5. The undersigned is forbidden from threatening harm or using physical force against Sharkey or any other agent of the Shop.
Swanny looks up from the paper skeptically. After a lifetime of study, she knows what’s legally binding. This isn’t. “You intend to murder me if I don’t obey your rules?”
“That ain’t murder. That’s punishment. You of all people should understand that.”
“And what gives you the authority to dole out this punishment?”
“Because I’m the boss. And I’m warning you now.”
“So, how will you punish me?”
He clicks a ballpoint pen and hands it to her. “I’ll probably stab you with a knife.”
“You’ll stab me?” The unease she’s feeling suddenly strikes Swanny as hilarious. Her death has already been decreed by the dread gods of Mutation and Heredity. This funny little man cooked her lunch and now he’s asking her to fear him. “You’ll stab me?”
“Or drown you in that bathtub upstairs you seem to like so much.”
“Drown me?”
But Sharkey’s smirk shows he’s in on the joke. He leans across the counter and continues, softer, as though he’s revealing a confidence: “Or maybe I’ll wrap my hands around your neck and squeeze till all life has left you, then throw your body down an empty elevator shaft right before the building burns to the ground.”
Swanny matches his tone: “That’s quite a lot of trouble.”
“If I’m in a hurry, I could choke you with a piece of piano wire.”
“Would that really be faster?”
“Yeah. Usually.” He turns around to open a small closet in the wall behind him, and Swanny sees her chinchilla on a hook inside, the diamonds’ glint on its lapel. Sharkey takes down a shoulder holster from the upper shelf and hooks it on before slipping back into his sharkskin jacket. “I’d shoot you, but I like to save my bullets for emergencies. What’s so funny?”
Swanny dissolves at last into giggles. “You won’t kill me. You’re a perfect gentleman. You even hung up my coat.”
“I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again.”
“Mr. Sharkey, you may feel obligated to pose as a reprobate to impress your colleagues around here, but you needn’t do it for my sake. I simply don’t believe you.”
“Believe whatever you want, but don’t try me.”
“All right, all right.” Swanny signs at the bottom of the page. “Will I get a fully executed copy for my files?”
He scrutinizes her. “You’re a hard girl to scare.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Ring the bell if you need me.” He gestures at a tasseled pull just beneath a cloudy porthole, the room’s only window. “I’m going downstairs to make some chaw.”
* * *
Without any customers to greet or chores to do, Swanny doesn’t know how to pass her time in the Chaw Shop. Of course, the drugs attract the bulk of her curiosity. She strolls around the perimeter of the room behind the counter, gazing up at the mason jars with their typewritten labels. Some suggest a flavor—CRèME DE MENTHOL, DUMP-TRUCK SALAD, UNICORN JERKY. Others are more enigmatic—FOSSILATOR, SUPER KLOUD, WIDOW’S PEAK, CUCKOO CLOCK, LONELY MOUNTAIN’S HEART, QUEEN OF THE NIGHT. She picks up a jar marked CORDIAL GOODBYE, pops open the lid, and holds it to her nose: Sharkey never told her she wasn’t allowed to smell. The scent is like that of an ambrosial liqueur made from cherry pits, decay and loss and candy, all at the same time. Fascinating. With some reluctance, she returns the jar to its place on the shelf and continues her perusal of the wares.
She has no notion of how to operate the cash register, which looms on the counter like an enormous klangflugel. But on the shelf just below it, under the counter, she spies a tattered, dog-eared paperback marked in the middle with a strand of twine. What a relief, something to read! She picks it up. SLAKELESS, screams the title, spelled out in raised, ballooning red letters. Beneath the swollen word, a dark-cloaked malefactor crouches over a young woman asleep in bed, his lips parted, his teeth nearly kissing her moonlit swanlike throat. Swanny eagerly takes a seat on a nearby stool, flips to the first page, and falls into the book.
SLAKELESS tells the tale of Luther Crowswallow, a man who gives up his soul in exchange for everlasting life, albeit everlasting with a catch. He is reborn as a drinker of essences, a monster who, like the fiends of old, consumes the vital forces of others to replenish his own insufficient store. Discovered at the grisly trade by townsfolk, who plot against him en masse at a tavern aptly christened the Brandished Pitchfork, he flees across the ocean, arriving in port accompanied only by corpses and a few depleted rats.
All this Swanny anticipated, and devours with relish, but as she reads on, the narrative takes an unexpected turn for the melancholic. As Crowswallow lives on, year after dizzying year, time in his perception speeds up. At first he hardly notices, but as decades turn to centuries, the rate exponentially increases, until the fiend can barely glimpse the fevered events zooming past. Now, from his perspective, human life is so fleeting, so inestimably brief, that no moral distinction exists between violence and nonviolence. Ending a life prematurely shaves off, at most, an eyeblink of consciousness, nothing worth worrying over. He compares drinking the essence of a beautiful woman to cutting a flower from his garden for a vase inside the house. “In the elements, it will perish a little later, perhaps, but without the benefit of my appreciation. And for a brief bloom to go unappreciated upon the Earth is the greater tragedy for the connoisseur.” Unfortunately, most of his thrashing victims disagree, and he realizes at long last the true nature of his curse: “Immortality is a prison for the friendless.” It’s at this point in the novel that he decides to embark on a desperate worldwide quest for a mate of his own kind.
“Sharkey sent me for you.”
Swanny startles back to life, nearly capsizing the barstool. Duluth is standing at the entrance to the shop, jingling a set of car keys around one finger. Hours have passed; outside the room’s lone porthole, only darkness shows.
“He said you’d wanna go out, when you was done with your shift. Go ‘investigating.’?”
“Oh yes, certainly.” Swanny makes a mental note of the page she’s on (264) and returns the book to its cubby. She gets her coat from the closet. “Where is Sharkey?”
“Business.”
The limo is parked on the street outside, right next to a fire hydrant where an alligator stands chained. At first, Swanny assumes it’s some form of taxidermy, but as they approach, the creature waddles lazily to the farthest extension of its clanking leash and grins up at them. Duluth gives the gator a wide berth and Swanny follows suit.