At least the stench had improved. He could still detect the lingering smell of horseshit, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been when the stranger had sniggered in his face. What’s more, and it had almost slipped his attention, the lights were back on. The dark room had turned into the gray room.
He glanced at the roof. A single dusty globe dangled from the end of a tortuous piece of wire. Was it just his mind playing tricks on him, or did the rays from the filament seem gray and sick, somehow malignant? Like the tumor that had eaten his grandfather’s stomach from the inside out. He didn’t know if it were possible for light to become cancerous, it just reminded him of how his grandfather’s skin had turned the same miserable gray toward the end. Despite his youthfulness, when Louis had walked onto the hospital ward and seen the limp form on the bed, he had known right there and then that there would be no miracle cure to save his grandfather. Henry Trump didn’t even last a week, and the grayness never left his skin. Even the foundation and rouge the undertakers had applied to his face before the funeral couldn’t hide it. Once the grayness was in you, it never left. It lingered like horseshit.
Annoyingly, the cylindrical thing continued to press into his back. He wiggled around to try and dislodge it, but it only seemed to roll from one flank to the other. Then he leaned forward and reached behind, and when he did he almost fainted with shock for the second time. The weasel in the portrait had moved.
Frozen, he kept staring at the toga-clad weasel. Likewise, its arm was now behind its back. That was the movement he had caught out of the corner of his eye. Louis didn’t dare move. Couldn’t move. He had heard of people petrified with sheer terror, like rabbits caught by headlights in the middle of the road, but not from simple disbelief. His jaw hadn’t even dropped. His eyelids, too, were stuck half-open in the act of blinking, like shutters jammed on rusty hinges. They hadn’t so much as fluttered.
Unable to take his gaze off the weasel, his mind whirred with possible explanations as to what in hell was going on. Not for the first time he wondered if he were being set up, if this was just one big joke. Someone was having a goddamn laugh at his expense. Nonetheless, there was really only one explanation, wasn’t there? And if that was a mirror in the center of the frame and not a portrait Epstein had arranged for his amusement, and somehow, somewhere between blacking out in his office and waking up in this gray sauna-cave, he had been resurrected as a goddamn weasel, then he would rather find out sooner than later. The proof, he figured, was on top of his head. If the laurel was there, he was a weasel. If it wasn’t, he was still good ol’ Louis Hugo DeVille, CEO of Global Resolutions Network, suffering husband to Lady Di, and there was nothing to worry about. Goddamn simple as that.
Slowly, he began to reach for the laurel, then stopped, keeping his arm wedged behind his back. Maybe this wasn’t really happening. Maybe this was one of them watchamacallit dreams, the ones where you were awake but not awake. Lady Di had had one a year or two ago, about the same time she started yoga classes and mumbling “aum” around the apartment to the point it drove him half-mad. She didn’t listen when he had told her to shut her goddamn trap, of course. She kept on doing what she damn well pleased, chanting “aum” here, there and everywhere until he had no choice but to ignore everything she said, which wasn’t exactly a new course of action. But he hadn’t been able to ignore entirely everything, as he had wanted.
One thing he remembered was the conversation she had had with her good-for-noth’n sister. Something about a dream she had had. “Lucid dreaming,” she had described it. He was at the kitchen table reading the Sunday paper trying to ignore her. Lady Di was in front of the TV in the lounge room with the portable handset nestled between her ear and shoulder, shrugging it tight so that it wouldn’t fall to the carpet while she exercised on the Ezy-Cycle. She and her sister had been gasbagging since the crack of dawn and he was about to blow his top. Nothing he had tried could block out her constant prattle. Closing the kitchen door. Turning on the radio (even though he couldn’t stand the weekend breakfast programs). Not even the TV could drown out her whine. She was just so goddamn loud. He was about to get up and go to the bedroom when he heard her mention the dream she had had.
“I tell you, Jennifer,” she said, still pedaling on the Ezy-Cycle and watching the Home Shopping Channel, “it was a lucid dream. What? … Oh, don’t you know? My yoga teacher has them all the time. It’s really strange, you know… Hmm, what? No. Not that kind of strange. More like you know it’s a dream but it’s as real as when you’re awake.”
Louis scoffed into his coffee, flicked the newspaper and tried to ignore his wife for the rest of the day. Only people who had nothing better to do with their time would believe that yoga-dreaming claptrap. Except now, believe it or not, he was having the same kind of experience that his wife had had. Maybe he was still unconscious in the office on Broadway and having this god-awful dream about reincarnation as a weasel. Maybe he was laying face down on his desk next to the bottles of Kwel-Amity and the yellow Stick-It note…
Goddamn it, he mumbled, snapping out of his train of thoughts. I completely forgot. The stupid cow’s taken an overdose again. He hadn’t dreamed that, or if he had everything in his goddamn life had been imagined and no more real than Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
Daring to return to the weasel in the mirror, he hoped the reality he had once taken for granted and felt so comfortable with wasn’t about to take on a horrifying new dimension. His arm was still wedged behind his back feeling for the lump, which, if this wasn’t a goddamn lucid dream but a real life nightmare, he had a pretty good idea what it was. If he grabbed it and twisted it, he would feel pain shooting up his spine into his brain as if he had done the same thing to his big toe. Which now he was beginning to doubt he had. Big claw was probably more to the point, or whatever a weasel had for digits on its feet.
He decided there was no point in hanging around and waiting for something to happen. He had always considered himself a go-get-it, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of guy; if something needed doing, he would do it. He had no time for pussyfoots and cowards who couldn’t make up their mind, who froze to the spot when a decision needed to be made. No time at all. So he went for it.
When he grabbed the thing pressing into his back, he flinched.
It was exactly as he had suspected. He had grabbed his tail.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Weasel
LOUIS let go of his tail and put his hand (did weasels have hands?) – his paw – on his head. The weasel in the mirror copied everything he did, including removing the laurel and putting it on his lap. He was a goddamn weasel all right. The evidence was plain enough. He was even wearing the toga he could see adorning the reflection, and when he ran his paw over it he was reminded of the silky sheets the maid fitted to the beds at the penthouse. He felt like some idiot at a fancy-dress party that nobody else had turned up for.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps this was a surprise fancy-dress party in honor of good ol’ Louis DeVille’s birthday. Perhaps Lady Di, her sister Jennifer, Sarah, Jew-boy Epstein and the whole crazy gang from Global Resolutions Network were going to burst through the door and start singing For He’s A Jolly Good Weasel.
“That’s the surprise, Mr. DeVille!” Epstein would say. “Your really are a despicable little critter.”
Lady Di would probably add: “Told you, Louis, didn’t I?” and she would call him Lewis, not Lewey, in her smarmy, know-it-all tone of voice. “Always said you’d find out who you really were.”
Louis snorted and briefly examined the laurel. It wasn’t the real thing. Fake plastic bay leaves that looked dull and lifeless in the grim, gray light. He put it back on his head, figuring he couldn’t look any more ridiculous than he already did, and glanced beneath the chair at the floor. The six-hundred-page contract was there, next to a pile of tangled bandages. He wondered who had stripped them off and dressed him in this goddamn costume. Nurses? Medics? He doubted it. He no longer reckoned he was in a hospital. He was beginning to suspect he was