Mike Resnick - Chronicles of Lucifer Jones Vol 3 1931-1934 Encounters

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Table of Contents

1. The Home-Made Man

2. Doubled and Redoubled

3. Treasure Hunting

4. The Lost Continent

5. Exercising Ghosts

6. The Werewolf

7. The Clubfoot of Notre Dame

8. The Crown Jewels

9. The Loch Ness Monster

10. A Tabernacle is Not a Home

11. Death in the Afternoon

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Baron Steinmetz, who creates a home-made man out of spare parts in his basement.

King Philbert of Sylvania, who bears a remarkable resemblance to our narrator.

Gustav the Book, half-man, half-thing, and all gambler.

Erich Von Horst, a con man's con man.

Princess Griselda, who knows what, if not who, she likes.

Mr. Tall and Mr. Short, who share a taste for lost continents, money, and indiscriminate bloodshed.

Sam Hightower, who forsakes the snowman biz for the ghost game.

The Count Basil de Chenza Lupo, an aristocratic werewolf.

Quesadilla, the notorious Clubfoot of Notre Dame.

Sherringford House, the world's greatest consulting detective, who is always brilliant if not always correct.

Rupert Cornwall, a very special landlord of a very special property.

El Diablo, a bull with an attitude.

And our narrator, The Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones, a handsome, noble and resourceful Christian gentlemen who has certain unresolved differences with ten separate European governments over the finer points of the law.

Europe is a lot different from Africa and Asia.

For one thing, it's got a lot more Europeans living there. For another, it's got better roads and it's a little more built-up. For a third, having been told by a batch of governments that totally misunderstood my motives that my presence was no longer desired on those first two land masses, I was in some danger of running out of continents while still in the prime of my young manhood.

Therefore, I made up my mind that this time I was going to keep out of trouble and obey all the nuances of the law while seeking to establish my tabernacle and pursue my vocation (which was preaching, no matter what Interpol and some of them other biased institutions said). So when the train that took me out of Asia and all the way through Russia finally came to a stop in Bucharest, I was determined that this time I wasn't going to spend my first night on a new continent in the local jail.

Of course, I hadn't really counted on the fact that my Silent Partner was out to test me the way He'd tested Job in times past, and that I'd lose my bankroll in the first twenty minutes of a friendly little game of chance with a pack of Gypsies just outside the railroad station. I was sorely tempted to even the odds by insinuating my own dice into the contest, but they were a swarthy-looking lot who spoke in tongues and carried an awful lot of knives and didn't look like they'd appreciate an effort to bring the laws of statistical probabilities under my more direct control, and so I took my losses like a man and wandered off, looking for some place to hole up for the night.

Well, you'd be surprised how many Romanian hotels wouldn't take an I.O.U. from a man of the cloth, and eventually I wandered out toward the edge of the city, and just after it got dark I found a quiet little park, and figured I'd catch a quick forty or fifty winks there before hitting all the major banking and brokerage houses with a request for donations to my tabernacle.

Well, I was just lying there, snoring kind of gentle-like and minding my own business, when all of a sudden I opened my eyes and looked up and realized that either the stars were moving awful fast across the sky or someone was dragging me along the ground by my feet, and I looked ahead and sure enough this little hunchbacked guy was pulling me across the grass toward a wooden wagon that was attached to an old swaybacked horse.

Hey! I said. What in tarnation is going on here?

He dropped my feet like they were on fire and turned to look at me.

You're alive! he said.

Of course I'm alive! I said. Why kind of country are you running here, anyway? Can't a man take a little nap in a public park without getting hauled off to jail?

This isn't a park, he said. It's a cemetery.

I'm the Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones, and if I've busted any laws by camping out here, I'm sure we can work something out.

It makes no difference to me, he answered. I am Ivor. I serve the Baron Steinmetz.

Then if you ain't some kind of night watchman, why were you dragging me off to that there wagon? I demanded.

I thought you were dead, said Ivor.

The Baron pays you to go around tidying up the cemetery, does he? I asked.

Not exactly, said Ivor. He sent me here to bring him back a better brain.

He ain't pleased with the one he's got?

Ivor sighed. It's all very complicated, Doctor Jones.

Yeah, it sounds a mite complicated, I allowed. I mean, a lot of folks wish they were a little smarter, but this Baron of yours is the first one I ever heard tell of who's actually trying to do something about it.

You don't understand, Doctor Jones, said Ivor. He doesn't want the brain for himself.

He's stealing it for a friend?

Ivor shook his head. It's for his work. He has long sought to create a living man. For years he has labored to reanimate dead tissue, putting together spare body parts in the laboratory he has built in the basement of his castle.

Seems to me that the standard way of creating new men is cheaper and easier, not to say more fun, I said.

He is a brilliant man, said Ivor. A great scientist. He is on the verge of a major breakthrough.

It sounded to me like anyone who wanted to build a man in his basement was more on the verge of a major break