by Andrew Post
“Other universes.”
“We call them vershes, but yeah. The Smocks decided that wouldn’t be conducive to good times for them, so they’d just go ahead and beat us to the punch, use the scratchers as a good scapegoat to crusade against. And, of course, to get people on board with them, they built a school of thought around it. Made their followers believe what they were doin’ was for some god’s satisfaction, a holy act. In snuffin’ out us deviants, they’d be purifying the vershes—all of ’em—for the betterment of humankind, no matter the dimension. A made-to-order theocracy. But, just like anythin’, it boils down to territorialism, really. They don’t want us to start pickin’ at their planet for fixins.” He scoffed. “Bunch of kids screamin’, ‘I saw it first.’”
After my head was done spinning, I said, “How do you and Mosaic Face work all this out?”
“Him and I have been at this for some time now.” Thadius looked east, which I remembered was roughly the direction Mosaic Face was, Pittsburgh, thousands of miles away.
“Would you do that, go to another versh to steal?”
“No. This planet’s big enough—well, it was big enough—that if we shared and shared alike, there’d be no reason to hop vershes to sneak off some fixins. Even if that were an option, I wouldn’t do it. But at the same time, like I said before, ain’t no one here ever done that. We ain’t got that technology to hop vershes. We’re bein’ slapped on the wrist before we even looked at the cookie jar.”
“Wouldn’t call it a slap on the wrist.” I let it all rest for a moment. But my mind remained hung up on something. “How did you know that about my mother?”
He ran a palm down his face. “When you told me what your name was, I kind of impressed myself when I was able to keep it together enough to throw that line back at you. The one about your parents being creative and hopin’ it didn’t skip a generation?”
“I remember.”
“Truth is, I was nearly knocked on my ass. I mean, I got it to a point, that it might be you because of the crutches and your red hair and how you said you had a cauldron, but then when you said your name, well”—he shook his head, laughed humorlessly—“You never told Mosaic Face your name, which was smart, nor did you tell him you were on crutches. I thought maybe you were just a false alarm, some other gal who had a cauldron who was just going to break my heart if you weren’t you.”
“I . . . I don’t think I understand. You were expecting me? I mean, I know Mosaic Face told you I’d be showing up, but . . . how did . . . and about my mom . . . I’m sorry, but I’m like completely freaking lost here.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry yourself about it. Just get ready for a few sleepless nights. Still, I just have to say, girlie, even though you’re about takin’ to all of this as well as we all do—like a pineapple cottons to algebra—I’m really glad you’re here. That it’s you.”
“Why? I’m nobody.”
“Girlie, you are anything but nobody.”
I snorted. “Sure, okay. I mean, thanks for the pep talk, Danny Tanner, but the way you say that makes it sound like I’m . . . I don’t know, related to someone important or you know my future or something.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you about that when we get back to the Siren House. I want to show you my studio, show you how to get in there.” He turned his back to the pit. “We should go. Mosaic Face said it’s migration season in this area now.”
“Migration of what?” I asked, turning away from the pit as well.
“Undesirables,” he answered, walking off, pushing aside a low branch.
“Bandits?”
“No. Undesirables.”
Walking on, Thadius took a deep breath. Sighed. “Ignore that. It just sort of slipped out. Let’s go.”
“Come on. I’m part of this thing now, remember?” I said to his back. “I need to know all of it.”
His shoulders dropped. He turned toward me. “All right, so one would think that because the Smocks burn scratchers that they’re against scratching, right? The creation of things that . . .” Thadius hedged his words in Squishy’s presence.
The squidmouse, thankfully, was too invested in avoiding walking into pricker bushes to hear.
Thadius continued, “Things that wouldn’t, on their own, be present in these parts, so to speak. But, really, I think the Smocks made their own bit of jazz with their cauldrons—things that got out of hand. With no place to put them, they decided to drop them off somewhere.” He twisted his beard. “That or they made them for just such a purpose. Either way, they’re here.”
“So are they”—I bobbed my head toward Squishy—“like him?”
Thadius sneezed a little laugh. “If only.”
“What, then?”
“Big.”
“And . . . ?”
“Fast. Scary Things.”
“But what are they?”
“That’s really what they’re called, girlie. Scary Things.” Thadius rolled his eyes. “And before you say anything, trust me, I know. I didn’t come up with it.”
“Someone says Scary Thing, and I immediately picture a clown with shark teeth,” I said and promptly felt a chill. “Don’t tell me they’re clowns with shark teeth.”
“No, worse. All right, here. Picture this. Take a decapitated elephant, make it three times as big, and where the head used to be, put the mouth of a lamprey.” Before I could ask what a lamprey was: “It’s like a really big leech. Like if an eel and a leech had a baby but with a mouth like a blender.”
I felt my eyes go wide. “And why the hell would they want to make something like that?”
Thadius shrugged. “Beats me. Apparently, they didn’t fancy ’em very much either, because there’s a whole slew down in the Twin Cities. Few packs in Wisconsin too. Heard you can’t take three steps into Chicago without bein’ picked up by a whole mess of ’em—because, yeah, as if they weren’t terrifyin’ enough, they have great sniffers too.”
I pictured a crumbled Sugarburg overrun by three-story tall elephant-lamprey Scary Things using our split-level house on Pinewood Avenue as a litter box.
“How do we stop it?” I asked.
We reached the LeBaron, but Thadius didn’t get in. He leaned on the driver’s side door, talking over the top of the car. “Well, my answering that entirely depends on you, girlie.”
“How?”
“Because you sound to me like you still got one foot on the dock.”
“I’m in. I am.”
“Okay, then,” he said, smirking.
He didn’t believe me.
Thadius helped Squishy up into the car, and then he and I got in.
Night had fully taken the countryside while we were at the pit. The headlights were old, and their jaundiced-looking rays didn’t paint the road ahead very far.
“Mosaic Face has been cookin’ up somethin’ for a few years now,” Thadius said, driving with his knees while he lit his pipe. “Said it’ll make all the difference. He won’t let me in on any of it, of course, but he told me to just wait and he’ll send me everythin’ I’ll need through pony express.” The smoke smelled sweet, but it still choked me.
“So it’s a plan that requires physical equipment,” I presumed, cracking my window, “not just information.”
“Now don’t you go gettin’ all wrapped up in theory makin’ too. Trust me, I’ve tried gettin’ it out of him plenty of times. Refuses to tell me—even whether I’ve guessed right. The wait’s been a killer. I’ll give you some advice: just find somethin’ to busy yourself and hope he don’t get himself found out before he gets whatever he’s cookin’ up. Speakin’ of which, my own personal time filler beckons. Might have to wait until after my intro to show you the studio if you don’t mind stickin’ around a little while.”
“Depends on whether I’m officially part of the fight now.”
“And like I said, that will depend on whether or not you still got one foot on the dock.”
“Nope. Both feet in t
he boat. Firmly planted.” I didn’t doubt committing to this for a second. Not then, that night in Thadius’s car anyway.
“All right, girlie, all right. Now don’t go expectin’ some kind of badge or nothin’, but yeah, I’d say you’re ready to be a part of the fight.” He released his hand from the wheel and put it out for me to take.
His palm was warm, not as calloused as I’d expected. It was odd, shaking the hand of a man, for one, but especially a hand that was missing a thumb.
He grinned, big and wide, pipe stem clenched in his teeth, his face lit blue by the instrument panel. “Welcome aboard.”
Track 9
SEQUENCE ERASE
We pulled into a vacant shipyard. Our headlights cut across a weed-invaded lot and shined on the main building, which looked big enough to house jumbo jets. It stood on the edge of Lake Superior, which at this hour seemed almost like a second starlit sky. The place immediately made me think of Dad. He sometimes took me to work when I didn’t have school. I liked going out on the Sassafras with him, up and down the Mississippi and sometimes out onto the Great Lakes when the salvage company was really hard up for steel.
Thadius pulled the car directly into the massive sky-blue boathouse, nearly to the edge of the space. The boat waited in the cement U, bumping softly against the rubber stoppers on either side. Small, for a building so big. And lonely; this was the only ship here. Well, not a ship. More like a yacht, really.
Thadius didn’t get out but merely clicked a lever on the steering column that made the headlights go superbright. It lit up the lonely little boat, dotted with rust and stained a soft brown where she was probably white at one time. Lit by the dashboard’s weird glow, Thadius smiled.
“One day,” he said, “when everything’s tidied up and I don’t need to hide anymore, that’ll be my way out of here. Just slap some more solar panels on her, get the rudder mechanism cooperative, and off we’ll go.” He slapped one hand across the other and sent it toward the windshield. I didn’t know who we was—him and the boat, alone, or him and someone else. I could tell he didn’t mean me, though.
“One day,” he said again, almost sounding sad. With nothing more, he dropped the car into reverse and pulled us back out on the road, heading toward Duluth. I wasn’t sure why he’d shown me this, but I liked the detour. At least it wasn’t a giant hole in the ground.
* * *
“How did you make him?” The radio was on, and I asked quietly so Squishy wouldn’t hear me from the backseat.
Thadius took his gaze from the road. “You said you knew how to jazz.”
“Well, I mean, of course, I know how you made him . . .” I tried, but it was too late. I’d given up my own jig, ratted myself out. Thadius laughed.
“It’s okay. I knew you was pullin’ my leg. I can jazz,” he mocked, friendly, grinning. “I could see right through you, but I thought, why not give the girl the benefit of the doubt?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t sweat it. Fake it till you make it, right? That’s what I always say. There’ll be plenty of time for you to learn all that. Clearly, you got the gear, so that’s half the battle. Now it’s just learnin’ what you can do with it.”
“Is your studio at the Siren House?” I asked.
We’d come back into Duluth. Empty streets, the occasional smoldering trash fire. A lone dog, skeletal and covered in bald patches, scampered hunchbacked across our back—in the headlights, then disappearing.
“Not exactly,” he said, ignoring a stop sign, “but it’s close by. Gettin’ there’s no problem. On the next block up, there’s a Mega Deluxo Superstore. Where I worked pre-A. Plenty of open space.”
“But don’t people see you going in?”
“Got a solution for that. See, once upon a prohibition, Duluth, being a port town, was naturally a prime spot for a slew of speakeasies. They put the Mega Deluxo right on top of where a distillery used to be. Gettin’ there from the Siren House—which used to be a front for a speakeasy itself way before I ever came into ownin’ it—to the basement of the Mega Deluxo is no problem. How? you may ask. There’s tunnels.”
Tunnels. He said tunnels. I couldn’t fight my smile.
* * *
Everyone had gone home for the night. The Siren House looked like what I imagined it when Thadius had pulled down the plywood over the door and called it his own, years before. Some lights were on still, the slight warmth in the air still carried that follows after a big, crowded room has emptied of bodies. It reminded me of the last day of school, that hanging buzz of a busy place now vacant.
As we went downstairs, having to access the Siren House’s basement through a door in the wine closet behind the bar, Thadius explained that they had to break up the Namaste & Jeff episodes over a bunch of shows because the Thickskulls were working at the Siren House as a second gig. Most of them owned farms or ran stands and carts on the boardwalk. He told me there weren’t many jobs outside of agriculture if you wanted to make a dependable living. It was either that, work on the port, or the alternative. Apparently, the Smocks wouldn’t stand jazzing, but a red-light district was A-OK.
“Farmhand isn’t a position beneath anyone anymore,” Thadius said. “Any fella or gal who has a steady-payin’ job is in high demand. And if that man or woman moved up and became owner of a farm, well, forget about it. He’s a king with a farmer’s tan; she’s a queen in overalls.”
He unlocked a door at the end of the hall. “Can’t get respect for not doin’ anythin’ anymore,” Thadius said as he closed the door behind us. Ahead was a rickety set of stairs. “The age of the famous useless person is gone, thank goodness. People like folks of substance now, who have calluses and know-how. People who can fix shit, do shit. I may run a place of business, but since it’s just one of entertainment and I produce no real product like they do, I might as well be the court jester.” He went down the stairs. I followed. Carefully. The basement was cold, dark. “And, honestly, that’s fine with me. I like what I do, and really I don’t think anyone should expect to get more out of their art than what they get. Ever hear of Oscar Wilde? No? Well, he said all art is quite useless. And even though I’m in the business of making it, I tend to agree. Still, can’t help but feel like I’d explode if I went even a couple of days without doing somethin’, here or over at the studio. It’s an addiction. You do any art, girlie? I mean, I know you write, but . . . never mind. This way. Watch your head.”
I’d been staring at the countless dusty bottles of wine lining the walls. “How do you know I write?”
“You mentioned it before, I think. Here, come on, help me move this shelf.”
Thadius slid aside an empty wine rack, revealing the tunnel. It was disappointingly narrow. I gestured at my backpack on the floor. It was too wide to fit with it on my back, and I couldn’t carry it any other way.
Thadius held his breath a moment, apparently to listen. No footsteps bled down from the dusty rafters above us. “Let him out,” he said and ducked inside.
Squishy walked ahead of me and behind Thadius. He kept glancing around, wringing his hands, and sometimes making this little whimpering sound. It was cold for me, and I was fully dressed. I considered how, in the Dr. Werewolf & Squishy cartoon, the Savannah always looked so sunny and hot, cicada songs accompanied the Southwestern-themed sound track, and cacti dotted the background.
“Here,” I said and pulled out my sweater for him. Took some doing, but he was bundled nicely after we’d put a few knots in it and turned the sleeves into a scarf.
The arched tunnel, all brick, was restricted and damp. A musty fog hung thick, like a flooded basement that hadn’t been properly tended to.
After we were far enough from the basement that no light reached us from behind, Thadius clicked on a flashlight. His bulk swallowed most of the glow, so I just scuttled along, banging my elbows on the mossy walls every few clacks and thumps.
It felt like we were in that tunnel for hours, navigating the gentle bends under stree
ts and buildings. Claustrophobia materialized. “Is there another way we can take next time?”
“’Fraid not, the department store’s all blocked up. I did it this way on purpose. There’s still food in there, and one of the few waterlines in town that hasn’t been messed up runs right underneath it. How do you think the Siren gets her water?”
Don’t care. Just get me out of here. But I remembered that glass I ordered from Beth: surprisingly clean and tasteless. The water on the rig, although triple-filtered, still had a weird brown tint and the last swallow always had a grain or two of sand in it to crunch between your teeth.
The basement of the Mega Deluxo was similar to that of the Siren House . . . brick with green-stained girders running overhead. When Thadius’s flashlight beam cut one way and then the other, I could see where the secret brewery reservoir tanks used to sit. Now it was just modern-looking furnaces inharmoniously installed in the stale, old brickwork space.
Some new-looking metal stairs led into the back stock area of the department store, and Squishy and I started heading that way.
“Hold up a sec.” From a squatty cabinet, Thadius took out a propane tank connected to what looked like a repurposed power washer wand. He struck a match, squeezed the trigger with his other hand, and tossed the lit match out ahead of him—a blossom of red blooming to life that, though I expected it, still started me. He used the homemade flamethrower to send fire up and down underbellies of pipes. “The waterline’s fed from up north, in Canada. Sometimes the water freezes on its way. If the ice clogs, the Siren House won’t have running water.” He couldn’t exactly travel the length of the entire pipeline, spraying it with flames, but he could at least ensure no ice was getting blocked up right here.
Squishy hid behind my leg until Thadius was done.
Once through, Thadius twisted the switch in the gas line and propped the flamethrower against the wall, the nozzle steaming and glowing red.