Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

  * * *

  Illyana and Luornu had been running for over twenty minutes. Both of them were winded and wheezing and drenched in sweat. Their clothes were spattered with mud and their faces and bare hands scratched and bloodied from the many bushes and branches they’d collided with in the darkness.

  And still, when they paused to listen, they could hear the rhythmic splashes in the distance behind them as the Snowman doggedly pursued them.

  “I…I can’t do this…much longer,” Luornu gasped. A stitch skewered her left side. Her throat throbbed. Her calves were starting to cramp, and her upper legs felt as mushy and watery as the muck they were running through.

  “You have to, girl,” Illyana snapped. She, too, was tired and out of breath, but not nearly as badly as Luornu. Illyana had always been sportier and more active than her friend, who spent most of her leisure time reading old books, an activity Illyana found incomprehensible and useless. She’d much rather be swimming or hiking or climbing things. “‘Unless of course you’d rather get all cut up like Bastard Jack.”

  Luornu made a small whimpering sound and somehow found the strength and will to run faster.

  Behind them the Snowman called out, “On this warm swamp night, all is nice and ours.”

  “I just wish he’d stop fucking talking,” Illyana grumbled under her breath. “Fucking loony gibberish is driving me fucking crazy.”

  “It’s terrible!” the Snowman cried. “She said, ‘And then I found my clit in my hand.’ He was sad then, because she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to a superhero named Tony.”

  “Do you think…he’s talking about…himself?” Luornu wheezed.

  “Huh?”

  “Well, I mean…half of what he says…is about a guy and a girl. Do you think…the guy was him? Maybe…maybe he lost the girl…or never got the girl…and it turned him into this?”

  “What are you, a Freud? Who cares why he’s the way he is? I mean, does it matter why he’s trying to kill us?”

  “It might. Maybe…if we knew his problem…we could talk to him…reason with him.”

  “Reason against insanity and guns? Please tell me you’re joking!”

  “It was just a thought,” Luornu muttered.

  “Only to find you I follow the aroma of flowers,” the Snowman called out. “All is glowing with moonlight and love.”

  Illyana frowned, then stopped dead. Luornu skidded to a halt next to her.

  “What are you—”

  Illyana waved a hand at her to shush her. What Luornu had suggested a moment ago, idiotic though it was, had given her an idea. The Snowman wouldn’t respond to reason because he was crazy; but what happened if you faced crazy with crazy?

  It was probably a stupid idea that wouldn’t work, but they couldn’t keep running, and anything was worth a shot at this point.

  “Your mother is a tree!” Illyana shouted. “She is leafy and brown and eats sunlight.”

  The Snowman’s squelching footsteps stopped. It was still too cloudy and dark to see far, but Illyana was certain he wasn’t more than three hundred feet away.

  There was a very long pause. The sedges rustled in the wind. A bullfrog croaked far in the distance.

  “I know the secret,” the Snowman said finally. “You know I know.”

  “Huh?” Luornu mumbled. “What does he know?”

  Illyana shushed her and called, “Stars like pretty glints. Happy times. Why can’t we all just get along?”

  Another, longer pause. Then: “Hh. Do not play these games. They demean us all.”

  Then the squelching running footsteps started up again, faster than ever. The two girls yelped and turned to run again, but when Illyana tried to propel herself forward, her foot skidded in the mud and she slewed around in a half-circle and splatted down onto her right side on the squishy ground. Luornu, who had started to run, tried to abruptly stop to help her friend, but she, too, slid in the mud and crashed down on her butt two feet to Illyana’s right.

  The squelchy footsteps were only two hundred feet away now.

  “Get up! Get up!” cried Illyana as she tried to push herself to her knees. Her hands skidded out from under her and she plopped face-first into the mud.

  “I’m trying!” shrieked Luornu. And so she was. But the mud here was so wet and slick and she so panicky that every time she tried, her arms and legs ended up sliding all over the place. Finally her hand fell on a long, thick fallen branch, one end of which she planted firmly in the mud to use as leverage to boost herself upright. The footsteps were about a hundred feet away now and closing fast.

  Almost sobbing with fear, Luornu climbed the branch, hand over hand as if she were climbing a rope. Her feet threatened to slide out from under her a few times, but whenever they did, she put as much of her weight on the branch as she could and was thereby able to steady herself.

  When she was upright, she grasped the branch with one hand, bent down, and extended a hand toward Illyana. Illyana grabbed it and held on tight as Luornu tried to pull her upright.

  After only a few seconds of sliding and skidding and adjusting their weight in a careful ballet of balance, Luornu realized this wasn’t going to work. Sure, she could help Illyana get to her feet, but not before the Snowman was upon them. From the sound of it, he was only about fifty feet away now. He’d be here in just a few more seconds.

  Even as she thought this, the Snowman called, “Many secrets perching on my lips! Joyous heaven exists near now!”

  “Help me up!” Illyana screamed. “Help me up!” Her terror-wide eyes gleamed white in the darkness.

  “I—” Luornu didn’t know what to do. There was simply no way she could pull Illyana up in time, but she couldn’t leave her friend.

  “Party time go!” the Snowman said, his voice so close now that both Illyana and Luornu yelped and looked around. They could see faint movement in the shadows about thirty feet away. As they watched in horror, the white snowman mask and the white shirt swam out of the darkness, rapidly growing larger and clearer as the Snowman sprinted toward them.

  “Help me up!” Illyana shrieked again. Tears were pouring down her face, making clear tracks in the mud smeared across it. “Help me the fuck up!”

  “I—” Luornu looked down at her friend and thought of her being skinned alive and chopped up like Bastard Jack, thought of her screaming even worse than she was now as the Snowman sliced off her fingers or her breasts or her ears; and then she looked at the Snowman, so close and clear now she could count the fake coal-lumps that composed the mask’s mouth.

  And then she let go of Illyana’s hand.

  “Lu!” Illyana screamed.

  Luornu grasped the branch in both hands and with a scream of fear and anger and defiance, wrenched it from the ground and swung it toward the rapidly approaching Snowman, swung it so hard she started to twist and slide in the mud. At the same moment, the Snowman, barely fifteen feet away now and still running forward, began to raise his pistols at her and Illyana.

  As Luornu felt herself begin to lose her balance, she let go of the branch. For a moment she was sure it would go flying off in the wrong direction. But no, it sailed straight at the Snowman, who tried to dodge it at the same moment he leveled his guns at the girls.

  Luornu didn’t see what happened next—she was too busy splatting into the mud—but she heard two overlapping gunshots, followed by a grunt from the Snowman.

  For a moment she just lay there with her eyes shut and her arms curled around her head and her clammy, mud-soaked clothes clinging to her skin, expecting the fatal bullets to tear into her at any moment.

  But then in a low, surly voice the Snowman said, “This is so very fuck.”

  “Oh!” That was Illyana’s voice. “Oh, look.”

  Something large and heavy smacked down into the mud about a dozen feet away, right about where Luornu had last seen the Snowman.

  Luornu opened her eyes, uncurled her arms from around her head, and looked about. The firs
t thing she saw was Illyana sitting up and staring at the spot where the heavy thing had fallen a second ago. Illyana’s eyes were wide and shocked. And was that a hint of a smile on her lips?

  Luornu followed Illyana’s gaze and saw the Snowman. He was on his knees, his mask-englobed head lolling back as if he were stargazing, his hands hanging limp in his lap, a pistol still loosely held in one of them. The other pistol lay in the mud a foot to his right. There was a small round hole on the lower right side of his dress shirt, directly beneath his ribcage. Around and below the hole, the shirt was dark and shiny with blood. The branch Luornu threw must have knocked his hand back toward him just as he fired.

  “By the Twelve…” Luornu said. “Did I…I mean, I didn’t…I mean…”

  “I can’t pretend to try,” the Snowman said. His voice was small and weak. “I’ll do anything if just to make her stay.”

  With a sigh, he collapsed sideways into the mud. As he fell, the pistol slid from his fingers and tumbled to the ground.

  Luornu and Illyana looked at each other, then back at the Snowman, then at each other again.

  “We killed the Snowman,” Luornu said in a tiny, wondering voice.

  “You killed the Snowman,” Illyana said.

  Before Luornu could respond, Illyana barked out a weird little laugh and started crawling toward the Snowman’s still, silent form.

  Luornu grabbed the back of Illyana’s shirt. “Don’t. Stay here. He might not be—”

  Illyana shrugged off Luornu’s hand and kept crawling.

  “I’m taking a look,” she said.

  Luornu watched her go for a moment, then heaved a small, exasperated sigh and crawled after her.

  Despite her initial enthusiasm, Illyana slackened her pace as she neared the Snowman’s body, and came to a full stop about four feet from him. She studied him carefully and noted that his chest was still slowly rising and falling. She looked around for the first pistol he had dropped. When she spotted it, she quickly crawled over to it, picked it up, and pointed it right at the snowman mask.

  Luornu joined her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just—”

  The Snowman’s chest ballooned out as he sucked in a loud, long wheezing breath.

  “I’m happy but you don’t like me,” the Snowman said, his voice high and tight like that of a devilgrass addict trying to speak while holding the devilgrass smoke in his lungs. “Night close in.” His chest deflated with a whoosh of breath under the mask.

  The girls waited another minute. The Snowman did not move or speak again. His chest did not seem to move, though in the darkness it was hard to be absolutely sure.

  Finally Illyana crawled forward. Behind her, Luornu groaned but followed.

  A moment later they knelt beside the Snowman. They could smell the raw coppery stink of his blood, as well as a fainter but nastier sewage-like odor. This close, they realized he was scrawny and fairly short, maybe only five-foot-six. The mask added a few inches.

  Illyana reached out and grabbed the mask.

  “What are you doing?!” Luornu asked, aghast.

  “Quiet.”

  She lifted the mask off him and set it on the ground. Both of the girls peered in fascination at the true face of the Snowman.

  He was an Ajin, like that Yellow Pawn girl who’d been in Moe’s earlier tonight. His eyes were closed, his lips slack and parted. A faint wisp of a mustache ran across his upper lip.

  “Wow,” Luornu said. “He doesn’t look very—”

  The Snowman’s eyes flew open. The girls shrieked and scrambled backward. His eyes sought them out, fixed on them, and then his lips spread in a broad grin, revealing teeth streaked with blood.

  “Sweet dreams for fishman all come true…” he whispered, and then his eyes lost focus, and his smile faded, and his head lolled, and he was dead.

  “Shit,” Illyana said.

  For a long time they just stared at the body in silence. Finally Illyana turned to Luornu with a huge, goofy smile.

  “You killed the fucking Snowman!” she said. “How fucking cool is that?”

  Luornu gave an embarrassed laugh. “Um, yeah, I guess. So, um, what’re we gonna do now?”

  Illyana pondered that question long and hard. Her eyes fell on the snowman mask, then on the gun in her hand. She smiled.

  “Um…” Luornu unconsciously shied away from her friend a little. Illyana had that smile again, the one she got whenever she was planning something devious.

  Illyana was.