“Please give my family back to me, Amos,” she pleaded. “Please… I’ll do anything for another chance. Anything.”
Green eyes rich with promise fluttered at him, but Malone turned resolutely away from that beckoning gaze with a resolve a Kiowa pony would have envied. “Just stay behind me, ma’am. Just stay behind me.” He turned his attention back to the waiting witchen.
“I don’t think you’re goin’ t’ turn me into no fireplace, filth-fingers,” he told it, “and I aim to see to it that you don’t hurt this lady no more and that you undo the damage you’ve already done.”
“Hee-hee-hee, you do, do you?” She took her little hands off the nape of the tiny broomstick and waved them at him. “Hibble-de-glum, mubble-me-mock, fire and iron, kettle and stock, make of this mountain a—”
Malone didn’t give her a chance to finish. He had the advantage of volume, if not timing. “Bellow and roar all you wish, balloon-beak, but you won’t sunder me. I’ve been circled round by the five fingers of Rusal-Ratar, Queen of the Kitchens of the Earth and personal chef to Quoomander, Ruler of All the Djinn, Spirits, and Unassigned Ghosts of the Nether Regions!”
“—two-armed stove crock!” the witchen finished emphatically.
There was a flash of smoke and fire as she threw something at him. Mad Amos Malone disappeared in a cloud of green haze. From behind it Mary Makepeace let out a despairing scream, and the witchen’s “hee-hee-hee!” of triumph soared above it.
Her triumph, however, dissipated as rapidly as the haze, for within it Mad Amos Malone still stood in the kitchen doorway, unchanged, unharmed, and certainly unstoved, though a faint fragrance of unholy boiling did issue from the vicinity of his slightly scorched belt.
“Now then, wart-heart,” he whispered huskily as he reached toward his waist, “how’d thee like to try riding a bowie knife for a change?”
“No, no, no, no! Not possible! It’s not possible… eeeee!” The witchen found herself dodging Malone’s huge knife, twisting and spinning for her life as the mountain man sliced and cut at her agile little form.
But she was quick and experienced, and while Malone was so fast that the knife seemed but a shining in his hand, he was not used to dealing with so small a target. “Hold up there,” he finally told his quarry, gasping for breath. He bent over and put his hands on his knees as he fought for wind. “I’m plumb tuckered out.”
So was the witchen. Exhausted, she landed on a shelf and climbed off her broomstick, dangling withered little legs over the edge. “Fast… so fast he is,” she wheezed. “Almost too fast for old Beeblepwist, almost, almost… but not quite, not quite.” A sly grin snuck over her extraordinarily ugly face. “Should be a better way to settle this, settle this. A better way, yes.”
“Don’t listen to her, Amos!” Mary Makepeace shouted from her position just outside the kitchen. “She’ll try to trick you and…”
“No harm in hearin’ what she has to say, ma’am.” Amos took a deep breath, straightened, and was eye to eye with the sitting witchen. “I’ve no stomach for this constant chasin’. What have you in mind, corpse-cleaner?”
“No stomach for chasing, for chasing, eh? Have you stomach for some food? A cooking contest, yes? Yes, me and thee, hee-hee-hee?”
Malone considered the proposal carefully. He was a man of many talents. There were those who regarded him as a middlin’ to clever cook. “Cookin’ contest with what as its aim?” he asked guardedly.
“You win, I’ll put this hovel to rights and lose myself in the Bottomless Jar. I win… hee-hee-hee… I win, and you become part of the decor, along with Little Miss Priss, there.” She threw a short finger of fire in the direction of Mary Makepeace, who barely kept herself from swooning. “And one other thing,” she said, her voice becoming less scratchy than usual, “one thing other. I keep your soul, man, your soul.”
“I thought you wanted me for a stove,” he said nonchalantly.
“I do, I do, but a soul’s no good to a stove, and I can always find a buyer for a spare one.”
Malone scratched his beard. “If you think a good stove don’t need no soul, you ain’t half the cook you think you are. I agree. What kind of cookin’ do you propose? We ought to work similar, or there’ll be no basis for comparison.”
“I’m partial to spicy foods,” the witchen said encouragingly. “Think you the same, the same?”
Malone nodded. “I can handle tol’able condiments in my food.”
“Then something spicy it shall be,” cackled the witchen, adding, unsurprisingly, a “hee-hee-hee!”
Soul or surcease at stake, it was determined that the spiciest dish would be declared the winner. A truce blanketed that abused kitchen then, for both mountain man and witchen needed time to gather the ingredients for their respective dishes. Mary Makepeace saw a few of her precious utensils and pots restored for the purposes of the contest.
Three days slipped by. The sky over the farm grew as dark and angry as the odors that began to issue from it. People remarked on the peculiar scents in the air as far away as San Francisco to the west and Chinaman’s Bar to the east. Rabbits dug their burrows a little deeper that autumn, the birds moved their nests higher in the treetops, and for the first time since its founding, the citizens of Sacramento were not plagued by hordes of mosquitoes from the swamps along the Feather River—all the insects having dropped dead of unknown cause.
The heat that began to rise from two steaming kettles blistered the wood of the farmhouse on the north fork of the American River. Paint peeled off furniture hauled undamaged clear across the country from New England, and rusty iron was scoured miraculously clean. Mary Makepeace huddled on the floor just outside the kitchen, not daring to peer inside, yet she still acquired a tan so deep and permanent that from that day on people mistook her for a Mexican.
By the third night the two dishes were nearly finished. A deep yellow-orange glow illuminated the kitchen, and no bullfrogs called along the length of the American River.
From the kettle above which the witchen danced and flew rose a pink glow alive with tiny explosions of spice. It emanated from a soup the color of pahoehoe, the thick ropy lava that sometimes flows from the lips of angry volcanoes.
Mad Amos Malone stood like a russet cliff above his own pot, stirring the contents occasionally with an iron bar until the mixture was thick and sizzling and the bar had melted clean away. The glow from both kettles suffused the room with the hues of Hell. So spice-ridden were the two concoctions that the wood fires burning beneath each pot had begun to cower away from the metal bottoms, so that witchen and mountain man alike had to chide the flames back into heating them.
And when the smell and temperature were at their highest, when both courses were ready for the tasting, the witchen floated in the hot air rising from her own pot and said with great anticipation to Mad Amos Malone, “You… go first… hee-hee-hee.”
Mad Amos somberly removed his wolf-skull cap and unbuttoned his buckskin shirt. Ceremoniously, he downed half a gallon of cold stream water from a still-intact jug. The soup ladle burnt his fingers slightly when he picked it up, but he held tight to it. Cupped in the scoop of the ladle was something that bubbled and burst into little sparks. He brought his lips to the edge of the spoon. Mary Makepeace peered fearfully around the corner of the open doorway, one hand shoved reflexively into her mouth.
Malone hesitated. “What is it?”
“Why?” the witchen challenged him. “You afraid of a little soup, hee-hee-hee?”
“Nope. Just like to know what I’m eatin’.”