Chilly Willy’s Open for Business

DENT | Rusted chains drape the soot blackened walls of the ice cream parlour. Green mist curls over the booby-trapped floor. The damp air smells of sulfur. The soundtrack is a low, keening moan. 

At the cash register of Chilly Willy’s stands its sole employee, the establishment’s owner and manager, none other than Boney Bill Billiam—who is a skeleton.

“In the flesh,” Billiam says with a dry cough as he scoops a helping of Booberry Cobbler into a waffle cone.

"Boney" Bill giddily poses with two scoops of the frozen stuff, graciously heaped into one of his signature Hardtack Cones.

At the corner of 6th and Merkin, Chilly Willy’s is the latest addition to the Hamheath Commons, an economic development zone sprung up in the wake of Tig’s Talismans, which recently opened a second distribution center in Dent. With the blessing of King Dagwood (A Very Good Boy, long be his reign) city officials hope the new shopping district will “revitalize” the southerly fringe ward and bring some “much needed civilization” to Qan’Tyr’s rugged seaside port of entry.

But Billiam doesn’t worry about things like gentrification or the long-term health effects of exposure to Class 3 magical byproducts. Right now, the only thing on his hollowed out mind is the joy of ice cream in all its flavors, from Mausoleum Mint & Maggot to Blooderscotch Pecan.

“Watch me, now!” the barnacle encrusted skeleton says.

Billiam raises an arm over his skull. Starts to rattle his phalanges together. Frosted neon light from the display case flickers in the gaps between his ribs as he clackingly shimmies and gyrates toward a table, his bleached frame jerking and tugging like a macabre marionette in a stiff wind over the cairns.

“That there’s my bone dance,” Billiam rasps with a hint of pride, his pelvis clattering loudly into a cheap plastic chair. 

Before he was an up-and-comer in the soft serve game, Billiam had what passes these days as a life. 

“I was a banker,” his toothy visage chatters, showing off a sharp carpal armature “And a passionate one at that.”

One day, while en route to inspect some exciting new foreclosures in a ransacked coastal village,  he got lost in the foothills of Grievesholm. A bloodstorm rumbled through, and Billiam—just plain old William Billiam the Bon Vivant Banker at that point—was forced to take shelter in a nearby cave. Ever vigilant for the next leverageable acquisition, he began to explore what he soon discovered to be an expansive dungeon.

“Then all the sudden,” Billiam says, “I’m standing smack dab in a den of ravenous cave spiders.”

The dusty old draugr hesitates here and gazes out the ice cream parlour’s front bay windows—which, in keeping with the place’s oubliette aesthetic, are cobbed with fake webs and drenched in cherry red corn syrup.

“Honestly,” he clickety clacks, “it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

After the cave spiders injected him with neurotoxin, flayed off his skin, and sucked out his innards like melted moose tracks through a straw, there was nothing but darkness for a very long time. When he finally came to, the local lich was levitating over him, waving a piece of parchment in his face.

“Big guy,” Billiam recalls. “Horny helmet, glow in the dark head. Told me I owed him a soul debt, what with how he brought me back from beyond the veil and all. Said I could repay him by filling a vacancy on his skeleton crew.”

Never known for his backbone, William the Banker unquestioningly ceded it to his new master and became Boney Bill the dungeon minion.

“The boss used to say to us, ‘If it’s got a pulse, give it an ulce---rrr.’ That’s a direct quote. I think he meant: If something living comes in here, scare it away. Or, you know. Kill it.”

Billiam was assigned to the catacombs on the third level of the dungeon with another skel named Marty, a former arcane bookseller and self-celebrated pervert.

“There’s no polite way to say this,” Billiam says with a shrug. “When he was alive, Marty liked to fuck books. A lot. It’s all he ever talked about. Nothing pleased him more than rattling off a good ‘bone’ anecdote, which I came to suspect were mere allegories for his many instances of carnal congress with a rare first edition of Phylacteries for Beginners. Real spine-splitters, he used to say.” 

200 years of this went by. Nothing happened. Until one day.

“So we hear this shuffling in the corridor,” Billiam whispers. “Marty sticks his dome out of his crypt to investigate.”

Billiam leans over the circular table as he says this, trying to hold its edges tight. But calcified collagen isn’t much for friction, so his grip keeps slipping and skittering. 

“And Marty gives me this look like—well, neither of us had a face, so he just gave me a quick thumbs up. I could tell he was excited. I thought maybe he’d spotted a lusty grimoire or loose leaf almanac, but no. It was an adventurer. Finally!”

The two brandished their standard issue obsidian axes as the heavy stone door to their tomb slowly grinded open.

“And right as we leapt out from the shadows, ready to cut the bastard in two,” the garrulous ghoul quakes, “there was a flash of light, and…”

Billiam slams his trepanned skull down hard on the formica tabletop and starts dragging a wooden spoon across his exposed ribs in what must be some kind of skeletal expression of grief.

“Poor Marty,” I hear Billiam whimper through the xylophone sound of his ribcage. “He didn’t stand a chance.”

A simple firestarter spell. Cast by a doofy looking guy with a hairy tunic and rusty sword. Needless to say, Marty was instantaneously reduced to a pile of perverted ashes on the floor.

“The guy didn’t even aim very well,” Billiam recalls. “Just sorta stuck out his finger. This limp bit of flame shot out, bounced off the tunnel a few times, then fizz-popped right into Marty. In that moment, the world felt tilted somehow in favor of that doofy adventurer. It’s hard to explain. Call me crazy, but it was like it was supposed to happen that way. Like the whole situation was—and I know how this sounds—engineered to be...Well. Easy.”

Billiam quit the dungeon life soon after. 

“I’ve always wanted to be my own boss on my own boss level. I asked myself, what would Marty do? Fuck it, I decided. Let’s open an ice cream stand.”

As Billiam wraps up his story, a lizard man at another table vomits, careens into a condiments tray and passes out in a heap on the tile floor. His skin immediately blinks into a camouflage of black and white checkers punctuated with pink stars.

“It’s okay, this happens at least once a week,” Billiam says as he gets up from the chair with a loud crack of his knee joints.

He disappears into a storage room in back and returns with a thin cardboard box. The label on the box reads My friend Marty: His Ashes. 

Boney Bill Billiam tips the box and sprinkles gray powder over the vomit. He stares down. The deathly rictus on his face unchanging.

“I get ideas for new flavors all the time,” he says.