stories were nominated for Nebula or World Fantasy Awards. Avram Davidson completed the story cycle shortly before he passed on in 1993. He was planning a Limekiller collection, and the notes and dedications were discovered among his papers. The collection wasn’t published during his lifetime, but the wonderful tales of the Bloodv Man and the Manatee Gal live on in one fantastic volume, thanks to Old Earth Books.
— Grania Davis
INTRODUCTION
by Lucius Shepard
I believe Jack Limekiller may have been the man whom Avram Davidson wanted to be; though it might be more accurate to say that Limekiller was the man Avram hoped that he, in essence, was: a gentleman of sorts with — like Avram — an insatiable curiosity, a quick, old-worldish mind, and a quirky, pungent view of life, but a bit more swashbuckling, armed with less of a temper, and perhaps standing a few inches taller than his authorial original. I think that Avram was happy when he wrote these stories, and I’m quite certain he was happy when he accumulated the experiences that inform them. They are, of course, rife with his offbeat erudition and plavful use of language and voice, but in much of Avram’s work, that playfulness is underscored by a gloomy, embittered cast of mind. In the stories you’re about to read, those qualities are not so much in evidence. There is darkness in them, to be sure, but it’s lent a joyfully exotic gloss that reflects Avram’s love for the tropic in which they are set: British Honduras; called by him, British Hidalgo; now called Belize.