Kilmanjaro

By A. F. Knott

This is the first in the Roddy Granger, Insurance Claims Investigator Series of Novellas, introducing the Gastrointestinal Fantasy Genre, a parody combining the most exciting elements of Witchcraft with Mundane Concern and Intestinal Pathology. In this first book, Roddy Granger arrives at Lester's Place, a run down bar in a deserted Industrial part of the city to be introduced to Lester and his wife Estelle, a Romanian witch. Roddy gets far more than he bargained for in his very first case as a field investigator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hekate Publishing
• Release date: Apr 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912017607

Book preview

Page

THE LADY FROM SHANG SHANG

Each and every morning Estelle poured olive oil over the top of her head, leaned forward and allowed it to drip off her bangs. As soon as the oil formed a good-sized puddle on the cracked urine stained tiles at her feet, she dragged a pinky down the middle of it all, uncovered one eye and examined herself in the booger-smeared bathroom mirror.

Well that’s fittingly self-deprecating, don’t you think Estelle? she whispered. Straight away she replied: No, it’s not. That greasy black waterfall is only half self-deprecating.

Estelle let her hair fall back in place and remained silent, not asking the obvious follow up question to either of her selves: 'If my black waterfall is only half self-deprecating, then what about the other half?'

When she emerged from the restroom after the very first olive oiling, Lester leered and remarked,

Well don’t you look like the Lady from Shang Shang.

Guess that means you’d be trapped in a hall of mirrors then doesn’t it, Lester?

I don’t know what you are talking about, Estelle.

I know you don’t, Lester.

Estelle knew a few things Lester didn't. For one, her olive oiled bangs covered two galaxy shaped clusters of maroon freckles on either cheek which Lester never paid much mind. Because of these distinctive markings, an old hag who had lived two houses down from Estelle's childhood home called her the little witch. Spat betel juice onto the ground whenever the girl walked past her porch on the way to school. The woman became obsessed with Estelle's freckles, in fact, and each morning took to waiting by her mailbox so as to follow the child to and from school, shaking a knarled finger, crossing and recrossing herself, sputtering curse after curse after curse. A devout Pentecostal, the woman felt bound to the task: Any form of display was an abomination, and in Estelle's case, those freckle clusters glowed a less-than-God-like orange, obviously some pigmentation from hell.

Something’s not right with the child. She carries the sign, the crone announced to members of her congregation. One might have thought an agitated pack of coyotes had been turned loose inside that little church. Many took to the ground and writhed on their backs as if being electrocuted while others spoke in voices seldom heard since ancient astronauts roamed the Earth.

By age seven, Estelle had decided to live the life of a rebel on top of what was already naturally ‘not right’ about her.

Living the life of a rebel signified different things to different people, of course. For Estelle, it meant wielding a teaspoon of magic every now and then, whenever that struck her fancy.

As it happened, the old lady was killed by a dump truck which for no apparent reason careened up onto the sidewalk where she had been standing. The hag had been in a particularly foul mood that day, hurling vehement curses toward little Estelle and punctuating these with dark blood-flecked spittle. More significantly, on that occasion Estelle's art teacher, Ms. Pledgefeather, had showed her class for the first time how to make collage. Estelle had been beside herself with all that realm of possibility and on her way home, had been in no mood for the old woman’s ranting, brown-staining an otherwise wonderful day with unfounded negativity. She slammed her front door, rushed upstairs and commenced snipping pictures out of magazines, knowing right away she had discovered a hidden garden within herself.

The hag planted her arthritic feet in front of the girl’s house and insisted on pointing her knobby cudgel upward toward the bedroom window only to continue her wet invective. Estelle yanked the blinds down at the exact instant that truck jumped the curb to pin the woman against the sturdy black tarred telephone pole which sat in front of Estelle’s house. He severed legs released onto the sidewalk making the dull percussions Mrs. Stillsbury next door said she heard, likening the sound to a butcher's delivery of ham hocks onto her back porch: Thump, thump.

Despite the woman being divided in half, the truck's engine managed to cauterize all her major blood vessels allowing her to raise a knarled finger one final time and point in the direction of Estelle, who peeked out from behind the blind, head filled with a myriad of ideas for both cut and paste as well as photo manipulation techniques.

The day Estelle found the red horned rims sitting on Lester’s bar top was what some people might call a game changer. She continued to apply the olive oil but stopped all her whispering inquiries. The red horned rims cinched her look: Self-deprecation was gobbled up by its opposite: An astute fashion statement. Whoever left the glasses on the bar top that night and where that person might have acquired horned rims that exquisite was anybody’s guess; there’d been too much of the usual yelling and screaming, beer mugs shattering and so forth to narrow down who that person might have been. The bottom line was, for Estelle, the red horned rims were a gift from some anonymous drunken angel swooping down from Heaven on a rope, like Tarzan, King of the Apes, placing the specs by the Schlitz tap for her to find.

She’d been mopping up a puddle of urine at the base of a bar stool when she spotted the glasses and right away recognized their potential. She threw a crumbled napkin over the top of them like some secret agent at Checkpoint Charlie, sliver of microfilm embedded in a rear molar. The last thing Estelle wanted at this point was call Lester's attention to the find. He would have 'confiscated' the glasses on the spot.

Lester had been counting money, straightening crumbled one dollar bills out on the side of his scuffed and dented cash register, like he always did that time of day. Estelle slipped her prize into an apron pocket and made a bee-line for the rest room, twirling once en route. She'd seen Sissy Spacek do that in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Any time she felt a rare semblance of hope, she twirled.

Stepping inside the silver fish ridden rest room and locking the flimsy door behind her, she right away clamped the glasses over her heavily olive-oil laden hair. They stuck fast: Red against black. Perfect. She uncovered an eye and peered closely at her reflection in the cracked mirror between smudges of grimy fingerprints. The whole experience was not unlike a visit to the Louvre itself; as if she'd flown all the way to Paris, France, and was met at the airport by the dead General Charles De Gaulle, only to have him plant a warm welcoming smacker on both her cheeks and bequeathing the Légion d'Honneur.

What a