Page 65 of The Bad Weather Friend

When Tanya called, “Bella,” a large white rabbit with enormous ears hopped—thump, thump, thump—out of what might have been a bath or a walk-in closet, crossing the bedroom with exuberance. The woman scooped Arabella off the floor. “Can’t hate her just because that turd loves her. She’s a bundle of joy.” She started to pass the rabbit to Harper, but hesitated. “Hold her for ransom, but don’t hurt a hair on this hare.”

“I won’t. I never would. She’s so cute.”

“If you hurt her, I’ll find you. I’ll cutyourthroat. And believe me,Iknow how.”

The rabbit twitched its nose and allowed Harper to cradle it like a baby, gazing up at her with soulful brown eyes. The long ears were soft pink on the inside, flexing left and right as if they were radar dishes seeking a signal. “She’s a giant furry marshmallow.”

“She’s strong. She can kick, but she won’t. She likes you.”

As Tanya returned to her room, Harper hurried down to the main floor, Arabella in her arms.

Benny stood on the threshold of the drawing room. He turned his head as she approached. The rabbit elicited from him a sweet smile, or maybe it was the sight of the rabbit and Harper in concert that together pleased him, even now when they were about to put their lives at risk. She liked to think it was the latter, that she, as well as a fluffy white rabbit, could brighten his spirits even with the prospect of death looming for all of them. This was an almost mawkish middle-school desire, the kind of yearning she thought she’d put behind her when she was thirteen. She had never liked bad boys; nevertheless, she was surprised to discover niceness, to the degree Benny embodied it, should have such appeal. In one evening, her heart seemed to have overruled her brain and had assigned her goal of becoming a private investigator to second place on her list of ambitions while inserting romance at the top.

Benny stepped into the room, and Harper followed close behind him. She saw Spike standing about six feet from an armchair, looking down at an entity so wattled and warted and wrinkled that it might have been a fungus of some kind, except that it was dressed in what appeared to be a Prada shirt, Giorgio Armani pants, and tasseled loafers by Salvatore Ferragamo. This was one of those individuals whose ears grew larger or became misshapenwith age, so that now they hung on the head like masses of indigestible gristle that had been coughed up by a meat-eating predator. As the ears colossalized with time, the lips seemed to have shriveled and lost much of their elasticity, so that the mouth was more like a hole, reminiscent of the end of a vacuum-cleaner hose. Under it spilled chins resembling a small stack of pancakes, each offset from the one before it. With F. Upton’s countless facial creases, his morning shave must be more difficult than grooming a Shar-Pei.

Harper remembered something her parents told her: How you live your life will earn the face you have in years to come; if you think you’re superior to others, if you can’t live and let live, if your arrogance inspires perpetual anger and resentment because others do not agree with you, then you’ll age into a face that reveals the corruption of your soul. To have earned the face he now had, Upton Theron must have been infuriated since infancy.

TO LIVE FOREVER

Although irritated by the impudence of Catspaw and his hulking friend, who appeared to be a professional wrestler from some down-market cable channel, F. Upton Theron was in a fine and fearless mood. For one thing, he controlled the situation. Having injected himself with the antitoxin, he was impervious to the nerve gas with which he would execute these foolish men after obtaining from them what information he required.

For another thing, his conviction that he would never die gave him unshakable confidence regardless of the circumstances in which he found himself. Scientific breakthroughs were occurring so often and technology was advancing so rapidly that long before he’d lived a century, he would have immortality options. A Methuselah enzyme or elixir would be discovered; the effects of aging would be reversed; life eternal would be his. Between now and then, there might be a period when he needed to be sustained by the transplantation of a pig heart and other porcine organs; the sows providing the organs had been genetically engineered to have enough human DNA so tissue rejection was not a concern and the risk of smelling like ham had been eliminated. He and others of the Better Kind had ensured that enormous government sums had been devoted to such a project. Being augmented with pig parts as needed could buy time until his brain could be transplanted into a robot body. Not enthusiastic about being a cyborg, more machine than human, some of the Better Kind wanted to explore the possibility of having their brains put into pigs, as a temporary measure to sustain them if their bodies began to fail. The size and shape of a pig skull and differences between porcine and human nervous systems presented insurmountable problems.Personally, Upton would be okay with having his brain stuffed into a healthy pig, strictly as an interim home, until human cloning was perfected, whereupon the brain of the clone could be removed and Upton’s brain installed; physically he would then be twenty with many years of good health during which to wait for the Methuselah elixir to be invented. There might be psychological problems related to having been a pig, even one that had lived in a mansion and been well cared for by servants, but if that were the case, drugs would be invented to erase those memories.

Catspaw, that insufferable nonentity with strange hair, finally stepped off the threshold and entered the drawing room.

Unable to repress a smile of triumph, Upton snatched the remote control off the seat of his armchair. He pressed the green button. Installed by Ob & Ob, two pneumatic steel panels whisked out of the doorjambs and engaged each other. Similar barriers dropped out of window headers and locked into sills.

The drawing room was now hermetically sealed. After extracting from his visitors the answers he required, when Upton pushed the red button, nerve gas would flood this space but not leak into the rest of the house. The lethal toxin had such a dramatic and prolonged effect that the demise of the intruders would be entertaining. These enemies of the Better Kind were about to discover their truths would not save them. In the world as it had become and was becoming, what were virtues had been transformed into vices, vices into virtues, and resistance to this progress was futile.

Then the woman appeared from behind the loathsome Catspaw, and for a moment Upton was frozen by enchantment, focused on her lovely face. Through the completion of his eighth decade, although not as often during the past ten years, he had enjoyed having a woman. His occasional and always short-livedrelationships were never about companionship; he had his rabbits for that. The sex was satisfying; however, he was primarily excited by waging a subtle but intense psychological war against each lover, instilling in her doubt about her worth, leading her to wonder if the best things about her were instead the worst, humiliating her while making her think she was the only agent of her humiliation. Upton taught her the new virtue of absolute tolerance. When in a few months she believed in nothing and disapproved of nothing and found purpose in nothing, when he had pulled her up by the roots from her past, he cast her out into a world unlike the one she’d been a part of before coming under his thrall, without the hope that might have made it possible for her to regain the world she’d lost. Not surprisingly, to one degree or another, these women resembled either his mother, Pelagia, or his sister, Arabella. This perky, ponytailed woman with Benjamin Catspaw looked less like Sister than others had, but she was particularly exciting because she possessed those qualities that most enfevered Upton Theron’s lust for destruction—beauty, winsomeness, grace, and innocence.

Enchantment gripped him so firmly he didn’t at once realize what she was carrying. When he saw Arabella captive in this bitch’s arms, the strobing lights of an ocular migraine squirmed through his field of vision. A high-pitched tinnitus shrilled like cicadas deep in his ears. His mouth went dry. His heart raced. His stomach turned over as if it were some sleeping animal adjusting its position, his kidneys swelled with an excess of processed root beer, and his testicles nearly retracted into his body. He was stricken by the irrational but powerful fear that eighty years of achievement had been undone, that before him stood his sister as an adult, not with her lungs filled with the water in which hedrowned her when he was ten, but his sister—the first Arabella—breathing air and holding Powderpuff, returned now that Upton was old and vulnerable. She had returned to thwart his plan to sustain his life with appropriate pig parts and robot bodies and a clone whose brain had been scooped out to make room for his own. Upton was displeased, then irritated, then angry, then enraged, then infuriated, and then filled with a godlike wrath so mighty that he wanted to rain fire and brimstone on them, shatter their bones as those inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were said to have been shattered. However, F. Upton Theron was not a god. There was no such thing as a god in his belief system. He was only the next best thing to a god, and all he could do to these intruders who would, if they could, deny him eternal life was to push the red button and deliver unto them an agonizing death by nerve gas.

A SUDDEN DEATH THAT UPENDS ALL EXPECTATIONS

As ancient as F. Upton Theron had looked, fury aged him even further. He appeared not merely like a wattled, warted, wrinkled fungoid variant of humanity, but like a fungoid variant of humanity who had also died, been preserved with the same techniques applied to the cadavers of Egyptian pharaohs, awakened after three thousand years, and stripped off his windings. He would henceforth need to wear a face mask if he wanted to get a table in a good restaurant.

When Theron saw Harper holding the rabbit, his mouth fell open in a silent howl of protest and rage. Then a geyser of obscenities erupted from him. It was such a brazen, vulgar, obscene spew that Benny felt as though he ought to bathe in a tub full of sanitizing gel as soon as possible. The old man sprang to his feet, not in an athletic fashion, but with a flapping of arms and repeated thrusting of his head that bestowed on him the grotesque aspect of a startled chicken.

On his feet, squawking curses, Theron thrust out his right arm, in which he held the remote control that had sealed off the doors and windows. If his intention might have once been to lure them into Palazzo del Coniglio and extort from them an explanation of how they had identified him as one of Benny’s organized enemies, that purpose was abandoned in his fury. He meant to press a second button on the remote and evidently either render them unconscious or dead with an infusion of a gas into the drawing room.

Spike didn’t take a threatening step toward Theron, but his arm stretched out as if he were Rubberman, the long-forgottencomic-book superhero whose limited powers were too silly to immortalize in movies. He broke the old man’s thumb and plucked the remote control from his hand. The giant’s arm shrank to its previous proportions. When he pressed the green button, the pneumatic barriers retracted into the window headers and doorjambs.

Between cries of pain, Theron expressed outrage that anything so horrendous as what had happened to him could have been allowed to transpire. “You broke my thumb! My thumb! You broke it!”

“You are correct,” Spike said.

“What were you thinking?”

“That your thumb needed to be broken.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Evidence suggests you’re incorrect.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Mr. Catspaw’s interior designer.”

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