Greegs & Ladders (24 page)

“But let me
guess,” I said, “there is yet another horrendous task before I find
the Beard, something much worse than either the crossing of the
lake or the blind navigation of the Swampy Maze?”

“You will
see.”

“And it
involves these Garbage-Demons?”

“You will
see.”

I noticed he
began to look in a bad state. He was green, frothing, swooning.
Nothing at all like the vigorous healthy life-form who had
approached me a few minutes ago.

“What's
wrong?” I asked.

“I think the
atmosphere is finally starting to get to me. I've been waiting for
you on Garbotron for a few months now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't be!
Getting this book signed was the greatest moment of my life!”

“Oh...sorry
again.”

Suddenly the
crazed fan dropped to the ground. It was clear he was choking as a
result of the toxic atmosphere.

“Pleh!” I
yelled.

That uselessly
dismissive non-sequitur was as reactive as I got at the moment.
Before I could move, the foul stench of Garbotron gave Wendell a
series of fatal lung implosions. The stranger now belonged to the
very waste-heaps he had tirelessly worked on naming and making
signs for. The planet Garbotron is a living collector of all that
is foul, or rather of all that goes near.

I searched the
fan's backpack. He was carrying no provisions aside from my
collected works. He had been lugging around all my earth novels in
mint shape first-edition hardcovers. I left the books among the
garbage, not because I felt they belonged there, even though some
of them did, but I thought they might one day provide future
entertainment for an unfortunate soul stranded on Garbotron.

How to Barely
Succeed on the Worst World Ever

When I
reached the
Lake of Liquids
I understood why Wendell warned me not to touch the
surface. The tar-like thickness of the black substance would
envelop and devour any who came into contact, immortal or not. Once
you go over your head there is no possible chance of resurfacing.
The lake was even more threatening to someone of immortal status,
for to remain forever alive while trapped in the lake is a far
worse fate than drowning. This is something I would see
first-hand.

I was made
nervous when I spotted the apparently sea-worthy canoe. It was a
haggard bird's nest of a boat, crudely thrown together with
whatever random pieces of garbage had been lingering about. Much
rusted twine and wire (care of the defunct Balahog Twine and Wire
corporation who'd had their entire derelict factory jettisoned to
Garbotron) was what held all the bits of debris together.

I slowly
paddled across the gloppy monstrosity of a lake. This evil stuff
made schmold seem like fresh-squeezed, ice-cold lemonade served on
a hot summer day by a waitress who shows just the right amount of
cleavage to garner a decent tip without coming across as desperate
or slutty.

Suddenly there
was a halting thud as if the canoe had bumped into a rock.

“Hey, watch
it!” shouted a voice.

“Who's there?”
I asked.

“Bob.”

“Who's
Bob?”

“Me.”

I looked over
the side of the canoe and saw just a person's head sticking up from
the lake's surface.

“What are you
doing in there?” I asked.

“Obviously I
fell in and got stuck. What kind of stupid question is that? One
just doesn't go for a swim and lounge about in probably the worst
substance imaginable.”

“Sorry.”

“You're lucky
I can't use my arms or I'd tip your canoe over.”

I paddled a
few feet away from Bob just to make sure.

“You'd be dead
as soon as the lake began its assimilation of your bloodstream!” he
raved. “A fate infinitely tamer than my own. As an immortal I've
been living like this in the lake for countless years.”

“Why has no
one rescued you?”

“They tried.
You may not think it when you look at my hideously tar-infected,
mutated face, but I was a very important person in my pre-lake
life. There were exhaustively expensive rescue attempts involving
every known type of pulley, crane, winch or rope system in the near
galaxies. It proved impossible to remove me from the living
hook-like grips of the tar, so everyone gave up. My story fell into
obscurity after I outlived all the people who cared. So now I am
one with the lake.”

“You know, I'm
also immortal,” I said. “Even before I saw you I was worried about
getting stuck in the lake forever, but now that I've seen how
agonizing your existence is I think I should get to shore as soon
as possible before something happens.”

“You're
immortal?” asked Bob excitedly. “That's great news!”

“It is?”

“Yeah!”

“Why?”

“You can join
me! Jump into the lake!”

“Why would I
do that?”

“So I have a
friend to talk to for the rest of eternity! It's the ultimate good
deed.”

“I'm not
jumping into the lake.”

“You
must!”

“
Don't
you think we'd get sick of each other?” I asked. “How many hundreds
of years can you converse with the same person? It's only been 5
minutes and I'm already sick of you.
Five Minutes.”

“You're just
like all the rest.”

“The rest?” I
asked. “How many people come here? I thought it was supposed to be
impossible.”

“Very little
of what appears to be impossible is actually impossible,” stated
Bob.

“Right.”

“Except, of
course, for the simple act of rescuing someone who fell into a lake
of tar,” he added with a whiny grumble.

“Who comes
here? Immortals?”

“Mostly.”

I wanted to
learn more, but getting away from the lake was priority one.

“Well, see ya
later,” I said. “Chin up.”

“I won't let
you go!”

“What will you
do?”

“I'll capsize
your canoe with ripples!” he shouted as he began to thrash his head
around like one of the many metal-headbangers taking in a Lincran
parking lot festival. The neck-breaking motion caused no ripples.
The dense anti-ripple consistency of the lake consumed all energy
before it had a chance to escape.

It was a sad
display. I turned around and continued my mission.

Even before I
got to shore I could hear the call of the Garbage-Demons. Every few
minutes I heard the drifting, ecstatic shrieks of the mysterious
feeders.

I had to spend
several nights in the swamp. I was not able to make good time
because of the absurd amount of falling and rolling and
backtracking involved with crossing a shifting landscape. There was
also only a short window of time in which I could move, for the
garbage-demons emitted their shrieking calls for only a few hours a
day. The rest of the time I had no bearing of direction and had to
sit down and wait until I heard the sound again, or until the land
shook me off my perch. The latter usually occurred first.

The
first thing I saw upon exiting the swamp was a sign reading
This Way to Bin
#897432 – GLPOA357%&11.FFF, aka The Bin Where the Beard of
Broog Has Been Stashed.

All those
letters had been painstakingly carved by Wendell. I could see faded
blood drops where the dull knife had slipped.

While
following the sign, it was clear I was headed directly into the
main nesting ground of the Garbage-Demons. Hearing their shrieks
over the last few days had given me plenty of time to nervously
imagine what they were like. Demons are never good. Considering
they feed on garbage, I had also been left to wonder what the area
was like where they had chosen to nest. It could only be the area
with the most rank concentration of junk.

My
expectations couldn't have been more wrong. There were no demons at
all. Instead there was a mildly tolerable bunch of tame mammal
creatures, a sort of hybrid cross between a dog, a cat and a Quigg.
All these creatures did was eat garbage, so they were actually a
vital part of cleaning up the planet's destroyed ecosystem. Milt
would have been overjoyed to learn about all the help that was
going on.

Between the
gushing fan, the obsessive mosquito and the hungry animals, there
seemed to be a lot of life on this apparently uninhabitable
dump.

I went to the
bin. The beard was conveniently placed right on top, as if on
display. I shook off the filth that had grown on the beard, even
though I was already growing accustomed to the grimy dark-gray
color of everything on Garbotron, including my own skin color which
had grown a layer of caked-on moldy dust within minutes of our
arrival.

Beside the bin
I discovered a sound-system rigged to loop the recordings of
shrieking demons. There was enough battery power and Investment
Banker-fuelled generators to ensure the recordings would loop for
thousands of years. I broke the system and funnelled what fuel I
could into some empty bottles. The animals were noticeably pleased
by the sudden cessation of the shrieking demons. It was a sound
they had heard perpetually for all of their lives, since the
beginning of the evolutionary path of their species. These animals,
like the Grollers, have no memory. Until I intervened with the
smashing of the stereo, their lives were a perpetual cycle of these
stages:

1) Hearing the
shrieks.

2) Feeling a
paralysing fear towards whatever the shrieks might belong to.

3) Joyous
relief at discovering the shrieks belong to a harmless ster

4) The
complete forgetting of everything.

The hybrids
could now relax and eat garbage. Their average lifespan
tripled.

I wondered who
had gone through the effort of setting up the sound-system. I
thought maybe it was this Fralgoth character.

Being
Immortal

Beard of Broog
in hand, I traipsed off in search of my lost immortal 'friends'. It
wasn't difficult. I found them rummaging in bin #894391 –
GRQAJ219%&11.FFQ

“Hey, look, he
finally evolved the ability to breathe and see and what not,” came
the familiar mocking tone of Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third. “We
thought you'd never stop wriggling and trifecta-ing about.”

“Tri-what-ing?” I said.

“The
Trifecta.”

“And what,” I
sighed, “is a Trifecta?”

“Crying,” said
Rip.

“Puking,”
continued Wilx.

“And Pissing
in your pants,” they merrily exclaimed in unison. “At the same
time!”

They broke out
into laughter. I didn't get it.

“Yeah,
whatever,” I dismissed. “So... you didn't have to suffer the same
trials of adaptation as my body had to?”

“Pffft!”
laughed Wilx. “What, you think this is the first time we've been
banished to a garbage planet to uncover some sort of lost, magical,
voodoo-antiquity?”

“You really
have a lot to learn about being immortal,” said Rip.

That pretty
much summed up everything at that point.

“I've got the
beard,” I said defeated.

“Course you
do,” said Wilx. “Of course you do.”

“Did you chat
with that nutty little fruit fly?” Asked Rip. “I'm certain he gave
us the wrong map.”

“Yeah... can
we get out of here now?” I said.

“I suppose we
ought to fashion some sort of escape vessel,” said Wilx. “Let's
head over to the razor sharp ravines of pointy rocket ships.”

We walked for
a long time in silence.

“Interesting
fact,” said Wilx, punching numbers into a small, digital
computation device. “When adjusted for relativity, that fruit fly
is the oldest creature to ever exist.”

“Ha! Told you
so,” said Rip.

“Yeah, yeah,
yeah,” said Wilx, handing a bag of dried up, dusty and filthy
superfluous internal organs to Rip, who began rather grotesquely to
ingest them and move them about his insides back into place with a
pointed stick.

And yes, if
you must know, Milt is the only creature to match the meticulous
attention to cleaning detail of The Quiggs. A strange being
indeed.

Fralgoth:
Notorious Intergalactic Thief of Voodoo Antiquities,

and the Movie
'Plasma Raiders 3'

As Wilx
attempted to find a usable rocket ship, Rip and I sat down and
tried to make sense of everything.

“What does
this beard do, anyway?” I asked him.

“Do? The beard
doesn't do anything. It's an inanimate piece of third-rate
imitation Plutonian wool. The dodgy black-market kind. Itchy by the
looks of it.”

“You mean
there's no magical properties to this beard?”

“I don't know.
Try it on.”

I wore
the beard. More than itchy, it caused a temporary leprosy-like
symptom within the first few minutes.
I now remembered why I'd thrown it
away.

“I could use
some help!” yelled Wilx from the ravine of ships.

“Just taking
an indefinite break!” Rip yelled back.

“You should go
help,” I said. “I'm the only one who's earned a break, after what I
went through to get the Beard. Did I tell you the part about the
swamp? And the lake?”

Rip took off.
I thought it seemed pointless. These rocket ships looked like props
from a cheesy science fiction movie. A lot of them were. Wilx had
noticed this right away, but instead of saying anything he decided
to forage the ships for any alcohol that might have been forgotten
by one of those D-Grade actors known for drowning out the regrets
of their failed careers.

Rip had
gotten the same idea, but all they ended up finding were the
remnants of the actors themselves. I later learned these ships were
from the set of the legendary unfinished movie
Plasma Raiders 3,
a production enshrouded with
controversy. To achieve total authenticity for the great launch
scene, the filmmakers had chosen to actually blast all the actors
and extras into space. Only instead of renting out some real
spaceships they merely strapped some spaceship-quality propulsion
units onto otherwise completely fake prop ships. The results were
mixed. The thrilling camera shots were fantastically unprecedented,
but none of the actors survived. The rest of the movie was then set
to be shot with lookalike replacement actors. During re-casts many
of the investors lost interest and dropped out, being that the
star-power of the lost actors was what had drawn their initial
interest. The film was permanently shelved, although some spoke of
revival with hushed reverence. The prop-ships eventually drifted
into space and found their way to Garbotron, where they were now
being raided by an immortal pair of well-seasoned travellers of
time and space.