Home Improvement: Undead Edition

Woolsley’s Kitchen Nightmare E. E. KNIGHT

There’s a joke over in Europe that if you find yourself in America’s Upper Midwest, it’s time to switch your GPS. Any reputable routing service provider should program its devices to keep you well clear of these bleak woods and cornfields, connected by old two-lane highways linking bits of crossroad nothing.

They can’t imagine why anyone would want to be here. Bland as processed cheese, either too hot or too cold and dreary in the spring and fall. Whatever the charts say, the region’s not on anyone’s cultural map—devoid of interesting incident since the last Sioux uprising was put down during the American Civil War and populated by flannel-wearing bumpkins; they might say antipathy is the best policy . . .

Feck the snobs, I say. I’ve been there a couple of times. Few of the snobs will say that. What’s more, I look forward to returning, which none of the snobs would say, even if it were true. You may laugh, but it’s a land of quiet surprises and secret treasures. One moment you’re on a winding country road counting cows, the next you’re in a Swiss village or Cornish mining country, with Norwegian troll statues grinning at you from the roadside.

That’s just Wisconsin, perhaps my favorite of the Midwest states. It’s a rich land in its own way, sharing the stolid wisdom displayed by the locals in my own home county in Ireland, and with life in the country moving to the rhythm of the livestock and harvest. The grass is the same emerald green as well, at least until the July sun hammers the countryside into straw and clay. Maybe that’s why it always seems half-familiar to me.

Ah, Ireland. You can leave it, but it never leaves you, even if you escape. I grew up wild and woolly with nothing but ravens and barn rats for friends, sneaking from one paddock to the next and scrounging from bins and feed sheds. I left the Auld Sod with a caravan of translife first chance I got. Quite an eye-opener, that, learning there were others not unlike me, full of anxiety and appetite. Because I was the new guy they dumped the worst duty on me: food prep and disposal. Of course the weres and the troupe’s leader, a one-eyed vamp named Jack who taught me the Discreet Art of Wandering Translife, had all the fun of procuring the food. Once the blood was drained and the excitement of sticky red died down, I took over and turned the meats and vitals into road cuisine that would see everyone through to the next carefully chosen kill.

Then on my night rides I’d get rid of the bits of evidence that weren’t reduced to sauces and stock.

That was how I found out I had a knack for cooking—a gift, even, as the others styled it. Dear old One-Eyed Jack plunked down the cash for my first translife eatery in Paris and handed over the deed. It was a dying bistro beneath an old nunnery when he bought it.

Two holes and a corner, it was, connected to the vast Paris sewers and a smuggler’s tunnel on the Seine that dated back to Napoleon’s Continental System. I put in twenty-two-hour days for a year and made a go of it. Word got out and I opened a second in Prague—my first and only instant success. I did a true restaurant in New Orleans, following with Shanghai, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and finally my crown jewel, Nippers, in London, not far from Jack the Ripper’s old kills. I did well in that very competitive market. The Secret Eyes, who pretty much run things in the translife world, put my London staff on retainer, doing the catering for their seasonals. That took me and my team all over the world, since the Secret Eyes never meet in the same city twice in the traditional human life span of three-score-and-ten. “Everyone served anywhere” went on my business cards.

But arse-over, such public recognition made me some enemies. Rivals in the translife foodie world got my place in Prague shut down. You’d think even white-hot jealousy wouldn’t make any of us night folk do a deal with the Templars, but that was just what happened. Someone sent a note or an e-mail and three promising caterers on my team there saw their last night. The Templars dispatched and exorcised them in the prime of translife. What could happen in Prague could happen in Paris and Shanghai and so on, so I sold off my catering empire.

Tragedy, right? Worst year of my life? Not a bit of it. I’m a born wanderer, I’m happy to say, always kicking on for a new horizon. I needed to earn money so I went into consulting—you go through a lot of cash as a translife, between covering your tracks and bribing the local constabulary. So now I advise other would-be or troubled restaurateurs in the translife catering trade. I like going somewhere with fresh faces, fresh preferences, fresh customs, and fresh victims. Fresh horses, too, for a good, sweaty night ride, since most translife eateries keep out of the cities for safety’s sake.

So, the call came to go to Wisconsin in the early summer, in the southwest corner on the bluffs overlooking that big, winding river through the heart of North America. Beer and dairy farm country, smelling of hot asphalt, manure, and crabapple trees. Sounded like a challenge; that bit of the world’s almost off the translife grid, culturally and logistically. I had to wonder who’d be mad enough to try to cater to translife in the middle of a teat-pulling human nowhere.

A madman or a visionary, I guessed. I drew up a mental sketch of a discerning vampire retiring from hectic urban life, or an old banshee reconnecting with her childhood roots. As usual in matters unrelated to food, I was wrong.

THE SECLUDED SKYLINE Restaurant had a promising enough setting for catering to translife appetites. From the outside, not even visible from any highway, it didn’t look like anything much—just another distressed barn in a part of the country full of them.

I had to follow the verbal directions given by the owner, as the little farm access road leading to the Skyline didn’t appear on any database. The road had cheap, mass-produced red-and-white NO TRESPASSING and NO HUNTING signs, with a BEWARE OF DOG as you came to the flat ground surrounding the barn. I pulled up in my rental van—in this business you never know what you might have to run out and acquire at the last minute, and a van is perfect for discreet haulage—and decided I liked the look of the place. The barn was green rather than the more usual reds or whites, with a pinkish-white roof. Lonely, windy, remote. Cold as Jadis’s tit in January, certainly, but on a deliciously firelit Beltane . . .

A walkaround reaffirmed my positive first impression. The building was shabby-looking and plain from a distance, but up close I could see that it had been largely rebuilt in the past ten years or so. One might wonder why a barn had a superb view from high on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi Valley, perhaps halfway between La Crosse and Dubuque, or well-kept gravel paths leading into an abandoned quarry, or a small planted trellis over the stairs leading down into the former pigpens. Someone really curious might venture around to the valley-facing side and wonder at all the windows and the little patio around brick fire pits.

But I’d have to enter to find out if this place passed my most important criteria.

First, security. If I don’t think a location is safe, or run with the wellbeing of its translife clientele in mind, I won’t touch it, no matter what the fee. Location, location, location, as the real estate fleshies say. I’m a hungry Irish night-rider, not a wizard; I can’t do anything about location.

Second, staff. Staff can sometimes make me walk right out the door within an hour of entering, if I think there’s absolutely nothing that can be done with them. I looked forward to meeting them, starting with the owner.

The Skyline’s owner, Mason Mastiff, came out to greet me, looking flushed and out of breath. He walked with short steps and crackled with a touch of other worlds about him, but he was as human as any of the dairy drivers whose rigs I’d been caught behind on the drive over from Madison. A wig cut to resemble the youthful, carefully crafted parted-on-the-left hair of a politician rested on his head, as out of place as a napping dove. I’ve always found wigs on men a little unsettling. Or maybe it’s the kind of men who wear wigs that I find strange. I should have trusted my instincts that Mason Mastiff would be arse-over trouble. Staring, suspicious eyes, vaguely mad and dangerous like Rasputin or an Old West gunfighter thirsty for blood and whiskey, blazed out of a fleshy, pale face.

“Chef Woolsley, I apprehend,” he said. His high-pitched voice rang out across the hills. He peeked over my shoulder into the van, perhaps wondering if a more impressive figure was waiting to be introduced.

I don’t look like much in the day, I’ll grant. My arms are out of proportion to my body and I’m a bit bowlegged. Haggard and limp when I’m not riding. I usually tell humans I’m between chemotherapies. Once the moon is up I’m not much better, but my hair comes alive and I’m hungry for fun.

Mastiff wore a brilliant azure smoking jacket and neat twill trousers that made him look as though he should be leading a marching band in a salute to John Philip Sousa. A cravat with a little golden skull stickpin at his throat screamed trouble.

I mean it literally. The feckin’ thing was enchanted.

“Welcome, monsieur, set yourself down,” it sang out.

Strike the enchanted, probably possessed.

“Quiet, Hellzapoppin,” Mastiff said. “Business, not a customer. Have trouble finding the place, Woolsley?”

We exchanged politenesses. As we toured his grounds, Mastiff told me a little about his background. He’d started out as a restaurant writer and critic, or at least that was his dream. Strictly for human consumption back then. There was too much competition for the big names and the Michelin-guide stuff, so he started to specialize in dive eateries, bohemian cafés, and theaters where you could get a bit of performance art with your canapés and coffee.

“I was killing an hour with a custom appliance installer in a little Seattle bistro, asking him about odd little places he’d seen. The dear man had had a few tales to tell and told me about a place he’d done when he lived in San Francisco. Not in the city, mind you, out in the wine country. There were some cages behind the kitchen and a special table that looked like something out of an episode of CSI. He figured it was some kinky sex establishment.

“I smelled a unique story there, and dredged up every piece of information I could about it. I tracked it down and tried to get in. No luck, private club, membership card only, that sort of story. No record of it with the health department, no advertising. So I started watching the clientele going in and out, always in late at night, always out again well before dawn or leaving in a well-tinted limo the next day from a lightless garage. I managed to meet the owner and talked him into letting me work there.”

He nudged some cold embers back into one of the fire pits with a polished dress shoe. The skull pin broke into the dwarf “Whistle While You Work,” but quietly.

“I met my first translife there. From then on, I was hooked. So many legends, so much human history, quietly filling forgotten corners, unrecognized.”

“We like it that way,” I said.

“At first, I thought I had a food exposé that would win me a Pulitzer, but I found the customers were more interesting than the story—and the money! The money, my dear Woolsley. I learned everything I could about the business and found this place. Sunk my life savings into it, but the game hasn’t gone my way. Hoped you’d tell me where I’ve gone wrong, dear fellow.”

“Let’s take a look inside,” I suggested.

Third, décor. An easyish fix most of the time. We walked in through the front door. If Mastiff’s own eyes couldn’t tell him where he’d gone wrong, nothing short of a burning bush on a Sinai mountaintop could.

As soon as I saw his interior I decided this would be an easy job. All I needed was to find a couple of crowbars and a flamethrower.

The barn’s interior was architecturally interesting, inspiring even, with the high, thick-timbered ceiling and small loft at one end, currently occupied by the bar. Big, airy, yet intimate in the way all those beams ate up the sound. Most translife don’t care for noise and clamor. The tall windows facing the Mississippi gave a beautiful show of a green-and-blue river valley, vaster than the Grand Canyon and very nearly as deep, with the Minnesota bluffs a blue smear on the horizon.

There were definite possibilities in the way you looked down into the kitchen. He’d opened up the barn floor so you could see into a bit of the cooking line setup in the old pigpens. He’d set up sort of an open-air dumbwaiter. Above the big kitchen hatch hung what I first thought was an art piece. Some chains and a big platform featuring a surgeon’s table not unlike the one used to animate Dr. Frankenstein’s go at creation gave me all kinds of ideas for culinary showmanship.

However, as we toured the inside, I felt like putting on welding goggles to keep out the ugly. All that sturdy beauty to work with, and Mastiff decided to cover it up with garish flourishes.

Mastiff had ruined with décor what should have been won with space and view. Ghastly brass and fern fixtures that managed to combine the worst excesses of the late seventies and early eighties clustered here and there on the barn floor like scattered dog turds. Pointless plaster mini-Greek columns stood next to vintage washtubs and gas-station Coca-Cola machines, and a Tesla coil buzzing here and there. Imagine Castle of Dr. Frankenstein meets bricky urban loft meets postindustrial rave.

Curtains and linens in purple and black and pink with flecks of red with billowing gauzy cotton hung in festoons from the ceiling, trying to look ethereal but succeeding only in adding to the tatty feel and hiding the interesting details in the ceiling. Pointing out his acquisitions with one arm while the other remained anchored across the small of his back in a ducal pose, Mastiff prattled on, gassing about where he’d obtained the fabric and how much time it had taken to get the draping just right.

Small spotlights on conduit riggings suspended ten meters below that lovely wooden ceiling lit fabric, floor, and tables haphazardly, ruining the rustic effect.

He led me up the stairs to the loft-bar. There, old polymer countertops in dreadful puddle shapes, everything rounded and looking like tongues, lapped around too-thin high-backed chairs with pointed, stamped metal moons crowning the backrest. The chairs seemed eager to do someone an injury.

He led me to the railing overlooking the dining floor.

“We put musical guests on the rising platform,” Mastiff said, pointing to the central Dr. Frankenstein rig on its chains. He gripped the rail like an admiral surveying his battleship from the bridge in a storm. “Or go-go dancers on singles’ night. I know an absolutely brilliant troupe from the Twin Cities, two succubi and a harpy—”

“In short there’s simply not, a more congenial spot . . .” sang the golden stickpin. Clearly the spirit inside was blind, deaf, and mad.

I only half-listened as it sang on. Singles’ night! Arse-over, I was trapped in an eighties grease-and-grind meat market. All that was missing was a backlit sign featuring two Regency silhouettes and a name like Snugglers .

The crowning insult to the eye was the centerpieces on every table in the bar: lolling skulls with bloodred wax candles atop, dribbling down on both skull and tabletop. I leaned over to get a better look.

Arse-over. “Is someone filming a metal video tonight?” I asked.

“Tee-hee, dearie,” Mastiff said, losing a little of his lordship’s air.

This sort of excess had been popular for about ten minutes in some London and New York and L.A. clubs two decades back, a mixture of an old Universal horror set and furniture shaped like various pieces of the human digestive system. It lingered now only in Tokyo, where the Japanese translife put their own twist on it by adding enough neon to represent the Human Genome Project and pumping up the technopop.

It stuck out in the rolling hills of the Mississippi River Valley like high heels on a cow.

He’d sent me his numbers. Unless his accountant was as cluelessly skeevy as his decorator, a few customers were still braving the fugly to eat here every week. Perhaps the service staff and food would be the Skyline’s salvation.

“I’ll want to watch a service tonight,” I said. “And we’ll still need to see the kitchens.”

Last, food. It can be an easy fix, or it can be like tunneling in wet sand. All depends on the staff and owner. Mastiff took me downstairs into the old pigpens. His kitchen crew was already at work.

A golem ran the kitchen with the help of two zombies.

My heart sank.

If there’s anywhere you don’t want a golem, it’s managing a kitchen. As for zombies, they have their uses, but not where food’s being prepared. You don’t want earlobes sloughing off into the mustard.

Mason Mastiff was inordinately proud of his golem and the great expense a Jewish Kabbalist in Marseilles had charged to create it. To his mind, with a golem all the cost was up front. It worked for free from then on, often for decades, without needing much more wizardry, barring accidents. I suppose it looked impressive enough, this mountain of copper and tin, ladles, skewers, pans, and tongs. A pair of blue butane lights serving as eyes regarded me across a slab of stainless steel.

Look on the bright side, Woolsley, I told myself. At least there wasn’t the usual suspicion when I was introduced to the chef of a troubled kitchen.

“Let’s see it make me an omelet,” I said.

Mastiff stuck his tongue in his cheek in thought. “You’re serious?”

“It’s supposed to cook. I didn’t ask it to fart out the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”

“Chef Cuivre, an omelet if you please.”

The golem clanked into motion. A nine-inch pan clicked out of its forearm and the mountain of cookware and utensils turned to the stove.

“Butter. Eggs,” it said. It took me a moment to realize it was talking to the zombies.

They stood there in their hairnets, stupidly, faces even more green when contrasted with the kitchen whites. They wore baseball caps advertising what were local radio stations, I assumed.

“Buck! Tooth! You heard the chef,” Mastiff said. “Sorry, everyone is used to orders being printed out on a ticket.”

“Is that the problem?” I said.

Thanks to dropped eggs and butterfingers, my two-egg omelet took five from the fridge. Why do Americans insist on refrigerated eggs?

The golem extruded a silicone spatula and went to work on the beaten eggs. It worked well enough, but moved with such deliberate, noisy concentration I wondered what would have happened if I’d asked for bacon, fried tomatoes, and toast to go with it.

It did cook the omelet perfectly, going by my eye and nose. Taste would tell . . .

Then one of the zombies picked it up with a black-nailed finger and set it on a plate.

“Bollocks,” I said, and Mastiff fled back upstairs.

The sight of that put me off eating. I watched the kitchen activity for as long as I could stand it. After seeing his kitchen staff doing their prep work, I was afraid to use the toilets for fear of what I might find floating in the bog. I returned upstairs.

“What did you think of the kitchen, then?” Mastiff asked, resetting a dripping candle atop a skull.

Maybe meeting some of the front staff would lift the growing sense of doom. “I’m trying not to. Do you have a hostess?”

“I take care of that, dear Woolsley,” he said, his hand disappearing behind his back again. An operatic gesture toward the little stand by the door next to a case of cuisine trophies (I later examined them and found out they were all antiques from other restaurants) showed a little lectern on a podium so he could greet his guests from an intimidating height. “I like to attend each customer and tell them about the specials. One should treat each customer as an individual, no? Noblesse oblige.”

Maybe that was the source of his mania for this place. He ran on fear. By serving translife, he was empowering himself over them.

The rest of the staff arrived. A bent, aged vampire named Ravelston served as the headwaiter. And the only waiter, considering how slow business was at the moment. He worked with the aid of two polished, animated skeletons. That I approved of. They looked clean and worked quickly, sounding like rolling dice as they worked.

I took a liking to Ravelston. He had grandfatherly wrinkles all about the eyes and smelled of lime talcum powder and extra-strength breath mints. “How ARE you, sir?” he said in a deep Southern accent upon being introduced. He had an interesting habit of both emphasizing and drawing out his verbs. “I HAVE heard about you. We ARE so PLEASED you made the trip. IS that an Irish accent I detect?”

We chatted a bit about my home county. He knew Dublin and Cork but didn’t lecture. He did make one feel special, as though you made his day by simply walking through the door.

Still, he seemed willing to talk until the restaurant opened, leaving the skeletons idling like waiting cabs. I broke away from him and found Mastiff in his office, checking an Internet news site.

“Why in God’s country are you using zombies, Mastiff?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Well, they’re reliable, my dear. They never leave the premises, as a matter of fact. So they work as a security system as well, if you think about it.”

“And they’re cheap,” I said.

“Well, yes. I am running a business.”

“Into the ground. Look, I see the strategy, but sometimes, with zombies and animated skeletons and all that, it hurts you in day-to-day tactics. You lose all ability to have staff that thinks on its feet. Reacts to new situations.”

“You haven’t met my bartender yet. She’s sharp as a spinning slicer, my dear. She doesn’t come in until just before opening. Besides, now you’re here. You’ll get things put right, won’t you? I’m entirely at your disposal, my dear.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” I said.

“Consider yourself at home!” sang the golden skull as we shook.

I gave myself an unreality check. I’d taken a dislike to Mason Mastiff and his restaurant. Could I give fair value in consulting to a man I despised?

Perhaps it was his human nature. I like humans—especially served seared and roasted with butter and an herb crust of rosemary, sage, garlic, and parsley—and usually have little difficulty dealing with them. Mastiff rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps it was his eagerness to court the translife world. I’d take a Templar, even a Black Templar, over a human who was so eager to profit on the preparation and consumption of his fellows. Since the soulrift, it’s been them and us, or them versus us I should say, alternating roles as hunter and prey for millennia. This recent mixing of life and translife—put me down as Not a Fan. It won’t end well. The farmer and the cowman won’t be friends, as that demented little stickpin might put it. I can guarantee that each little story and encounter is being transcribed for the Templar archives. They’re paying attention. Organized. We in the translife world spend too much time in a navel-gazing funk, or jealous of the fleshies and their daisy-chain lives.

Everyone served anywhere. Wisconsin was an anywhere and Mason Mastiff an everyone. Luckily for the world, everyone didn’t wear a goldbraided smoking jacket and strut around a barn like Mussolini with three feet of PVC up his arse, thinking the world’s ugliest dining room was some kind of tribute to Christo and H. R. Giger.

THE SERVICE THAT night, such as it was, depressed me. Few customers ordering fewer entrées. I tried a bit of the cuisine. A medical school lab equipped with a microwave and a salt shaker could have come up with a tastier dinner. The specials were an Unattended Death paella—an old lady and her cat, by the look of the kitchen bin—and Quad Cities suicide scramble.

Ravelston, the vampire waiter, spent more time talking to his friends among the clientele than shuttling food and drink. While I admired the gentlemanly charm and the smattering of knowledge and interesting anecdotes he could summon up on almost any subject, each involved him planting his feet at the edge of the table for ten minutes. The original thirdwheel waiter.

Mastiff was serving emergency room food at private clinic prices. Twat.

Most of the clientele sat in the bar, chatting with each other or the barmaid. A pair of werewolves in purple Vikings jerseys hooted at the television.

Traffic died early in the bar. Strange for a place catering to translife, but then, it was a long drive back to any of the cities.

The barmaid was the one bright spot in the whole front of the house.

She was clearly out of the Eastern heritage of translife. Young, beautiful, pale green skin, and wide red lips. She had six arms and a graceful walk, gliding behind the bar from bottle to tap while wiping, placing coasters, and picking up money. I guessed she was a Devi.

“How did you manage to make it to the West?” I asked her.

“Mastiff petitioned the Secret Eyes,” she said.

“That must have taken some doing.”

“He never fails to remind me of that,” she said, a red-green smile traveling across her face as if it were in a hurry to get elsewhere.

“What’s your name?”

“Call me Megha.”

“Devi?”

She gave me that brilliant smile. “I didn’t sew these arms on.”

“How do you like Wisconsin?” I asked.

She gave a matched set of shrugs. “It’s pretty. The air and water are wonderful. No pollution. You can’t imagine how bad India is with the exhaust these days.”

“Like bartending?”

“I’ve always been a listener, and I’m proud to say the bar never gets behind.” She checked the screen on her electronic assistant, opened a fresh jar of olives, and replaced the ice scoop. “Our patron, he’s something of an old letch. Those wigs should come with goat ears. I think he brought me over because he liked the idea of a girl who could rub his prostate, give him a reach-around, and fill out his taxes all at the same time. But I get tired of the bar. He wants a glamour girl here.”

She reached up with two of her arms and adjusted her fleshy breasts in their dressy bustier. “Regardless of what you’ve heard about minor Devi girls, we don’t all go for the stage makeup and jewels. Doing six sets of fingernails three times a week is tiresome. What’s a human life span again?”

“I give Mastiff three more decades, at best.”

“Vishnu’s discus,” she said. “These last two years have felt like ten. I don’t suppose you have American citizenship through the Secret Eyes.”

“Not even a green card,” I said.

THE PLACE HAD possibilities, no question. But at the moment, Mason Mastiff was playing checkers with some very expensive chess pieces, moving his queen like a pawn while his bishops sat back tossing off.

“This weekend will be better,” Mastiff insisted, as we talked over the dismal dinner service. “I’ve something special to celebrate the rebirth of the Skyline.” Mastiff let out a titter.

I HAD TO ride and think this through.

In all my travels I’ve yet to find a perfume sweeter than horse lather, and, given my nature, I doubt I ever will.

I found a small farmette surrounded by promising, moonlit fields. Their stable, under a buzzing incandescent floodlight coated in spiderwebs, didn’t even have a lock. Inside a chestnut mare dozed.

Her ears pricked up as I touched her nose. In Wales and Ireland the legends say that the horses fear us; that’s why they run so hard while we’re astride. The truth is our scent excites them as much as their sweat pleases us.

I led her out, grasped two handfuls of thick mane, and swung up onto the beast’s back. Muscles quivered between my thighs as I removed the tight restraining tie from my hair. I kicked her on. The mare galloped off into the night, accepted the challenge of the three-rail fence, and we were in the dark, free and away at last.

The pounding hooves soothed me and the fresh night air cleared my head, even if it came at the price of a swallowed bug or two. I’d return the mare, sweaty and trembling, by morning. A steamy mystery for whoever came first into the barn. For now, I’d give her the ride of her life.

THE NEXT MORNING I forced Mastiff to show me his surprise for the weekend.

I found him in his office. Megha had arrived early, or perhaps had never left, and was sorting bills into three piles: Delay, Delay Some More, and Final Notice.

“You’ve been hinting at some special cuisine for this weekend. I was hoping for some input on preparation,” I said.

He winked and took me down to the kitchen. The zombies were taking turns working the mop back and forth—Buck would hand it to Tooth, who’d wring it out and hand it back to Buck, who’d wring it again and pass it back, without mop head coming into contact with the floor—as the golem slumbered in a corner, gently ticking and shifting like a refuse pile with a rat exploring within.

We passed through what served as an office and into the old dairy storage tank room. He’d converted the two tanks into cells, after a fashion, by installing reinforcing-rod grills over the cleaning hatches.

A white-painted dungeon. It smelled faintly of bleach and mice.

“Only one’s occupied. Take a look.”

“HELP ME! OH GOD, HELP MEEE!” a voice pleaded from within.

I hazarded a look. An attractive, tan, college-age human with bruises up and down her forearms and fists shot toward the hatch like an electrified cat.

“Help . . . out . . . please,” she burbled.

It came to me. I’d seen the face on the airport news. The Stensgaard disappearance. The girl had vanished from the U.S. Virgin Islands while on spring break from her college in Syracuse.

She fit the profile for a missing woman the cable media would obsess over: upper middle class, attractive, a white girl-next-door with just enough body to warrant a second look—perhaps a third if she was in her swimsuit.

“Oh, this one was expensive,” Mastiff said. “Very expensive indeed.”

Idiot. He’d probably paid two or three hundred dollars a pound, plus finder’s fees. He could have snatched a local Iowa high-school dropout for a tenth of that price.

Beyond cost, there was the danger that always came with a big media case. If word got out, it wouldn’t be just a quiet little Templar raid—they’d call in Shaolin monks and Aborigine animist spirit men. One of the rules of the long war since the rift was to keep humanity only vaguely aware of the translife world. Rouse the superstitious, ignorant masses and you get inquisitions and jihads and pogroms that hurt both sides.

“This guy’s crazy, you’ve got to listen!” she cried, white fingers gripping the bars.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I told her, storming out of the storage room.

We returned to the office and I asked Megha to give us a moment.

“Are you mad? A big media kidnapping victim?” I asked.

“I thought it would create a buzz. I was in Europe last fall for the yearly declarations of the Secret Eyes, and no one had even heard of the Skyline.”

“You’re not just playing with your own safety, it’s everyone who works for you. Me, too, while I’m here.”

“Oh, come come, my dear. What’s she going to do, chew through wrought iron or riveted tanks built to hold a thousand gallons of milk? Once she’s on the table and surrounded by parsnips, your worries will be over—and at the plate cost I’m charging, I’ll have a chance to put this month in the black.”

“You’re straining at a camel and can’t even swallow a fly, Mastiff. You’ve got a six-armed demon on payroll who isn’t being used to near her capacity, pouring with one hand, working her cell with another, and picking her bum with the other four.”

“I will admit Megha’s been a disappointment. Cold fish, my dear.”

“Arse-over, more like. Quit looking at the two really great tits and think about those six arms and the creativity in the brain behind, right? You should put her in the kitchen, instead of that slow-motion junkyard.”

“Then I’d have to find another bartender. I’d rather spend what cash I have left for a dazzling display of fresh food. That’ll get them over from Europe.”

Last person to try to blow this much smoke up my ass was a loquacious demon in San Juan.

“Fresh food! You’re taking the piss, aren’t you? Serving up one truly high-end dish surrounded by lashings of garbage that would choke a hellhound. Customers know a dodge when they see one. You’re from here, Mason, yet your mindset’s with those knobs in Marseilles and Prague who won’t see beyond the tip of their cardamom-dusted noses. Your locals deserve better. Let’s start with giving them your respect, right?”

“The locals! Depressed St. Louis vampires and Minneapolis ghouls. That’s not why I went into this business.”

Well, so Wisconsin grows a few snobs, too. Interesting. Still, I had to talk sense into him, or at least try.

“Forget about the fancy, high-concept menu items. You have great local sourcing, if you just think about it. In the summer, there’s enough prospects on the waterways to keep three translife restaurants going. Drunken ski-boaters, sclerotic fishermen, college girls looking for a secluded stretch of beach where they can take their tops off without getting leered at, backpackers. In the fall, you have hunting season. Talk about a buffet! There are hundreds of different ways a couple of beered-up rednecks hunting out of their camouflage-painted truck might disappear. In the winter, just snatch someone off their snowmobile and then sink it in one of the lakes, or wait for a storm and go knocking on isolated ice-shack doors. In the spring, you have teens jaunting off into the woods for the first outdoor shag of the season. And all the bird-watchers. Bird-watchers are hardly ever missed by anyone.”

“Have you ever eaten one of these good-ol’-boy deer hunters? They wouldn’t be caught serving one of them in Paris.”

“Listen, Mastiff, in Paris I could get twenty servings out of a fat old Normandy fisherman, skin salt-tanned right into a boot heel. Twenty servings at three hundred a diner, maybe thirty euros to find and haul him.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s in the cooking, mate, it’s not the quality of the cut. Your infatuation with college girls—Pilates classes and whole-wheat biscuits don’t give you much flesh or any marbling. Your average Wisconsin plumber makes better grilling. Give me a braising pan and I’ll make the most leathery old stream fisherman taste like sea turtle. 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.”

“We lost my wife early on, so it was just the two of us. I think the possibility she wouldn’t have to outlive me got in her head. She’d been away years, just a postcard here and there from various spots in Mexico or Rio. Then she came back. I SHOULD have known something was odd about her, years traipsing around Puerto Vallarta and the Caribbean, but pale as moonlight. Still, who wouldn’t hug their daughter even if there was rather too much white about the pupils.”

“How did she get into it?”

“Some young hotshot. Hardly KNEW the art himself, and here he was building a posse. That’s what he called my daughter. Part of his posse. Nothing so dignified as bride, or mate, or with the implied responsibility of sister. She was in his posse. The world and its young hotshots. Those are just the kind of customers Mason wishes to cultivate. As if they are going to be touring the Mississippi Valley, antiquing for old farm implements and rare beer bottles.”

“What ever happened to her?”

“The Templars, I think. She called me, once, said some men were after her and I MUST move and change my name. She loved the game, the game she called it, and played it risky. Just here—I can hear panting from those trees.”

I thought about asking if she’d ever tried his tweed suit, but even the horses I exhaust don’t deserve that much cruelty. In any case, we were almost on top of Lisa Stensgaard.

“Shall you take care of her, or shall I?” I asked.

“Must we?” Ravelston asked. He stared at the copse of hillside poplars. I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the horse stomping, but his instincts were intact with the night at its zenith.

“It’s that, or the Templars will be burning you all out by noon the day after tomorrow.”

“Perhaps—Oh, I suppose you’re right. She’s just about the age of my daughter. Funny how the bits of human existence linger on. Like a nursery rhyme from childhood.”

“Along came a spider,” I muttered.

Wait a tick—

“Come out, my dear,” Ravelston said. “I’ll make it quick, and I GUARANTEE it’s pain free and rather pleasant. I went through it myself not so many years ago, you see.”

“No. Let me go, please. Please!” she said, stepping from the copse. Her legs were scratched by thorns, and they shook.

“Lisa,” I called. “Lisa, I know you didn’t ask for this. You didn’t ask for anything but a holiday in the sun. The only thing you did was talk to the wrong guy in a bar, I suppose. Bad break for you. But I think I can give you a choice. You can just accept that you’re a casualty of an ancient battle, or you can help us out. Maybe even get revenge against the man who imprisoned you in that tank.”

“Is this a trick?” she asked.

“More of a treat,” I said. “For us, at least.”

A WEEK LATER the Skyline had been cleaned of the dreadful décor and refurnished with some simple Arts and Crafts chairs and tables Ravelston had found at an Amish furniture roadside shop. A new bar was on order.

Megha, working the kitchen, had the zombies in thick rubber gloves and surgical suits washing dishes and polishing glassware. The golem was chopping vegetables, working methodically from the bins.

I’d loaned her a substantial sum to pay off the Skyline’s debts. She’d proven herself an eager pupil and looked forward to her new role as chef.

The relaunch was a stunning success. Not a soul recognized pale, newly dyed-and-shorn Lisa Stensgaard as the new waitress. A delicate black choker hid the healing bite marks in her neck, and her nice eyes and cheekbones drew attention upward in any case.

Ravelston was behind the bar, pouring out aquavit—a local favorite—and anecdotes.

The menu, designed by me and executed by Megha, was a success. The special tonight was a juicehead fricassee in a New Ulm winery sauce. Some drunken college jocks had overturned their canoe on the Wisconsin River—with a bit of a nudge from Buck—and the police had managed to dredge up only one of the victims.

Even Charles Lasseur was impressed. I issued an invitation for a revisit personally, and he’d called Megha to his table to compliment her on the second-string Badger linebacker. “You’ve brought expertise back to fine dining here in the Midwest. I expect you’ll find a grateful and loyal clientele,” he said.

“Thank you,” we said in unison.

“I look forward to trying you again tomorrow. Can I assume the new management has a fresh surprise to delight the tooth?”

“You can count on it. As our guest, of course,” Megha said.

Megha knew how to stay on the old ghoul’s good side. Counting her tongue, she was making at least four obscene gestures. Five if the lascivious wink was included.

Lasseur’s lips had long since shriveled and pulled away from his gumline, but he licked where they’d once been. “Give me a hint?”

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, tomorrow night we’re serving the old management.”