Green-eyed and blind, the diaphanously clad girl turned from the fire as the Lord of Insidiousness entered. She nodded, smiling, as his fingers closed on a fold of silk.

Stunned, he drew back in the moonbeam that slanted perpetually through his window, clutching his bloody cheek.

“Beware the month of June,” she said, pointing to the calendar by the door, “for you, it is the month of death.” Then she was gone.

A gray cat yawned in front of the hearth and licked its lips; then it, too, was gone.

He died, always, with a look of surprise on his face, as though seeing a sunrise for the first time. Locking himself in, he decreed that all suspects were to take up residence at the front gate, where, mounted on footmen’s pikes, they were to greet visitors from the neck up. A blind crone was the first to join the newly formed hospitality committee; in the town square, a scholar was disemboweled for keeping a gray cat.

Delirious with fever, his Lordship sat in his chair and counted the twenty-eight X’s marked in his own hand beneath a grinning skull. Make that twenty-nine, he thought, gasping as he pitched forward onto the floor.
On the thirtieth day, he was summoned to dine in his own hall.

“What the hell—” he started, and then gaped at the enormous woman at the head of the table.

He guessed she weighed over five hundred pounds. As she feasted, her soiled bib swayed and heaved with the rhythm of her bosom like abstract art painted on a ship’s sail. With a cat’s reflexes she swiped a dish of mutton. Her eyes flicked up to him, barely more than green-centered slits in the doughy bulges of her circling cheeks.

“Is that you?” he asked, seating himself next to her.

“It’s closer than what you saw earlier.”

He spread his hands in the air. “What is this?”

“We’re celebrating.” She licked her thumb and forefinger clean. “A well-deserved transition into the next life or oblivion, whichever takes you. Lazy man’s suicide, I call it.”

“What are you?”

“My name’s Judith.”

In his memories of another life, two hands clapped.

“The nurse!”

“Nurse’s aide.”

“How are you here?”

“You’ll have to read my mind for that information.”

“How did you disable my Avatar?”

“By reading yours.”

“Bull.”

She shrugged. “It’s true—not all registered telepaths end up in intelligence. I consider myself a student of human nature.”

“And why do I interest you?”

“Just like a man,” she said, in a theatrical aside. She plucked up a goblet of wine, quaffed it, slammed it on the table. “Because I’m sick of making my rounds and hearing the vulgar, egocentric thoughts that buzz in your heads while you wait for the cryo folks to disconnect you and take you to the organ farm. It’s disgusting. It’s just plain selfish.”

“Say whatever you like.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?”

His eyes narrowed. He stuffed a grape in his mouth.

“I have six months left to live,” she continued, and smoothed the tablecloth on either side of her plate. “Cancer. I found out one year ago, a year to the day after my husband died of the same. Unlike him I decided to make the most of it. I took a cruise in the Mediterranean, wrote a novel, painted my house and climbed Mt. Hood. The final item on my to-do list was to talk one perfectly healthy specimen from taking advantage of the Faneuth clinics because he’s afraid of life, not death.” Her eyes darted from side to side, and she leaned in, continued: “I always hated these places. They’re like funeral homes for the not-yet-dead. It smells of two-thirds disinfectant and one-third sanctimoniousness. The doctors look like used car salesmen! And every few minutes one of you moans with pleasure, rolling in whatever flavor-of-the-month fantasy you’ve selected. Eighty percent of the patients are male, you know.”

“I’m sorry you’re dying,” he said, and popped another grape in his mouth, “but I think you’re being unfair.”

“On the contrary. I sympathize with you. I lost most of my sight in a car accident when I was twenty-five. Suicide—real suicide, the kind that hurts—entered my mind on occasion, but slashing my wrist or throwing myself off a bridge wasn’t going to solve anything. People counted on me, as they do on you. Time to be Jeremy Gray again, retired contractor.”

“I have no children,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“How do you nurse us when you’re blind?”

“My nerves were affected, not my eyes. Doctors still can’t sort it out. I see things, just differently.”

“I’ll say. And you can read—”

“That was the whim of nature. And now it’s your turn. I asked you earlier if you believed in an afterlife. Well?”

He furrowed his brow, nibbled on a fig and sat back, folding his hands on his stomach.

“I see where you’re going with this. The blind girl act wasn’t just because you really are blind, was it, any more than the fat lady you are now reflects that you’re really fat. You want me to see what you believe is a form of cowardice—namely my presence at the clinic—and you want me to witness the grotesqueness of my indulgence. Well, what I do here is my business, my intellectual property, paid for in full. You have no right to interfere.”

“There’s no privacy law concerning telepathic intrusion in a euthie clinic,” she countered, with, he thought, a note of disdain.

“It’s still my fantasy,” he said. He helped himself to a decanter of brandy.

“If only you could see it from my point of view. The lot of you, immersed in your pathetically banal cyber-castles, your atrophying bodies the flesh-and-bone equivalent of Dorian Gray’s portrait. My women patients do things: they fly jumbo jets, or walk the stage as concert pianists, or invent a mathematical formula that solves world hunger. Men are either Sir Lancelot or the Marquis de Sade. You could go to a pornjack hut for what you’re after.”

“You don’t know at all what I’m after.”

Her face, for all its pink, greasy folds, hardened. “Perhaps you don’t know the distinction between intuition and ESP, mister. I don’t need the first to read you, and I barely need the second. She did the dishes, didn’t she?”

“What?”

“And ironed your shirts.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“My husband made great pizza meatloaf. I don’t know anyone who makes a great pizza meatloaf anymore. It’s one of those things I took for granted. I was told I had no future—well, I do. Before I resign I’m going to see one of you noodle-heads checks out of this place, sinks his teeth in real beef and cheese, not this pseudo-historical fluff that belongs in some old Camelot B-movie. That is my future.

“I don’t mean to belittle what you’ve gone through,” she continued, reaching for an éclair, “but it’s always hard, isn’t it? Why, at fifty-five, should you decide it’s not worth it? And who are you to decide?”

“That,” Jeremy said, straightening with his hands on the table, “is a discussion for politicians and legislators.”

“Then let’s get back to my earlier question. Do you believe in an afterlife?”

He sighed.

“I believe in doing nothing—whether or not I’m aware of it makes no difference to me.”

A frown wrestled at her marshmallow cheeks. Still chewing on the éclair, she reached for the peach cobbler.

Ever the gentleman, the Lord of Insidiousness slid it within reach.

With all the quickness of her earlier food-snatching, she seized his wrist. Her grip dug in like a steel claw. He shot her a questioning glance. Her head looked like it was about to explode, the flesh flushed and beaded with sweat, the eyes like puckered navels, not even the whites visible through the quivering, contracted flesh around them.

“You disgust me,” she said, spraying custard.

“Why? What did I say?”

“You’re worse than lazy—you have no commitments, no beliefs. You have no reason to live.”

“You’re upset,” he said, tugging at his hand without success, “because you’re dying and have no choice. Abusing me in my own fantasy—a fantasy I paid for—isn’t going to change that.”

“You piss on the question of an afterlife.”

“It’s my right.”

“You have no rights!”

At first he thought she smiled. A mad woman's smile, yes. Then he realized it was simply her mouth spreading open. Wide. And wider.

“Let me go, Judith.” Was he really talking to an infuriated, blind telepathic nurse’s aide at his bedside?

“I sentence you to your final death in the tradition of Castle Jeremy,” she said. Not she, he realized, but the gray cat, wagging its tail at the foot of the table. It added: “I’m giving you an afterlife whether you want one or not.”

The mouth of the fat woman grew wider than the face that possessed it. The face was like a rubber band of flesh, or several all tangled in each other, stretching to make way for an enormous finger. A finger made of gums, lips, tongue and teeth. Yellow teeth. Bad breath. Hot.

Jeremy steamrolled over the plate of peach cobbler, caught in her iron grip. His last thought, as he rode up her bosom and peered into her gaping maw was: at least I’ll wake up back in my room.

The sun, a bloody jewel, was about to set. Jagged mountain peaks, drunk on the last spills of rose light, parted for its passing. God, be done with it already, thought the Lord of Insidiousness, gazing on his former lands. Then he noticed figures winding, in a sluggish, defeated fashion, across the plain.

Under the never-quite-setting-sun (she savored uncertainties) he watched them pick their way among the rocks. The ones in front wore torn, soiled garments, their hands and feet bound in chains. Behind them a number of tall, brawny figures prodded at them with spears.

Jeremy put on his most regal smile as they approached.

“Good evening, sir,” said a red-headed captive, raising a hand while he caught his breath, “we are commanded to greet someone outside the castle wall. It appears you alone are in any condition to return the courtesy.”

“Welcome to Castle Jeremy,” Jeremy croaked, his tongue dry as leather.

It looked like the aftermath of Hell Week gathered before him. Togas hung in shreds from most of the men, though a few looked dressed for a science fiction convention and one wore the uniform of a Confederate soldier. Their captors grunted occasionally in what sounded like pig squeals played backward.

“No offense, but it does not look quite welcoming,” the man said. “In fact, I wonder your master can enjoy himself in such a place at all.”

“I have not seen the inside myself in some time,” Jeremy confessed.

This brought chuckles all around, and more squeals from the captors.

“Pardon us, sir,” said the man, “we make not light of you. I should explain the situation. Each of us, it seems, was summoned to your lands. Indeed, we found ourselves in pitched battle against this band of devils for no reason we can discern. It appears we are your prisoners.”

“Castle Jeremy does not take prisoners,” Jeremy said.

“We know that, sir. That is why we laugh.”

“I am Jeremy Stormblade, Lord of Insidiousness, Haunted Warrior-Poet and Bloodthirsty Prince.”

“And I am Erik the Deep, Tormentor of Maidenhood. On my right is Gil the Elusive, and on my left is Augustus Ironthew, he of the Black Glove. The rest of this company are fine men all. I take it you are master of this estate. You do not know, then, what has brought us here?”

He wondered. Had Nurse’s Aide Judith really entered the minds of the male patients and coerced them into this morbid re-imagining of his once idyllic world—this twisted feminist satire of the Knights of the Round Table? Was this really happening? Was there a nurse’s aide named Judith, or had he invented her, hungry for antagonism in a dreamworld void of drama?

Perhaps terrorists had hacked into the Faneuth mainframe, infecting the machines with a neuro-virus like the one they’d used in Cancun. The tourists all went mad, he recalled.

“You’ll love the sunsets here,” he said.

The first ax fell.