Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

And the dummy sat up.

Tuck couldn’t see the face in the predawn light filtering into the bungalow, just a silhouette behind the mosquito netting, a shadow. And the shadow wore a captain’s hat.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking because I’ll give you six to five I do.” The accent was somewhere out of a Bowery Boys movie, and Tuck recognized the voice. He’d heard it in his head, he’d heard it in the voice of a talking bat, and he’d heard it twice from a young flyer.

“You do?”

“Yeah, you’re thinking, ‘Hey, I never wanted to find a guy in my bed, but if you got to find a guy in your bed, this is the guy I’d want it

to be,’ right?”

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“Then you shoulda taken odds, ya mook.”

“Who are you?”

The flyer threw back the mosquito netting and tossed something across the room. Tuck flinched as it landed with a thump on the floor next to him.

“Pick it up.”

Tuck could just see an object shining by his knee. He picked up what felt like a cigarette lighter.

“Read what it says,” the shadow said.

“I can’t. It’s dark.”

Tuck could see the flyer shaking his head dolefully.

“You know, I saw a guy in the war that got his head shot off about the hat line. Docs did some hammering on some stainless steel and riveted it on his noggin and saved his life, but the guy didn’t do nothing from that day forward but walk around in a circle yanking his hamster and singing just the ‘row’ part of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ They had to tape oven mitts on him to keep him from rubbing himself raw. Now, I’m not saying that the guy didn’t know how to have a good time, but he wasn’t much for conversation, if you know what I mean.”

“That was a beautiful story,” Tuck said. “Why?”

“Because the steelhead hamster-pulling ‘row’ guy was a genius compared to you. Light the fuckin’ lighter, ya mook.”

“Oh,” Tuck said and he flipped open the lighter and sparked it. By the firelight he could read the engraving: VINCENT BENNIDETTI, CAPTAIN U.S.A.F.

Tuck looked back at the flyer, who was still caged in shadow, even though the rest of the room had started to lighten. “You’re Vincent?”

The shadow gave a slight bow. “Not exactly in the flesh, but at your fuckin’ service.”

“You’re Malink’s Vincent?”

“The same. I gave the chief the original of that lighter.”

“You could have just said so. You didn’t have to be so dramatic.” Tuck was glad he was a little drunk. He didn’t feel frightened. As strange as it all was, he felt safe. This guy—this thing, this spirit—had more or less saved his life at least twice, maybe three times.

“I got responsibilities, kid, and so do you.”

“Responsibilities?” Now Tuck was frightened. It was a conditioned response.

“Yeah, so when you get up later today, don’t go storming into the doc’s office demanding the facts. Just go swimming. Cool off.”

“Go swimming?”

“Yeah, go to the far side of the reef and swim away from the direction of the village about five hundred yards. Keep an eye out for sharks outside of the reef.”

“Why?”

“A guy appears out of nowhere in the middle of the night saying all kinds of mystical shit and you ask why?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because I said so,” Vincent said.

“My dad always said that. Are you the ghost of my dad?”

The shade slapped his forehead. “Repeat after me—and don’t be getting any on you, now—one and two and three and ‘Row, row, row, row, row…’” He started to fade away with the chant.

“Wait,” Tuck said. “I need to know more than that.”

“Stay on the sly, kid. You don’t know as much as you think you do.”

“But…”

“You owe me.”

Two armed ninjas followed Tuck to the water. He watched them, looking for signs of microwave poisoning from the radar blasts, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the signs would be. Would they plump noticeably, perhaps explode without fork holes to release the inner pressure? That would be cool. Maybe they’d fall asleep on the beach and wake up a hundred times larger, yearning to do battle with Godzilla while tiny people whose words didn’t match their mouth movements scrambled in the flaming rubble be-low? (It happened all the time in Japanese movies, didn’t it?) Too good for them.

He pulled on his fins and bowed to them as he backed into the water. “May your nads shrivel like raisins,” he said with a smile.

They bowed back, more out of reflex than respect.

The far side of the reef and five hundred yards down: The ninjas were going to have a fit. He’d never gone to the ocean side of the reef. Inside was a warm clear aquamarine where you could always see the bottom and the fish seemed, if not friendly, at least not dan

gerous. But the ocean side, past the surf, was a dark cobalt blue, as deep and liquid as a clear night sky. The colorful reef fish must look like M&Ms to the hunters of the deep blue, Tuck thought. The outer edge of the reef is the candy dish of monsters.

He kicked slowly out to the reef, letting the light surge lift and drop him as he watched the multicolored links in the food chain dart around the bottom. A trigger fish, painted in tans and blues that seemed more at home in the desert, was crunching the legs off of a crab while smaller fish darted in to steal the floating crumbs. He pulled up and looked at the only visible break in the reef, a deep blue channel, and headed toward it. He’d have to go out to the ocean side and swim the five hundred yards there, otherwise the breaking surf would dash him against the coral when he tried to swim over the reef.

He put his face in the water and kicked out of the channel until the bottom disappeared, then, once past the surf line, turned and swam parallel to the reef. It was like swimming in space at the edge of a canyon. He could see the reef sloping down a hundred and fifty feet to disappear into a blue blur. He tried to keep his bearing on the reef, let his eye bounce from coral fan to anemone to nudibranch to eel, like visual stepping-stones, because to his left there was no reference, nothing but empty blue, and when he looked there he felt like a child watching for a strange face at the window, so convinced and terrified it would come that any shape, any movement, any play of light becomes a horror. He saw a flash out the side of his mask and whipped around in time to see a harmless green parrot fish munching coral. He sucked a mouthful of water into his submerged snorkel and choked.

He hovered in a dead man’s float for a full minute before he could breathe normally and start kicking his way up the reef again, this time resolved to faith. Whatever, whoever Vincent was, he had saved Tuck’s life, and he knew things. He wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to have Tuck eaten by barracudas.

Tuck ticked off his stepping-stones, trying to gauge how far he had come. He would have to go out farther to see past the rising surf and use the shore as a reference, and besides, what was above the water’s surface was irrelevant. This was a foreign world, and he was an uninvited guest.

Then another flash, but this time he fought the panic. Sunlight on something metal about thirty feet down the slope of the reef. Something waving in the surge near the flash. He rested a second,

gathered his breath, and dove, swooping down to grab the object just as he recognized what it was: a set of military dog tags on a beaded metal chain. He shot to the surface and hovered as he caught his breath and read: SOMMERS, JAMES W. James Sommers was a Presbyterian, according to the dog tag. Somehow Tuck didn’t think that a thousand-yard swim was worth finding a pair of dog tags. But there was the swath of fabric still down there. Tuck hadn’t gotten a good look at it.