Limekiller!

Having experienced one such enthralling passage of time with embedded story, the obvious next step would be to proceed on to another, just like Jack Limekiller would and did. Here, in this little book, you’ll be able to do that five more times and will likely expect to continue passaging thereafter.

Unfortunately, only six Limekiller passages exist.

Or, as Avram might have said, six are all there is and six is all there are.

These are they, and they are, in my view, whatever anyone else may tell you, regardless of whether a book entitled The Best Of Avram Davidson rests on a thousand and one shelves, the best of Avram Davidson, his most evocative, most generously spirited, and most Avramesque work. Despite his previously mentioned response to mv letter, I think Avram did stake claim to a place and time that no other writer should touch. 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, and ought else. These stories are far more than the relics of a great fantasist, a great writer, a man whom I knew and venerated and — when he wasn’t pissing me off — loved.

These stories are his soul.

JACK LIMEKILLER

by Peter S. Beacle

Limekiller? Christ, of course I knew Jack Limekiller — used to come in here all the time. Canadian, right? Canadian. Skinny kid, drank Montejo Dark mostly. Looked older than he was, or anyway you had that feeling about him. Lord God, Jack Limekiller. I haven’t heard that name in. Christ, who remembers? Limekiller. Damn.

He bought a boat. That was it — Limekiller bought some kind of a small boat. Quit his job, picked up his check, shot it all on a boat, with a bit left over to throw a party in here for his friends, the night before he took off. I remember, I couldn’t keep from asking him, “Limekiller, what the hell you want with a boat? You know how to sail?”

“A little,” he says. Then he grins at me. “No, not really. But figure I can learn.”

“Oh right,” I says. “No problem. Where you planning to study at, Captain Limekiller, sir?”

“The Caribbean,” Limekiller says, rolling it out. “Pirate country. Buried treasure country. Duppy country.” He told me what duppies are, and I’ve been trying to forget ever since. “Pm going to plop my boat down in the St. Lawrence, point her south and just keep going until I bump into something. There’s a place called British Hidalgo that sounds about as far from Canada as a Saskatchewan boy can get. Maybe that's what I’ll bump into, British Hidalgo.”

So I says, “Well, good luck, captain,” and we drank to it. I says “Don’t forget to write. I got a nephew that collects stamps.”

Weird thing is, he didn’t forget. I still get a postcard anyway sometimes. Really pretty stamps, too, with birds and fruit and stuff on them. Old Jack Limekiller. Damn. Tell him Pete says hello.

BLOODY MAN

”Yes, Mr. Limekiller,” said old Archbishop Le Beau. Having acknowledged Jack’s self-introduction with politeness, he now returned to his task of scaling fish. Some were still on the block and some were in the basket and some were in the pot. A time there was (and a place) when archbishops moved before a train of state. But not this archbishop, in this time, in this place — to wit, Point Pleasaunce, in the sub-tropical colony of British Hidalgo.

“They tell me… Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it… it was, wasn’t it… Your Grace?

Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint. ‘Just Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip. scrap. scrip. Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.

“Ah. thank you, sir. Archbishop. they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”

Flop went the fish into the basket.

“Something of the sort, Mr. Limekiller. The bungalow is not for me, you know. I already have a bungalow. It is for my brother Poona.”