Home Improvement: Undead Edition

Besides, local sourcing saves you a bunch of money and the potential for subcontractor mistakes. You can afford to cut prices, add variety, and these days even translife are on a budget.”

“No! Tonight I’m putting on a show that’ll impress even you, Sean Woolsley. You can help me by thinking up some side dishes to go with the Stensgaard girl.”

Ahh, that’s his bollocked-up plan. He thought he’d have me in, update the menu, then put on a show with his expensive little menu item every twenty-four-hour news channel had the hots for. Get a buzz about the old barn. Takes more than one pretty little dinner to turn around a restaurant, fleshie, believe you me.

I THOUGHT ABOUT climbing into my rented van and raising gravel. I could eat Oreos all the way back to London.

In the end, I stayed. For Megha and Ravelston, even for those two idiot zombies in the kitchen. Even those two deserved better than Cecil B. DeRanged putting their translives at risk. Mason Mastiff had bitten off a good deal more than he could chew, and someone had to be there if he choked.

I took out some of my frustrations on a horse stolen from a riding club. I left it tied out back, knowing that I’d need another ride after seeing Mastiff’s little show with the Stensgaard menu.

He’d been right about one thing. He’d generated a buzz. The old barn was very nearly packed. I even recognized a few diners from the translife foodie circuit from as far away as Memphis. Then I saw another familiar half-face.

Leave it to Mastiff to toss a turd into his own punch bowl. He’d invited yellow-skinned Charles Lasseur, a writer for the Nightcraft Roundtable, a one-stop Internet shop for all things translife. Some mix of ghoul and vampire and lich, he had an occasional column on restaurants, cafés, and nightspots, draining the life energy from would-be restaurateurs more thoroughly than a starving vampire. The old bastard had a scarred-up face minus the nose that might have been the inspiration for Lon Chaney’s Phantom.

He had a peculiar sideways gait and sidled up to me as though we were old friends.

“I heard you were orchestrating another culinary triumph,” Lasseur said, looking down his nonexistent nose.

“I’m still evaluating matters here,” I said. “After tonight, I’m sure I’ll know what sort of changes need to be made.”

“Beyond the décor, I hope,” Lasseur said. “Please tell me you’ll do something about the décor.”

I wouldn’t give Lasseur the satisfaction of agreeing with him, so I just grunted.

For the featured dinner tonight, Mastiff wore a metallic suit and top hat, sort of a cross between Willy Wonka and Liberace, with a tiny brown wig the size of a sleeping bat atop his head.

The Frankenstein platform rose. The poor Stensgaard girl stood on it, attached to the rigging arms like Fay Wray awaiting her rendezvous with King Kong.

She had a stout leather ball gag in her mouth but otherwise looked wide awake and thrashing.

I’ve heard of a few translife clubs in Amsterdam, Southeast Asia, and the Mideast making such a production out of food preparation, but I don’t agree with such spectacles. I’d warned and rewarned Mastiff not to attempt his plan, and here he was going ahead anyway. Tonight would be my last night at the Skyline. He could spend his way into bankruptcy without attaching my name to the fiasco.

“The world has gone mad today. And good’s bad today. And black’s white today. And day’s night today,” sang his stickpin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames and monsieurs, meine Damen und Herren,” Mastiff began to an audience of English-speaking, Upper Midwestern translife, “let me introduce you to our fabulous main course, on special tonight for only nine ninety-nine a plate. That’s nine hundred ninety-nine dollars, for the privilege of tasting the most talked-about woman in America today, Lisa Stensgaard. That price includes, of course, fresh blood to accompany your meal.

“She’s exclusive to the discriminating clientele of the Skyline. Only you will be able to answer the question on everyone’s lips: What happened to Lisa Stensgaard?”

Don’t play with your food. First lesson old One-Eyed Jack ever taught me. Leave it to a human to go for sexy presentation. Sparkle might fill movie theaters, but it doesn’t do much for cuisine. Hollywood gives the humans such lame ideas about translife.

Both zombies were pulling hard on her arms, forcing her down into the guttered autopsy table. Fresh jugs waited under the drain to collect every precious drop of blood, and Ravelston stood ready with wineglasses.

As the golem bent over her, chef’s knife at the ready, she suddenly threw herself toward Buck. Or perhaps it was Tooth. One zombie plus one desperate woman plus the tipping platform managed to yank Tooth (if that was who it was) off his feet and impale him on the golem’s outstretched knife and sent Buck backward off the platform.

Both zombies grunted in outrage as they bounced bloodily into the kitchen pit.

Stensgaard scooted backward as the golem mechanically wiped the knife and struck again.

“Chef! Stop her!” Mastiff shouted.

Breathing hot and hard, Stensgaard jumped off the platform and among the diners. She sprinted between the widely spaced tables, upending a busboy cart that one of the guests had pushed into her way. Otherwise the rest were satisfied with just watching the escape attempt.

Perhaps they thought it was dinner theater.

“Stop her,” shouted Mastiff, waving his shiny top hat in frustration from the balcony.

The skeletons went about their business of mechanically filling knocked-over water glasses and picking up dropped forks. You get what you pay for, Mastiff.

Stensgaard didn’t bother with the door. Instead she grabbed the busboy cart and followed it through one of the great river-facing windows and down onto the patio.

All I could do was shake my head. If she got away, the Templars would be investigating all of southwest Wisconsin and the surrounding states inside twenty-four hours.

“Looks like the special’s off . . . and running,” Lasseur said. “I can’t wait to see what’s planned for dessert. A heroin addict launched from a cannon, perhaps?”

Someone had to set this mess to rights, and for the sake of the staff of the Skyline, I’d undertake it. I grabbed Ravelston by the arm and pulled him toward the hole in the glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems . . .” Mastiff said. “It seems . . .”

“Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!” sang the stickpin.

“THIS NEVER WAS my kind of show,” Ravelston said, his arms tight across my back as the horse trotted through the cloudy Wisconsin night. The tall quarterhorse was deeply unhappy about carrying a vampire. “Running down food in the dead of night.”

I’d had to bring him. I could ride quickly, but I couldn’t track a bus driven through a glass blower’s.

“How do you keep yourself fed? Just the restaurant?”

I couldn’t see his face much out of the corner of my eye, but it looked like a cheek muscle twitched.

“Tweed suit,” he said.

Wasn’t sure I heard him right so I yelled over the hoofbeats. “Come again, please?”

“She WENT downhill here, sir. TURN to the right, if you please. A tweed suit. Just put on a tweed suit. Especially if it’s a few decades out of date. No one suspects you of anything. I tell you, if you ever need to lie low somewhere, find yourself a secondhand tweed suit. When I must eat, I visit the hospitals and nursing homes. Someone like me, smelling like mothballs, wool hat in hand wandering around a nursing home peeking into doors—no one gives me a second look. I look for those on their last legs. Dementia, pain . . . not much vitality in their blood, of course, but I feel as if I’m doing them a service.”

“Was it always like that, or did you change over time?” I’d known a vampire or two who’d quietly starved themselves to death because the routine got to them. Talky old bloke would probably go that way.

“It was my daughter, poor creature. She’d had it all, smarts, looks. WANTED, NEEDED to keep it. Best turn left here, I think she’s down this gully.”

“Your own daughter.”