This man was not my brother!
OUTSIDE the prison, we walked silently to our car. As we reached our vehicle, Mab hung his head. “Oh, Ma’am! I hope you can forgive me for leading you on a wild goose chase.”
I glanced his way, intending a stern rebuke, but he looked so woebegone I could not help smiling. Suddenly, the experience seemed inexpressibly amusing. I started giggling.
Mab frowned, hurt. Then, a grin began tugging at the corner of his mouth. He too began to chuckle, and then we were both laughing uncontrollably. As soon as one of us would stop, a glance at the other would set us off again.
“By the North Wind, it’s a good thing we didn’t break him out without talking to him first!” Mab chuckled as we climbed into our car. “Would have been downright embarrassing, breaking out the wrong man!”
“Very true! Remind me of this event, should the issue ever arise again,” I replied. “You made an understandable mistake; the prisoner claimed to be Mephistopheles, and he did look Italian.”
“Mr. Mephistopheles’s trail still leads to Chicago, Ma’am. He’s here somewhere, or, at least, he was here recently. Perhaps we should take a day or two to investigate. Clues might come to light here that I’d miss if I were back home in Oregon.”
I closed my eyes and prayed to my Lady. She had brought this matter to my attention, I had no doubt She would help me carry out my duties. A sense of urgency, of growing danger, had begun nagging at my thoughts, and yet, as I prayed, I felt enveloped by Her calm constant presence. This feeling of peace came with no specific instructions. My Lady was gracious, all-wise, and a very present help in trouble; however, She only spoke to Her Handmaidens when it suited Her divine purpose. After pondering, I interpreted this to mean that we should stay here in Illinois.
Of course, had I been a Sibyl, I could have just asked Her directly and received a clear, unambiguous answer.
“Time is of the essence, Mab,” I said, opening my eyes. “There’s no point in our wasting time returning to Oregon, just to rush back again as soon as another clue turns up. Let’s go to our Chicago offices and have the—whatever they are calling clerks nowadays—arrange a hotel for us. Then, you can continue searching for my brothers while I check in with the head office.”
LEAVING the prison, we drove into Chicago, a city of wonders! Long ago, in Milan, I lived in a castle with a clock tower seventy yards tall. Even today, no building in Milan rivals that tower. Yet, seventy yards was like a child’s toy compared to the soaring marvels of glass and steel in downtown Chicago. The Sears Tower reached over 1,450 feet. While it dwarfed the buildings around it, the shorter ones also reached heights unimaginable to the men of my childhood. I never tired of gazing up at them.
But, it was not just the buildings. I’ve lived in many cities during my long life: Milan, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Alexandria, to name just a few. Despite their various marvels, they had one thing in common—they stank. The inhabitants routinely dumped their chamber pots and rotting garbage into streets already buried under piles of horse manure. One could not walk in these cities without ruining one’s shoes—sometimes, one’s entire outfit.
Today’s tall looming skyscrapers rose over firm dry streets, clean except for occasional mud or litter. And the color! Ancient cities were bright on festival days, but flags and banners soon faded. Not so the brilliant signs and eye-boggling billboards of this modern age. The difference between the stinking towns of old and the glorious metallic expanses of today staggers the mind! I would never have believed men could produce such magic if I had not lived to see it with my own eyes.
And to think that none of it would have been possible without Father and Prospero, Inc.!
I ARRIVED at our Chicago office just after ten. My next hour was swallowed by company business. I commandeered the Branch Director’s office and dealt with problems that had arisen since the morning. Many of our business concerns were unusually busy due to the Christmas season, and half our branches claimed to have emergencies only the CEO could resolve. Finally, I gave instructions to have all mundane troubles dealt with by the appropriate vice president and to forward to me only issues involving the five Priority Accounts.
Our company offices had been in a fashionable district when we opened them in 1910, but times change. Now, the area was so dilapidated, I hesitated to walk the eight blocks to the hotel; however, I felt a sudden intuition that I should walk the distance. After arranging for our bags to be sent ahead, Mab and I set out on foot.
We strolled through the windy streets of downtown Chicago, past delicatessens and small stores selling jewelry or cameras. Winter was nearly upon us, and the weather here was true to the season. Mab pulled up the collar of his gray trench coat and lowered the brim of his black fedora, hoping to protect the back of his neck from the icy cold. I wondered how much protection an Aerie Spirit or, in particular, the carnal manifestation of the Nor’easterlies, actually needed from the wind.
The cold was not particularly disturbing to me either. Among the many charms woven into the emerald satin of my enchanted tea gown was a protection against the chill brought by any wind. However, a high-necked Edwardian gown tended to draw odd looks these days, especially if worn unadorned in frigid weather. So, I had added a white trench coat and a matching fedora, which fit snuggly over the Grecian twist into which I had pinned my silver-blond hair. Catching our reflections in a plate glass window as we walked along in our trench coats and hats, I thought Mab and I made a jaunty pair.
The morning rush hour had ended. A few well-dressed citizens bustled past, but the majority of our fellow pedestrians were unkempt and shivering. Almost every unattended alley or doorway had an occupant sleeping in it, huddled beneath newspaper or an old blanket. Across the road, a man in a bright fez and a brown overcoat stood in an archway. His placid face could have belonged to anyone—a short-order cook, an accountant, a department-store clerk, or a stock broker—except that one eye was significantly smaller than the other. As he met my gaze, something about his expression reminded me of the past, of many people I had met over the long years: people who worked for me, both aerie and human; people I had known in my childhood and long forgotten. Disturbed, I averted my gaze and pressed on.
Others, more adventurous, dared the cold to panhandle for their dinner. A lone woman with a red kerchief over her head and earrings the size of my palm sang beside a radio. An open cardboard box on the ground before her held a scattering of coins. Her voice was eerie and lilting. Mab tossed a bill into her box and another into the instrument case of a slim figure in a blue poncho and a sombrero, who sat on an old tomato crate, playing the lute.
As we approached the door of the hotel, the lute player began a new tune, singing in a high tenor:
“The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate
Lov’d Mall, Meg and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;
For she has a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, Go hang!
She lov’d not the savor of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch:
Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang!
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
The song brought a smile to my lips, despite its lewd nature. Many years had passed since I last heard it, outside performances of The Tempest. By Shakespeare’s grace, it had outlasted many of its more deserving contemporaries. Yet, it seemed oddly charming to hear an old familiar tune, even a bawdy one, on the streets of modern Chicago. I walked back to listen.
The lutenist’s head rose. A slim pale hand pushed stringy black hair from large brown eyes that slowly grew round with fear.
“Miranda?” My brother Mephisto peered out from beneath the sombrero. “What are you doing here?”
“Why I . . . I’m looking for you!” I replied.
Mephistoph
eles was slight and lithe with warm brown eyes. He was also filthy. Dirt and oily grime coated his poncho. His matted stringy black hair had not been washed, or perhaps even combed, in months. His cheap sneakers were riddled with holes. Through one hole protruded the big toe of his left foot, the nail of which was rotten and caked with pus. And he stank, abominably.
He sat on the tomato crate gazing at me fearfully. Then, a glint of comprehension sparked behind the emptiness in his eyes. He leapt to his feet and flung out his arms to embrace me, whooping with joy. The lute he had been playing flew from his hands and crashed upon the cement sidewalk, shattering into several pieces.
“You found it!” Mephisto cried, oblivious of the lute. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “You found it!”
“Found what?” I threw up my hands to ward him away as he tried to kiss me. The stench was unbearable. Still, I was happy to see he was in one of his cheerful periods. Mephisto stared at me in wonder, as if amazed anyone could be thinking of a subject other than what was on his mind.
My initial shock at encountering my long-lost brother on a random side street faded the instant I recalled that my Lady had prompted me to walk in this direction. That was how the Lady of Spiral Wisdom worked, subtly and indirectly, yet leading me always onward to my goal.
“My staff, Miranda! You found my staff?” His voice rose to end on a hopeful note.
“No.”
“Oh.”
Mephisto stepped back and hung his head. I brushed at the grime that now clung to my white coat with a handkerchief I found in my pocket. Several passers-by stopped to look at the shattered lute where it lay upon the concrete, a tangle of splinters and strings. Their attention drew my brother’s.
An unarticulated moan came from Mephisto’s lips. He rushed over and scooped up the broken lute, cradling the pieces in his arms and keening softly. He looked back despairingly toward me, his pathetic face streaked with tears.
“Not my lute! Not my lovely lute, too,” he cried. Laying his cheek against the broken neck of the instrument, he whispered, “Who did this, my lovely? Who did this to you?”
Big wet tears rolled slowly over his hollow cheeks. Watching the pathetic figure of my weeping brother, I contrasted him in my mind’s eye with the handsome statue of his youthful self.
Mab stepped up beside me and spoke in a low voice. “The poor sucker doesn’t even remember that he threw it.”
“It breaks my heart, Mab.”
“Didn’t know you had one, Ma’am.”
I stepped forward and put my hand on Mephisto’s grime-caked arm. “It’s all right, Mephisto. I’ll buy you another one.”
“I don’t want another lute. This was my lute,” he began.
“The next one will be yours too.”
“. . . I’ve had my lute almost my whole life.” A haunted look came into his eye. “It’s the one my mother gave me; my mother’s been dead over four hundred years. It’s the lute I played for Queen Elizabeth.”
I stepped away, back to where Mab stood. He was squinting at the fragments of lute.
“Was that really a fifteenth-century lute?” Mab asked.
“Most likely he lost that one long ago and forgot he’d replaced it.” I shrugged. “But it is possible.”
Mephisto began walking. He wound his way through the pedestrians until he came to a trash can. There, he unstrung the strings from the neck and body and ceremoniously lowered the broken remains into the wire bin. Wandering back to the tomato crate, he sat with his hands over his face.
In a tired and ragged voice, he said, “Breaks. Stolen. Falls apart. Everything I love gets destroyed. My staff is gone. I can’t find my Bully Boy. My friends don’t recognize me. A woman killed my cat with a car. She said she was sorry afterwards. Does that make it okay? All the things I love get destroyed, and there is nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do to protect them.”
Mab spoke softly in my ear. “I think he’s forgotten us.”
I nodded.
Mab lowered the brim of his hat. “He’s not going to hear any warning you give him, Ma’am, and he’s in no position to respond if he did.” When I did not answer, Mab continued, “Mr. Prospero told me nothing could be done for him. He said Mephisto resisted every attempt your family made to help him.”
“It’s true. Every time Mephisto seemed to improve, he would suddenly grow obstinate and refuse to continue his treatment. We tried locking him up, but sooner or later he’d escape or one of his supernatural beast friends would show up to break him out. Eventually, Father washed his hands of the matter and said we had to let him go his own way.”
“Let’s go then,” said Mab, “There’s nothing else we can do.”
I started to turn away, then hesitated.
“There’s one big difference between the past and now.”
“What’s that, Ma’am?”
“Normally, Mephisto has all sorts of supernatural friends to help him. When he has his staff, no number of ordinary thugs could overwhelm him. Without it? He may be faster and stronger than a normal mortal, but in his current condition, he could be taken out by a bum with a knife.” Frowning, I contrasted in my mind once more the picture of my brother, broken and dirty on the sidewalk, with the intelligent young man portrayed by his statue. “We can’t leave him like this, Mab!”
“We can’t do anything for him here,” Mab gestured at the sidewalk. He waved his hand in front of his face to dissipate the awful stink.
Walking over to Mephisto I grabbed his arm and dragged him to his feet.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
I HAD just finished my soup and was beginning on my salad when the door into the men’s bedroom finally opened. A wet and bedraggled Mab came slouching into the parlor of our suite. Mab had been saddled with the unpleasant job of stripping Mephisto down and piling him into the shower, while I went out to purchase a new wardrobe for my brother. On the way back, I had stopped at a theater costume shop, where I had found a royal blue surcoat emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis, left over from a performance of The Lion in Winter. It was my hope Mephisto would accept it as a replacement for the ghastly poncho. As best I understood, he had started wearing ponchos to begin with as a replacement for his royal tabard.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Admiring his new duds in the mirror,” Mab growled. “He’ll be out here soon enough, once he smells the food.”
As Mab pulled the silver dome off his lunch, the door opened again to admit my brother.
Mephisto looked like a different man. He was clean. His newly-cut hair formed a halo of wavy dark curls around his head. He wore a loose, black, Russian shirt and black trousers with high black-leather boots. Over the black clothes, he had thrown the royal blue surcoat emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis in silver. When he came forward and embraced me, he smelled pleasantly of Old Spice aftershave. I had not seen him look so neatly turned out in many, many years.
Mephisto leapt back. He spread his arms and threw back his head, assuming the pose he had immortalized in his statue of himself.
“Don’t you recognize me?” he cried happily.
“Of course, I recognize you, Mephisto.” I looked him over once, and then gestured toward the food cart. “Ah . . . why don’t you pull up a chair and eat your lunch? You look famished.”
He really did, too. He was thin, almost emaciated. I wondered if he had eaten in days.
Mephisto pulled up a straight-backed chair to the serving cart of food room service had provided and began devouring the fare. He inhaled whole slices of pizza and devoured sandwich halves in a single bite. His eyes, however, remained fixed fondly, though warily, on my face.
“So?” he asked happily, his mouth full.
“I believe something may have happened to Father,” I began. “He sent me a note that suggests he ran afoul of powers he could not control. His message asked that I warn the family if I did not hear from him. When I found the message, I sent Aerie Ones to
his house on the island, but he hadn’t been back since he left to come to America in September. So, I’m warning the family. Beware the Three Shadowed Ones.”
“They’re after our staffs!” Mephisto exclaimed.
“How did you know?”
“They took mine, didn’t they?”
“I thought yours was stolen by some strumpet you took home for the night.”
“That’s because you didn’t stick around to hear the whole story,” Mephisto shot back accusingly.
“You were drunk.”
“You were rude.”
This was getting us nowhere.
“Someone broke into the house and . . . did some damage,” I said, returning to the earlier topic. It was too soon after the lute fiasco to tell Mephistopheles about the shattered statues. “I believe it was one of these Three Shadowed Ones, and he was after our staffs.”
“I told you!” Mephisto turned to Mab. “Didn’t I tell her?”
“That’s not all, Mephisto,” I continued. “The creature that broke into the mansion . . . it was an incubus.”
“What?” exclaimed Mephisto
“A Power of Hell!”
“Oh, them.” He reached for a biscuit.
A shiver ran down my spine. Was Mephisto so far gone he no longer feared the servants of Hell? If so, he was not just out of it, he was dangerous to be near! Either way, it was time to do what I came to do and go.
“Look, I’ve given you Father’s warning. Now, you know. Father said to ‘keep close the gifts he had given.’ In your case, the warning came too late. All the same. I thought you should know.”
“Who else have you warned?”
“No one yet. You’re the first.”
Mephisto wiped his mouth with one of the napkins provided. “What a good move! Now you’ll have me to help you find the others.”
“Great comfort that is,” muttered Mab, from where he sat hunched over his lunch. Apparently, he was still disgruntled from the drenching he had taken bathing my brother. Mephisto regarded Mab, and then turned back to me, cocking his head.
Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I Page 6