Limekiller!

AVRAM DAVIDSON

¡LIMEKILLER!

EDITED BY GRANIA DAVIS & HENRY WESSELLS

The book you hold in your hands is a ticket to the exotic shores of British Hidalgo, a tiny Central American land of jungles and coral reefs, wonderful people and strange customs, strong rum and sunny skies. Collected here for the first time, Avram Davidson’s six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is “a place that you can put your arms around,” welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast. Afloat and ashore, Jack Limekiller, master of the working sailboat Saccharissa, encounters ghosts of the colonial past and monsters far older.

The tropical paradise where Avram Davidson lived and wrote in the 1960s no longer exists in our world, but, as Lucius Shepard writes in his introduction, “That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you — a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves…”

¡Limekiller!

FIRST EDITION Stories Copyright © Grania Davis, Proprietor, Avram Davidson Estate. All Rights Reserved. “The Adventures of Jack Limekiller in a Far Countrie” Copyright © 2003 Grania Davis. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Copyright © 2003 Lucius Shepard. All Rights Reserved. “Jack Limekiller” Copyright © 2003 Peter S. Beagle. All Rights Reserved. “Dragons in San Francisco — A Sequel” Copyright © Grania Davis. All Rights Reserved. Afterword Copyright © 2003 Ethan Davidson. All Rights Reserved. Cover Art Copyright © 2003 Douglas Klauba. All Rights Reserved. Sloop Art on half title page Copyright © 2003 Robert T. Garcia. All Rights Reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from both the author and copyright holder, except by a reviewer who may want to quote brief passages in review.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Bloody Man” (Fantastic Magazine, August 1976). “Manatee Gal. Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1977). “A Good Night’s Sleep” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1978). “There Beneath the Silky-Trees and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me" Other Worlds 2, edited by Roy Torgeson. New York: Zebra, 1980;. “Limekiller at Large” (Asimov's, June 1990). “A Far Countrie” (Asimov’s, November 1993). “Along the Lower Moho The Iguana Church” (The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2000).

PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publisher would like to thank Peter S. Beagle. The editors would like to thank The Avram Davidson Society

Published by: Old Earth Books Post Office Box 19951 Baltimore, MD 21211-0951www.oldearthbooks.com

Book design by Robert T. Garcia Garcia Publishing Services Post Office Box 1059 Woodstock, Illinois 60098 wwnv.garciapublishingservices.com

ISBN: 1-882968-26-3

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICABy Thomson-Shore Dexter, Michigan

CONTENTS

The Adventures of Jack Limekiller in a Far Countrie

by Grania Davis

Introduction

by Lucius Shepard

Jack Limekiller

by Peter S. Beagle

Bloody Man

There Beneath the Silky Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me

Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight

Sleep Well of Nights

Limekiller at Large

A Far Countrie

Afterword Section

Along the Lower Moho (The Iguana Church)

Dragons in San Francisco — A Sequel

by Grania Davis

Afterword

by Ethan Davidson

For

Faustino Zuniga, J.P.

Alan E. Nourse, M.D.

Kathleen Redman

“among the great company of the dead, who increase around us as we grow older.” (Ommaney, The Shoals of Capricorn) and, among the great company of the living,

Ethan Davidson H. Austin Miller Burton Moore

THE ADVENTURES OF JACK LIMEKILLER IN A FAR COUNTRIE