“A dilemma,” Preston said.
“I made a promise to the starmen — and a solemn promise, it was — not to reveal them to the world for what they done here. I feel most bad about breakin’ that promise, but the hard fact is I’ve got to eat and pay bills.”
Preston nodded at the bibbed and bearded moron. “I’m sure the starmen will understand.”
“Don’t mean to say I’m not for-sure grateful about havin’ the cripple takin’ right out of me with that blue-light thing of theirs. But all-powerful like they were, it seems queer they wouldn’t also thought to give me some skill or talent I could put to use makin’ a livin’. Like mind readin’ or seein’ the future.”
“Or the ability to turn lead into gold,” Preston suggested.
“There would be a good one!” the Toad declared, slapping his armchair with one hand. “And I wouldn’t abuse the privilege, neither. I’d make me just as little gold as I needed to get by.”
“You strike me as responsible in that respect,” said Preston.
“Thank you, Mr. Banks. I do appreciate the sentiment. But this is all just jabber, ’cause the spacemen didn’t think to bless me in that regard. So … though it shames me to break my solemn promise, I can’t see any damn way out of this dilemma, as you called it, except to sell my story of bein’ de-crippled by aliens.”
Although the Toad gave even deeper meaning to the word fraud than had any politician of recent memory, and though Preston had no intention of reaching for his wallet and fishing out a twenty-dollar bill, curiosity compelled him to ask, “How much do you want?”
What might have been a shrewd expression furrowed the Toad’s blotchy red brow, pinched the corners of his eyes, and further puckered his boiled-dumpling nose. Or it might have been a mini seizure.
“Now, sir, we’re both smart businessmen here, and I have a world of respect for you, just as I’m sure you have for me. When it conies to business matters between such as us, I don’t believe it’s my place to set a final price. More like it’s your place to start the dealin’ with a fair offer to which, with due consideration, I’ll reply. But seein’ as how you have been a gentleman to me, I will give you the special courtesy of sayin’ that I know what’s fair and that what’s fair is somewhere north of a million dollars.”
The man was a complete lunatic.
Preston said, “I’m sure it’s fair, but I don’t think I’ve got that much in my wallet.”
The choirboy voice produced a silvery, almost girlish laugh, and the Toad slapped his armchair with both hands. He seemed never to have heard a funnier quip.
Leaning forward in his chair, clearly confident of his ability to be amusing in return, the Toad winked and said, “When the time comes, I’ll accept your check, and no driver’s license necessary.”
Preston smiled and nodded.
In his quest for extraterrestrial contact, he had tolerated uncounted fools and frauds over the years. This was the price he had to pay for the hope of one day finding truth and transcendence.
ETs were real. He badly wanted them to be real, though not for the same reasons that the Toad or average UFO buffs wanted them to be real. Preston needed them to be real in order to make sense of his life.
The Toad grew serious. “Mr. Banks, you haven’t told me your outfit yet.”
“Outfit?”
“In a true spirit of fair dealin’, I’m obliged to tell you that just earlier this very day, Miss Janet Hitchcock herself of Paramount Pictures paid me a visit. She’ll be makin’ an offer tomorrow. I told her straight out about your interest, though I couldn’t tell her your outfit, bein’ as I didn’t know it.”
If Paramount Pictures ever sent an executive to Nun’s Lake to buy the Toad’s tale of being de-crippled by aliens, their purchase of screen rights could be reliably taken as an omen that the universe would at any moment suddenly implode, instantly compacting itself into a dense ball of matter the size of a pea.
“I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Preston.
The Toad didn’t want to hear about misunderstandings, only about seven-figure bank drafts. “I’m not pitchforkin’ moo crap at you, sir. Our mutual respect is too large for moo crap. I can prove every word I’m sayin’ just by showin’ you one thing, one thing, and you’ll know it’s all real, every bit of it.” He rolled up and out of the armchair as though he were a hog rising from its slough, and he waddled out of the hub of the maze by a route different from the one that they had followed here from the front hall. “Come on, you’ll see, Mr. Banks!”
Preston had no fear of the Toad, and he was pretty sure the man lived alone. Nevertheless, although additional members of this inbred clan might be lurking around and might prove ferociously psychotic, he wasn’t put off by the prospect of meeting them, if they existed.
The atmosphere of” decline and dissolution in this house was from Preston’s perspective a romantic ambience. To a man so in love with death, this was the equivalent of a starlit beach in Hawaii. He wished to explore more of it.
Besides, although the Toad had thus far seemed to be a flagrant fraud, his sweet clear voice had resonated with what had sounded like sincerity when he’d claimed that he could show Preston one thing to prove that his story was “all real, every bit of it.”
Into tunnels of paper and Indians and stacked furniture, Preston followed his host. Into a warren of glossy fashion, pulp fiction, and yellowing news compacted into building blocks.
Out of angular and intersecting passageways as oddly scented as the deepest galleries of ancient Egyptian tombs, around a shadowy cochlear spiral where the Toad’s open-mouthed breathing whispered off every surface with a sound like scarabs scuttling in the walls, they progressed through two more large rooms, identifiable as separate spaces only by the intervening doorways. The doors had been removed, evidently to facilitate movement through the labyrinth. The remaining jambs and headers were embedded like mine-shaft supports in the tightly packed materials that formed these funhouse corridors.
All windows had been blocked off. Maze partitions often rose until the overhead plaster allowed no higher stacks; therefore, the ceiling transitions from chamber to chamber were difficult to detect. The oak floors remained consistent: worn to bare wood by shuffling traffic, darkened here and there by curious stains that resembled Rorschach patterns.
“You’ll see, Mr. Banks,” the Toad wheezed while through his snaky warrens he hurried like a Hobbit gone to seed. “Oh, you’ll see the proof, all right!”
Just when Preston began half seriously to speculate that this bizarre house was a tesseract bridging dimensions, existing in many parallel worlds, and that it might go on forever, the Toad led him out of the labyrinth into a kitchen.
Not an ordinary kitchen.
The usual appliances were here. An old white-enameled range— yellowed and chipped — with side-by-side ovens under a cooktop. One humming and shuddering refrigerator that appeared to date from the days when people still called them iceboxes. Toaster, microwave. But with these appliances, the ordinary ended.
Every countertop, from the Formica surface to the underside of the upper cabinets, was packed to capacity with empty beer and soda bottles stacked horizontally like the stock of a wine cellar. A few cabinet doors stood open; within were more empty bottles. A pyramid of bottles occupied the kitchen table. The window above the sink provided a view of an enclosed back porch that appeared to contain thousands of additional bottles.
The Toad apparently prepared all his meals on the butcher-block top of the large center island. The condition of that work surface was unspeakable.