The Fantastic Fable of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  “Professor Silver, I know what you meant,” I said impatiently, staring longingly at the ladder and thinking of all that comforting I still needed. “I just really need to get going. You know, if I’m about to be killed and all, I have a few things to take care of first.” I glared at him. He stepped back, his wooden leg stomping on the floor loudly.

  After a moment, comprehension seemed to dawn.

  “Peter, you don’t think I put that in the hat, do you? I don’t choose the conflicts! When someone needs one, they just—”

  “Look, can we do this some other time, professor? I’m sorry, but I really need to get going,” I said, not sure I wanted to hear anymore. As far as I was concerned, Santa Clause could have put the conflict in the hat. It didn’t change what it said. Without waiting for a response, I walked toward the ladder and began the climb up. By the way, dramatic exits are not nearly as effective if you have to climb a ladder to leave the scene.

  When I poked my head up into the Conflict hall, I was surprised to find it completely empty. I could hear the muffled sounds of students greeting each other from the main building above me—excited calls and laughter from people ready to head home for the day. I even heard the vague shout of one of the stereotypical Frat Boys—something about beer or boobs or, more likely, both.

  “Jenny?” I called pointlessly. I could see the whole dark corridor, and nobody was in there. I thought fondly of the first time Jenny and I had really talked, just after she’d been hurled through the air into the wall. Just as I was about to go look at the wall, and certainly not touch it with my fingertips creepily, I heard Long John making his way up the ladder, his wooden bat clanking loudly on the metal rungs.

  I quickly left, hoping Jenny had just decided to wait upstairs in the main building rather than in the cold, dungeon-like hall. But she wasn’t there either.

  And I was scared. And sad.

  And I needed comforting, damn it!

  A little frustrated, I left the main building and stepped outside. It was much darker than I’d expected, and gray clouds covered the sky. There were only a few students left on campus. I saw a group of southern pixies splashing in the fountain despite the chill, their smooth, green skin glistening like emeralds . . . or pixie skin. There was also a group of centaurs standing on the other side of the square near the forest. They were in a small huddle, whispering about something, and when they saw me watching them, they slashed their tails and walked away like I’d been eavesdropping. Centaurs are really full of themselves.

  But that was it. No Jenny.

  So I made my way down the path alone, and like I said, a little frustrated. Okay, I was pissed.

  As I passed by the Detective building heading toward the South Entrance, chilly, irregular splats of rain began to fall, and the “undercover” cars’ windshield wipers were flapping furiously. I decided not to stop by the building to talk to Randy and just go straight home to avoid the storm I knew was coming.

  I had to avoid the acid rain of Sci-Fi, and so by the time I’d sprinted to the end of Mystery and was nearing Fantasy, I was cold, wet, and not in the best of moods.

  “Watch it,” a man wearing a raincoat and holding a flashlight snapped at me as I ran past, splashing him with muddy water. “You better get inside! Don’t you know there’s an escaped assassin running around?!” he shouted.

  I continued to run, the cobblestones slick and dangerous beneath my feet. I merely waved a hand behind me in acknowledgment. Oh, I knew.

  As my mood worsened, so did the rain. Little angry words, fragments of my thoughts, raced behind me, trying to keep up, but were quickly battered down by the water.

  Jenny

  SPLAT

  Assassin

  SPLAT, SPLAT

  Pie?

  SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT

  I kept running, stomach growling and feet sloshing around in my shoes until I could see my apartment building creeping closer. The patched-up wall of my kitchen was obvious even from a distance. By the time I’d run up the stairs, nearly slipping on the slick wood, it had begun to hail, and as I turned the handle to go inside, I saw a little water nymph duck into the bushes near the road. Water nymphs love storms; I knew this was going to be bad.

  “Peter!” Randy said, popping out from behind the open door.

  I jumped nervously and closed the door behind me to prevent any more hail the size of stones from streaming into the living room. He pulled me into the kind of back-breaking hug that only a father can give to a son about to be assassinated. You know the type.

  “Randy, I thought you’d still be at work. I was going to stop by, but—” I gestured feebly to the door. The hail sounded like gunfire against it.

  “I came home early to talk to you. It’s Gail. She—”

  “I know. She escaped. I got this note in Conflict,” I said, pulling the soaking paper from my pocket. Outside the thunder rolled and the building shook as he read the smudged words of my fate.

  “This is bad, Peter . . . this is . . . what is that, seaweed? This paper smells awful.”

  I nodded glumly and mumbled something about Professor Silver being my teacher. To my surprise, this seemed to cheer him up a great deal.

  “Professor Silver—you mean the old man with the leg? Long John Silver?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, this is wonderful news! If anybody knows about escapees seeking revenge, it’s Long John Silver! Come on Peter, we’re going back to the school.” Randy ran to his room and returned wearing a blue raincoat and galoshes before I had time to even ask what we were doing, or more importantly, whether or not he’d lost his mind.

  “Have you seen a large, stuffed parrot lying around?” he asked, frantically lifting the cushions and pillows from the sofa.

  The latter was starting to seem likely.

  “Oh well, doesn’t matter; he’ll probably be willing to talk. Peter!” he barked, shaking the cushions at me. “Why haven’t you gotten your rain coat?” Thunder boomed and lightning illuminated his silhouette, which looked like some weird cushion-wielding statue. Once again, I noticed how very clear he looked, how very written. Which isn’t to say he looked good; quite the contrary. The lines of his face were deeper than I’d ever seen; his brown eyes looked, well, kind of crazy; and his glasses were filmed over with fog, probably from the flush of his cheeks.

  “It’s storming out there, you know,” he added helpfully as thunder shook the ground.

  Trying not to acknowledge that Randy might be playing a bigger role than I’d thought, I went into my room and began rifling through a pile of clothes near the foot of my bed. If Randy were being written, would he know? Would he keep it from me? And did that make me a character too? I decided I’d have to ask him about that tingling feeling as I pulled on my coat and gave my messy bedroom one fleeting glance. A bowl of old soup was congealing on my nightstand, my windowsill was muddy from where Dach-shund kept creeping in, and my bed looked like some large animal’s nest. I promised myself I’d clean up when I got home. If I got home.

  Luckily the hail had stopped, and so it was only like swimming upriver to get back to campus, rather than like being pelted by bullets. I kept looking over my shoulder for escaped assassins, trains, or perhaps arrows flying for my nose, but I could barely see my hand in front of my face, let alone my imminent death.

  And so I was surprised when we found ourselves underneath the southern entrance’s archway so quickly. I stopped and leaned against it for a moment to catch my breath, but Randy had already moved on.

  “Randy, I don’t think Professor Silver is still going to be on campus,” I called through chattering teeth. I was terrified, but I chalked it up to the chill in the air.

  He ignored me and continued up the path. I jogged to catch up, but he was gone.

  “Down here, Peter!” I heard from the bushes along the path.

  I separated the branches and a few moths flew out indignantly. There was Randy hiding in the bushes.

  “Randy,
what are you doing?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the rain.

  “I’m being sneaky.”

  And then he darted out from the bush, did a sort of summersault, and continued to run along the path, crouched down low against the rain.

  “Come on, Peter. It’s fun!”

  And so I walked along behind, letting Randy do his detective thing and wondering what I’d gotten myself into. We made our way through the square and past the main building onto a little dirt path I’d never seen before. It led through a sodden field and straight up to an old, squat building that looked more like a house than something belonging on campus. The only difference was, it was stretched out and had ten front doors instead of one, and ten little chimneys poking from its one thatched, sloped roof. Somehow, smoke was still billowing happily from one of these, in spite of the wind and rain. As we walked by the window, I could see Merlin sitting on a couch inside, cozily reading a book with the fire blazing. Of course.

  “This is the one,” Randy said, stopping in front of the neighboring door.

  I was wondering what mysterious Detective skills he was employing when I noticed the name plate above the doorknob.

  Long John Silver

  Get lost.

  He knocked a few times, though the sound was lost in the storm. I was about to suggest we just head home, that Professor Silver was probably out terrorizing kittens or burning down an orphanage. But the door swung open, and there was Long John . . . wearing a frilly white nightshirt and pink foam curlers in his beard.

  “You’re here early,” he growled, and then closed the door in our faces.

  Silver returned about five minutes later, this time plus pants and minus the curlers. He ushered us into the little sitting area, which was really just a small section of the one-room home. In the back left corner was a kitchenette with a short wooden counter and a lone barstool. There was a soggy, unfinished bowl of cereal sitting there, looking rather forlorn. I tore my eyes away from the sad scene and saw in the right corner of the space a large iron bed covered in luxurious blankets, pillows, and a colorful little stuffed animal that was worn beyond identification. Along the wall next to the bed was a domed wooden door, which I assumed led to a bathroom, which I also assumed did not contain one bar of soap, much less a shower. The whole place smelled like the ocean and whatever dead things washed up on shore.

  “Sorry about that—the interrogation wasn’t due to start until nine o’clock,” Long John said, waving at the front door.

  Randy and I looked at each other in confusion.

  “Well, I assume you are here to talk to me about Pollyanna?” he asked, plopping himself into a deep armchair. With his arms, he hoisted his fake leg onto the coffee table, and then he gestured at the old, worn brown couch opposite him.

  “Sit down. I expect this is going to take a while,” he said as he picked up a pipe from a little wooden table beside his armchair and lit it with a match. Even the tobacco smelled salty.

  Randy and I sat down on the leathery couch, sending dust motes into the air around us. I say leathery, because I am pretty sure at one point it was something more like cotton than leather. I sat on the edge, not because I was nervous—or not entirely anyway—but because I didn’t want to leave with any sofa-borne diseases.

  Randy, on the other hand, seemed totally in his element with the mention of an interrogation. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees, the couch groaning in protest beneath him, and in a low, terrifying whisper, advised Professor Silver to “spill his guts.”

  “What’s that? I can’t hear you over this blasted storm!” Silver said, swatting at the green cloud of smoke between us. Randy deflated a bit and, with my help, scooted the old couch closer. It was a lot heavier than it looked and made a painful screeching noise along the floorboards.

  “Look, John—can I call you John?”

  “No.”

  “Right then. Mr. Silver, Peter is kind of in a bind here and could use any advice you can give him on Assassins Seeking Revenge. My ex-wife, or technically wife I suppose; I’m not really sure. Are you considered divorced if one spouse fakes their own death and leaves the family for six years?”

  Randy looked back and forth between the Professor and me, and I decided that this interrogation needed to take a new direction. Then I remembered something.

  “Professor Silver, you said you needed to talk to me today after class, but I left before you could tell me what it was about. Did it have anything to do with an Assassin Seeking Revenge? Is . . . is that who Pollyanna was?”

  At first, Silver looked like he was going to scold me for being intrusive, or at least take a swing at me with his bat leg. But then he leaned back into the chair, and, after a long pull from his pipe, began the story of Pollyanna.

  “Pollyanna and I were inseparable. Now this was back in our days of backstory—before any Royal Navy, Captain Flint, or even Jim Hawkins. It was just me and Pollyanna, plundering from port to port, pirating from ship to ship, and laying waste to anyone who got in our way. Those were the good days—before I became the villain I am today; before this,” he said bitterly, gesturing at the wooden bat still propped up on the table.

  “She was a good parrot, and above all else, a good friend, the one soul I thought I could trust—”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Randy asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “I said I could trust her,” Silver said, shrugging.

  Randy glanced at me, but decided to let it go, and the story went on.

  “But Pollyanna didn’t like our living situation. I was able to go off to my quarters every night, take a nice bubble bath, do some knitting, and sleep in a comfortable bed. She, on the other hand, had to spend the cold nights in a cage on deck. She had the dangerous but vital role of ship’s lookout, and she resented every moment of it.

  Of course, if I could have changed things, I would have. But it was there in the backstory, and we all know how that goes.”

  We all silently acknowledged the truth of this. I thought of my father, of the few ill-written and brief memories we shared before my story even began, growing vaguer by the day. I could only imagine Randy was struggling with memories of his wife and his conflicting feelings about those early days before their story truly even began . . .

  “I’m sorry, but are we really talking about a parrot here?” Randy asked.

  Professor Silver ignored him.

  “Pollyanna began to blame me for keeping her locked up. The looks she gave me every night before we went to sleep . . . I’ll never forget them. Pure resentment, it was.” Silver looked off into the distance, the lightning through the windows dancing across his features.

  “And then one night, she escaped. I don’t know how she managed it, but the next morning when I went to let her out, she was simply gone—vanished. I suppose that’s why she never appeared in the book. But her parting gift managed to.” Again, he gestured toward the bat propped up on the table.

  He went on, umbrage thick in his voice.

  “It happened late at night, after a long day of pillaging, plundering, and, to wind things down, a bit of knitting. I was just crawling beneath my covers when a voice spoke from the round cabin window.

  ‘I see you use a down comforter, Long John.’

  I spun around and saw the silhouette of a large bird peering into the room! When the creature shuffled forward, something metal scraped along the windowsill.

  ‘Pollyanna, where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you,’ I told her.

  ‘Why? Because now you don’t have anyone to keep watch over the ship while you sleep? Nobody to lock up at night?’ she retorted.”

  Professor Silver was getting into the theatrics of the story, and I had to stifle a laugh when he did Pollyanna’s voice. So engaged was he in his tale, though, he didn’t notice.

  “And before I knew what was happening, Pollyanna flew into the room, brandishing a knife almost twice her size. The whole thing was a blur—feathers everywhere, blood, the kni
fe slashing, and pain. So much pain. She left me there, bleeding all over the ruined comforter. Luckily I wasn’t far from port, and I made it back. The doctors said I was lucky to have survived after losing so much blood, but they’d have to take the leg. And as they say, the rest is history.”

  He took a long drag from the pipe, and through the salty, green smoke between us, I saw him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. I’d never known how Long John Silver had lost his leg, but now I knew he’d lost so much more—a friend, perhaps even the ability to trust. Despite myself, I felt a little closer to Long John. Sure he was brusque, curt, and often swore like a sailor in class, but he knew about loss, just as I did. Not for the first time or the last, I thought of Beth and how I’d made a promise to myself to take my life into my own hands in honor of her memory. Yet everything seemed to be getting out of control. Perhaps he could relate. There was something I just had to ask him.

  “Professor Silver . . .” I started timidly. He looked at me expectantly. Perhaps he already knew the question on my lips.

  “Why do you have a baseball bat as a leg?”

  He grunted and set the pipe down on the table with a clatter. I don’t know what he wanted me to ask, but evidently this wasn’t it.

  “Well the first leg they gave me splintered up and broke after the first couple hundred reads, didn’t it? The bat’s sturdy. And it hurts a lot more when I stomp on someone’s toes!” he said, banging the thing on the table.

  “Ah,” I said wisely.

  Randy and I sat silently for a minute while Long John refilled his pipe, probably both of us wondering what important, secret message his absurd tale might be hiding, because surely, it had to mean something, right?

  And so we waited for the greater meaning that seems to come with all good stories. We waited and waited, until the storm seemed to even lose interest and things started to calm down outside. Through the thin wall dividing the little homes, I could hear Merlin chuckling about something. And finally, the only sound was Long John’s scratchy inhale and the light rain against the thatched roof above. Apparently there was no message. Silver had said his piece, and it was time to go.