Lizard World by Terry Richard Bazes Page B

pictures he had seen of unwrapped mummies with leathery skin pulled tight over protruding cheekbones. From earliest childhood, when he had been forced to kiss the lips of a mustached great-aunt who saved her spittle and smelled of Vaporub, Smedlow had retained an unconquerable aversion toward the very old. Now, as this one held a bony hand to her mouth (overjoyed, no doubt by the munificent gift of cigars), he felt a sudden fear that she might touch him. As it was, however, she merely seized on her booty and conducted them across the rubble to her shack.
           “You put glass in that window since I been here,” said Lemuel Lee.
           The dirt floor was littered with cigar butts. Flies studded the amber ribbons of flypaper hanging from the rafters. A glance took in the shelves of canned food, the striped mattress, the kerosene lamps and the gold-framed photograph of Rudolph Valentino. An old Spanish helmet, turned upside down and splattered with wax, held a burnt-out candle.
           “Mister,” said Aunt Ligeia, “this swamp’s got things in it you fancy folks don’t know nothin’ about. Take old Hattie here, for example. She don’t talk much. But she’s a hun’red and seventy-five if she’s a year. And folks say that English fella was nigh two hundred by the time him, Mosher and Hezekiah built this factory. It’s gator juice that does it. You can use every ounce of a gator, mister.”
           Oh God no, thought Smedlow, feeling suddenly nauseated, if what this slattern said was true, then this singularly repulsive crone was old enough to remember President Lincoln. But did he really want to live forever if it meant he had to look like her? And was Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth no more than the scent glands of a lovesick reptile?
           By now Old Hattie had opened a cigar box and was lighting up a stogie. There was a look on her face of beatific stupor.
           “And you got ten whole boxes of those, Hattie,” said Aunt Ligeia, who couldn’t help noticing that now, once again, that fancyman fatty was staring at her leg. Hell, she hadn’t had a man since Aldo Scalzi, the barber in Beaureard, had died of complications from a bypass. She had to admit that she was getting pretty tired of bondage videos and muscle magazines and that she sighed for the days when she and Aldo would retire to the backroom of his barbershop and she would whoop his fanny with a wire brush.
           “You can untie his hands now, Lem. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
           Smedlow felt a sudden burst of hope. For, sullenly, that hateful Lem started yanking at the ropes, making sure to pull them tighter before reluctantly removing them completely.
           “Well, don’t you try nothin’, mister,” he said, thrusting a flashlight into Smedlow’s hand and shoving him out the shack door and onto the refuse heap outside.
           Smedlow found himself stumbling through the vast, unroofed room of rusty tubs and rubble. Now that he was among the ruins, he could hear that the howling had resumed. It was softer than before, a low and sustained moan punctuated by periodic, louder, angrier bursts of what he thought might be gurgling, incoherent attempts at obscenity. The broken walls of the perfume factory frowned above him as the goat stood grazing in the moonlight. The others were following behind him and that Lem would kick him if he didn’t hurry.

    Beyond the ruined chimney a door creaked open into oblong darkness. Smoking her cigar, holding her lantern, Hattie led them down the slippery stairs. For such an old girl she looked remarkably spry in her high-topped sneakers. She looked pretty strong for a hundred and seventy-five: it was hard to believe that the Fountain of Youth was only alligator juice, although it was true he had heard stories about peasants in Russia who had reached a supernatural old age through a diet of honey and yogurt. Her cigar smoke made Smedlow