D-Mac's Stuff

(Written by my brother, Matthew MacKenzie, and originally published in Tesseract Magazine in the early 1980s)

I have a terrible fear of plumbing. If you think this is the fear of an amateur who cannot tell a bolt from a bowl, you’re all wet. The tale I am about to relate is not some pipe dream from my untapped unconscious mind, but an actual, draining experience.

My academic background as a high school dropout, combined with the perceived necessity to outdo my brother, and established lawyer with a private practice, made me an ideal candidate for the profitable profession of plumbing, for which academic background is academic anyway. After six months of vocational training, which was rigorous enough to qualify as vacational training, I was hired by the prosperous plumbing company, Bill’s Bills.

My present fear of that profession stems from my first experience as a plumber. I had been dispatched by the controller to the residence of a Mrs. Lisa Fisher, who was reporting problems with one of her toilets. I drove to the appropriate residence in my Billmobile, and Mrs. Fisher introduced both herself and the appliance in question.

The Fisher residence was a large place, with wide rooms which could have afforded them the space to spread out in what seemed an arbitrary arrangement. Even the bathroom containing the ailing toilet was large and open, with plants guarding the view through the windows, a fan to circulate out the steamy air, and a hot tub which I looked upon with tremendous professional interest. The toilet, other than being unflushed, looked perfectly fine; there was no water splashed on the floor, no untidy bowl mess at all.

I decided to plunge right into the problem (so to speak). “Let’s see what the problem is here,” I said with professional nonchalance, pressing the lever on the toilet. Mrs. Fisher began to object in a shrill voice, but too late. The toilet erupted, just as I was at ground zero. In the aftermath I noticed that the plants would need no further watering that week. “Let’s… try another approach.”

I leaned down to inspect the systems of the tank, preparing to faucet open, but stopped with a start when I noticed two liquid eyes staring up at me from the bowl. On closer scrutiny (at greater distance), an entire face resolved. (Although I cannot remember it having ever solved the first time. Perhaps it had done so, but then dissolved, leaving no trace.) Because it was made up of a nearly transparent liquid, the fact was vague, but I could make out two dark, watery eyes and two long, combed sets of whiskers on either side of a wide, animal nose. Even with my background in plumbing, it was a wrenching sight.

“What the [BEEP] is that?” I asked Mrs. Fisher. (I have been known to spontaneously produce beeping sounds from an early age.)

“I don’t really know. It’s been appearing there off and on for the past week. As you can imagine, I refuse to use this toilet when something is watching. This is the main reason I called you in. The thing appeared this morning, and hasn’t moved since.”

“You could consult me on the matter,” said a gurgling voice from the toilet.

“OK then, what the [BEEP] are you?”

“Since you finally decide to ask, I am an otter. In fact, I am a liquid otter from Venus. You otter know these things, earthling.”

“Well, I don’t.” I turned to Mrs. Fisher and asked, “What kind of a stupid joke is this, anyway?” but she had already fainted. So I turned to the otter. “What kind of a stupid joke are you, anyway?”

“An invasion is no laughing matter, Earthling.”

I reached down and pressed the lever. In one fluid motion, the toilet went flush. The otter was still there. In one fluid motion, my face went flush.

“You, Earthling, are just asking to be shrunk. You are a nitwit.”

“I’m sorry, Venusian, I don’t shrink in the wash. And you are a drip.”

“True, technically very true. But we still plan to invade your planet. We have an especially fun fate in store for your country,” he alliterated.

“Well, since I’m dumb enough to be talking to a watery otter from Venus who showed up in a toilet bowl, I may as well be dumb enough to ask how you’re gong to invade.”

“Splendid! Wonderful, how you Earthlings always catch on to the plot lines so quickly. We will destroy your country by applying our reduction rays to your supply distribution bases. During after-hours, of course. We aren’t primitives.”

“To our what? Water you talking about?”

“Your stores, Earthling. Sears! Safeway! That sort of thing. We take great joy in using supply centers for target practice with our shrink rays. All the merchandise squeezes out the windows as they shrink.”

“So what do you do when you’ve shrunk them all? And what if we pour Draino on you? Or radioactive waste?”

“Oh, that kind of junk goes right through us Venusians. You might be able to steam a few of us, which would be a pain in the gas, but any plan by Earth to defeat Venus simply won’t hold water. Actually, though, we do have a few problems once we’ve shrunk all of a planet’s distribution centers. We often get bored and go home.”

“So then you plan to leave?”

“We shall probably have to. Many Venusians generally congregate to one planet at a time, to join in the target practice. But we quickly run out of distribution centers to reduce. Imagine hundreds of thousands of Venusians just sitting around with nothing amusing left to do. You would see a water otter, everywhere, and not a shop to shrink.”

(Written by my brother, Matthew MacKenzie, and originally published in Tesseract Magazine in the early 1980s)

Kind Tidnup scowled, in that way which is only possible while looking down at the rabble from an elevated throne. He addressed one of the pages who waited at his side: “Is that all of them for the day? We are growing tired of arbitrating arbitrary wheat disputes between the chaff of society. We just want to get all this out of the way so we can enjoy our weekend.”

The page consulted a list of audiences. “There is just one more, Sire. A Sir d’Nalor, messenger from King Cong of the North. He only arrived but a few minutes ago.”

“At least he’s the last of them. Send him in.”

A knight in chain armor clanked heavily to the base of the throne from the far end of the chamber, and knelt before the King. The messenger had obviously been traveling very hard, for he looked weary, and his armor and cloak were splattered with mud; nevertheless, his manners, at least, were intact.

King Tidnup waited a moment, savoring the authentic courtesy of a fellow noble. At last he said, “Rise, Sir d’Nalor, and speak your message.”

The knight looked up, and slowly rose. He was a tall man; the top of his head reached the level of the King’s feet. He extracted from his cape–the King’s guards around the chamber froze in menacing poses as he did so–a small, feebly buzzing, box. “The message, your highness, is contained in this box.” He held the container up.

A page hastened to take the box and, stretching, raise it up into the easy reach of the King. King Tidnup carefully opened it. At the bottom of the box, held prone by a weight, was a housefly. “Sir d’Nalor, this had better not be as idiotic as it appears.”

“The message, your highness, is attached to the legs of the insect. Had I been captured on the road, I had instructions to feed the creature to a frog, with which I was also supplied.” He reached under his cloak again, then decided that the point was not worth demonstrating.

“Of…course,” replied the King, suddenly contemplating wheat disputes in a new, more favorable light. Certainly such disputes were nothing to chaff at. He uncoiled the narrow slip of paper wound around the fly’s hind legs. A message was written on it, and at the end of the message was imprinted a miniaturized but identifiable version of the Cong Royal Seal. This might, King Tidnup considered, be serious after all. The message was an earnest and articulate plea for reinforcements to force back a minor Orc invasion form lands to the north of the North.

The King thought for a moment. “Tell King Cong–and the message can, and may just as well be, a verbal one–that we will send his miserable little domain no aid whatsoever. Countering an invasion force of the sort described should require little effort, even without our aid. You may leave, Sir d’Nalor.”

“Your highness!” The knight pleaded. “Our situation is desperate! We may temporarily lose control of our swamplands, our only source of messenger-insects!” He was on his knees again, this time looking up. “I implore you to reconsider!”

The knight was obviously serious about this matter; in talking back, he was risking his neck. But King Tidnup was adamant. “We refuse to send aid of any sort, and our reasons are sound. We do not consider King Cong’s territory to constitute a kingdom at all. In fact, we would describe it as nothing more than a fly-by-knight operation.”

(Written by my brother, Matthew MacKenzie, and originally published in Tesseract Magazine in the early 1980s)

The figure tripped on a ridge in the cobbled street, stumbled, and toppled like a sack of collard greens. A whiff of smoke issued from around Nup’s final arrow, and it thickened into a solid plume. A scream, like a dying tiger who had thought he had won the battle, the final scream of a demon vanquished filled the air, right up to the top. The demon’s body tensed, then momentarily relaxed, and it slowly began to be engulfed in flame, charred by the passage of an evil spirit back to some shadowy universe. As the heat passed over the demon’s face, its true nature was revealed; rather than the features of a second-rate medium, a horrible, green, fanged curse of a visage briefly withstood the heat of the flames, before it was consumed. The boiling smoke engulfed the creature’s form, and brief glimpses through it revealed that the demon’s clothes were deflating, until at last all that remained was a cheap cloak saturated with ash, partially charred, and resting in a heap on a black spot on the ground. One final fold, just now recognizing that it was no longer held up, collapsed limply. Then stillness.

“Commendable shot, boy!” cried the old adventurer, slapping his young archer a healthy clap on the back.

Nup lowered his bow and slung it over his back. “That’s the first time I ever finished one off, Diputs. I didn’t know they went out with such a bang.”

“Always, boy. I wanted to prove to you that it was a demon, not just a stupid fake medium like it said. I know, you know, you said you took my word for it, but you still weren’t sure, I could tell. I have to admit, the sucker was pretty well disguised.”

“I’m sure now, that’s for sure.” They approached the imploded corpse at a regular pace, but Diputs was permitted a conspicuous lead.

Nup’s voice was not as strong as he imagined an adventurer’s should be under these conditions. “Is there…any danger, now that he’s dead?”

“I keep telling you these things are dead to begin with! Got that? You can’t kill demons, because they start out that way!”

“All right, I was just saying, I mean, now that he’s banished.”

“Better. No, there’s no danger at all. And a demon’s an it, not a he or a she.” Diputs drew his sword and poked tentatively at the remains. “At least, not much…I just want to be sure it didn’t leave us any little surprises.” His sword tip knocked a charred, blackened object from the heap with a little cloud of black dust and a few floating cinders. “Pick that up, boy, and open it.”

Nup reached down and gingerly took the object from the blackened street. He brushed some of the ash off of it, and nearly opened it, but stopped. “It looks like a book. You’re sure I should open it? An incantation tome might be booby trapped.” It occurred to him too late that he was not the veteran here, and probably shouldn’t presume to be.

“Naaah. It’s just a stupid billfold. Open it.”

Bits of ash dribbled out of the edges of the wallet as it opened. Nup carefully–like a man reaching through a spider web for something–explored the pockets with his fingers. He extracted a few burnt orange discs. “What’re these?”

“You don’t know too much about demons, do you, boy. Those are carrot slices.”

“Tarot?” cried Nup, in a desperate attempt to misinterpret the statement. “Demons can predict the future?”

“I said carrot, boy. Carrot. You know, like the things you eat.”

Nup took a second to digest this information. “Why would a demon be carrying carrots around in his wallet?” A thought struck him. “Wait! I bet I know! They’re poisoned! He, I mean it, puts these in peoples’ food, to–”

“No such luck,” Diputs interrupted. “You should learn more about demons, boy, if you ever intend to become an adventurer. This was probably just our friend’s cross-Hades bus fare or something. You see, carrots are legal tender in Hell.”

“You mean–” Nup had absolutely no idea how he might have ended this sentence.

“Roots are the money of all evil.”