“Dear god, boy, now look at what you have done.”
Fennel stared down at the change as it found its way gently into the salt worn cracks. He didn’t search for it at all but instead just stared after it in wonder. “You don’t mind picking it up for me, do you, sir?” he asked, looking up. The solicitor’s face was aghast.
“You’re worse than I thought,” the man said, moving to walk past Fennel and back to the work at hand. “Be off with you!”
Fennel’s small hand grabbed him by the leg, his little fingers gripping into the silks that comprised the man’s fine suit. Below the silks he felt the meat of the leg and below that the humble bones of a mortal man, too mortal to handle him.
The solicitor looked down with a shred of fear on his lips and a shred of disgust. “Let go of me, you little wharf rat!”
Fennel stared up, still on one knee, not having moved one iota. “I’m afraid, dear sir, you only make matters worse. Your hostility only encourages me. It’s like momma’s fine cooking. Makes you just want to take a bite.”
And with that, Fennel did just that. He bit into the man’s leg making him howl in pain. The meat went into Fennel’s tiny teeth splitting under the pressure of a mythical jaw. Silk, bones, blood, tendons, veins, and pain. Blood spurted from his mouth and Fennel pulled back in victory. The man fell to the wooden dock below madly screaming and gripping his leg. Fennel brushed himself off and tipped his hat at the sailors who were laughing hysterically at the shenanigans below.
“It’s true. That was great fun. But don’t think any of you is excused from this. You’re all next. Every one of you!” And with that, Fennel headed into a most poorly planned battle.
Meanwhile, the woman was yelling as the two men tried desperately to pin her down on the ground. The room smelled of termite victory and the lanterns that hung on the wall barely illuminated. It was nearly dark in the shack.
“Shut 'er up, Jangles. This one’s a real screamer. She just won't shut the hell up. Listen, lady, we ain't gonna harm ya, we just gotta get ya outta the way. You’re messing up the work we gotta do. Cap says tie ya up and that’s what we going to do. Don’t worry, your ladiness won’t be harmed by the likes of us. You can stay the virgin ya clearly are.”
The other sailor laughed as he returned to the two with a long pile of rope. They were going to tie her up.
The woman’s eyes were fire. She was filled with hate. “You call that a joke?" she snarled. "Hey, Jangles, tell this one, he is about as stupid as his mommy always said he was. You boys don’t know what you’re doing. You would tie your own self up if the cap’n told you to. Do you ever wonder about life or the next day or what makes you actually tick? No, you’re just like my last husband. Robots. Men. Idiots. Robots walking the planet. Beware the zombies. Here they come. Do you see those people you are loading on the ship? Who do you think that is for? Why is that? What is that? Do you think? Hey, Jangles, do either of you think?”
“Ya gotta shut 'er up,” said the one named Jangles. The other one reached down, pulled off his shoe, then his sock and then proceeded to stuff the foul cotton attire in the woman’s mouth. Isabella waited. She didn’t want to interfere unless she had to, but her heart went out to this wild beast of a lady. She was like Isabella but different. She was, in a sense, in the world. She was fighting it. Pushing on it. Resisting it. Crying in it. She was the water and her tremendous tragedy filled Isabella’s heart with a fever. And then, quick as lightning, something even more remarkable transpired.
Without warning or smell, the entire shack literally exploded. Shards of wood crashed and exploded everywhere. Isabella briefly saw both sailors flying through the sky as though launched from a catapult—their bodies bent in exasperated pain. A massive shrouded figure grabbed the screaming lady. It was huge. If it was a man, it was hard to say—more like a beast. It had exploded through the front door, grabbed the woman and then with a launch of its enormous legs, headed straight up into the sky. It hovered briefly above and Isabella could tell, whatever it was, took a brief second to feed on the water. The water that filled the air from the howls of the mad and the howls of the woman all moved through the air and entered into the body of that creature hovering high up in the night.
Isabella wanted to shout out, to say hello, to call on it for answers, but nothing came out. She was prone, surprised and off guard and with one smooth motion, the creature disappeared into the sky—the brief spectral figure of their silhouettes barely visible in the black Barrenwood night. They were gone without much of a trace. All that was left, sitting heavy on the air of sawdust and sea salt, was the pungent odor of gasoline.
Chapter 3
She woke in a flash. The cave was still dripping and the Aliber River was still flowing. The mosquitos were out, their long noses filled with the blood of deer and vermin. She flew off her sleeping mat and went straight out toward the water. When she needed to think, she had to have her frail feet in mud, had to feel it squishing between her toes. She really needed to ruminate. Her mind was a beehive, buzzing with ideas ever elusive. Something most peculiar had happened last night and it wasn’t her brother throwing seven sailors overboard.
Her feet sank into the river bottom and algae and moss pushed up around her legs. She paced back and forth as the pull of the river played on the edge of her skin. She could smell the last vestiges of twilight and feel the humidity gradually diminishing with the farewell of the invidious sun. Thinking is a rhythm, a movement. She had to have it to get the gears moving. She paced to and fro and felt the waking of her brother back on his mat. She couldn’t stop thinking about that creature that had rescued the screaming woman. That figure, whatever it was, she knew for certain, had flown. It had disappeared in the hair’s-breath-of-a-second up into the sky, blasting that cabin into smithereens. It had been for all intents and purposes supernatural—and that kind of behavior had always been, for as long as she had ever known, the sole territory of herself, her brother and that wretched drunk Marty. What that meant, in the short, she knew, was that she and her dear brother were not alone.
But it wasn’t just that it could fly. While that was most curious indeed, there was something much more engrossing. That creature had come for that woman—that woman that spoke in harmony with Isabella’s thoughts, that woman that screamed against the world and pushed up hard against it. That massive creature hadn’t rescued one of the many sailors that Fennel had most inexcusably tossed off Le Bateau Ivre. It hadn’t flown down in heroic anguish over the biting of the solicitor’s silk leg. No. It had rescued her. It had come to her calling. It knew, as Isabella did, that this woman was special beyond measure. It knew, with divine inspiration, that this woman saw the ghosts that walked this somnambulist plane. This creature—that moved with such blinding speed she had only sensed the one thing it left behind: the smell of gasoline—had been attracted by the water.
“Disgusting as ever. As ever,” said Fennel as he brushed his teeth and walked up to her in his flip-flops. He would never deign to put his feet in this mud. “Let me guess, you want to go find that woman. Don’t tell me, I know. You’re a sucker for a singer, my dear.”
He was in good spirits. He felt he had made some strange victory over the world with his exploits, although the boat itself had nevertheless sailed away. He couldn’t stop that. He merely inconvenienced it. But Fennel wasn’t much of a big picture thinker in that regard. He had given it a good fight and enjoyed the encounter.
“Fennel, I dare say, we might have had a brief encounter with one of our own last night—that mysterious crash on the building—it was something like us.”
“Tut tut, dear sis. I know you. I know what you want. You want company and I take it to heart. I’m just not good enough for you. Make it up, if you will. It matters not. I admit something strange this way came, but it never can claim to be us all the same. That’s my humble opinion. I do appreciate your poetry, however. It’s eloquent and sincere. And frankly it goes well with the gruesome lack of hygiene.
That being said, I want to get the day going.”
With that, Fennel went back into the cave. He took much more time to get going than she as he had a lot of prepping to do. Isabella wasn’t surprised at his reaction. He wasn’t curious like that. He had his own version, but the desire for camaraderie generally stopped at Isabella and Marty. Three was a crowd, but it was his crowd. Four was beyond the pale. In that, he was an awful pain. He just couldn’t let things flow. Isabella was too excited at the current prospect and she had to talk to someone.
She made her way back to her desk in the cave. Pencils, notes, drawings, and ink stains abounded. She got out some parchment and wrote out a letter to the Persembe Sisters. She needed information. They had to find it for her. That would at least be a start.
“Fennel, I think that creature came for that woman’s water.”
Fennel was picking lint off his overcoat, consistently looking at the mirror to see how he looked. “Let me think on that,” he said. “Perhaps. Perhaps. But don’t get all spun out thinking about it. I know you better than you do. Stay with me and my vengeful pursuit. It will be more comforting and perhaps more adventurous.”
“Congratulations but you aren’t working with me in the slightest. Oh, never mind!”
Isabella stopped this train of thought. She knew it was a non-starter with her brother and, at times, he scared her. He could be cruel when he was uncomfortable.
Fennel looked up from his jacket. Something about her giving up on that particular subject irked him. “You aren’t alone, sis. You have me. And if you don’t start recognizing that, I’m going to throw you in the river too!”
Fennel smacked his sister upside the head and danced in front of the mirror. He then clapped his hands together and jumped over to Isabella.
“You are such a romantic, my sis. I almost think you invent these games to make life more interesting for yourself. Myself, I am a pragmatist. I know all we have is this lame town. I am just going to un-lame it by acting as sheriff and clown. Once that statue goes up, people are going to simply see themselves differently.”
Isabella shook her head in frustration. She really shouldn’t have started this conversation with him in the first place. She knew his worldview quite well.
“Very well, but it isn’t boredom I am worried about. We do not have much time before Marty comes laughing himself through the door and I for one have no interest in being shoved back into a log.”
Fennel shook his head. The thread of this conversation was slowly bringing down his usually chipper mood.
“Thinking like this will surely get you back in the log.”
Isabella stood up and dunked her feet in the footbath. She was excited now. She was talking herself into a new adventure.
“Oh Fennel, as fierce as the Raven is, he is a rather timid beast, wouldn’t you say? Let's not let Marty’s wrath prevent us from following our inner calling. You can solve the city and I will find its fire exit. And furthermore, whether you admit it or not, that creature that came flying down from on high, told me one thing that I always suspected: we are not alone. There are others like us out there.”
“Wait, did you hear that?” asked Fennel as he finished lacing his shoes and raced out the door. He held his hand to his ear and stared into he glistening night.
“What?” asked Isabella, following.
“It’s the night. It is speaking to me. It is saying . . . wait, what is it? Yes. That’s it. The night tells me that you are losing it. Amazing! I think it might be right! You are losing it! The cat is out of the bag at last!”
He gave his sister a shove and ran to the boat. Isabella regained her balance, shook her head, stowed the letters in her pocket, and met her brother in the boat. He had already put the needle on the record and out came a low song of Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust. They let the record play and sailed down the river without a word. As chatty as they were, they also appreciated the music serenading the marsh. It tempered them like a finger on a lizard’s belly.
Pulling into port, they saw the silhouette of Heinrich. Ever dutiful, he had met them for many moons, to tie up the boat and await their needs. He caught the rope as Fennel tossed it and helped the twins disembark.
“Heinrich, I have these letters for the Persembes. Can you please get them delivered at once? They are of the most utmost of importance.”
“Very well, Lady Isabella. I am sure they will be most pleased to hear from you,” he said, twisting his moustache, as was his custom.
“Heinrich,” said Fennel, playing with something in his pocket. “Can you have these delivered to the Persembe sisters as well?”
Heinrich put out his hand and Fennel delivered a fresh bluefish that wiggled in his paw. Heinrich recoiled immediately and Fennel laughed hysterically. “I’m sorry ol' chap. I shouldn’t do that to you, but I couldn’t resist. Please forgive me. I am still suffering from the malady of appreciating my sister's company.”
Heinrich squished up his nose. Isabella, for the hundredth time that evening it seemed, shook her head in bewilderment.
“I should mention you have a guest this evening. Mr. Barrister Bruno has stopped by the restaurant and was inquiring as to whether you two would be making an appearance.”
Isabella’s eyes perked up. Just as I had hoped, she thought. “What do you say, brother, a little time with our war vet?”
Fennel shook his head. He had no intention of meeting the Barrister. He felt he was too chatty. The way Isabella talked about him, he could imagine being bored to tears as the old man waxed nostalgic over his glory years. Fennel wasn’t one for sitting around and hashing out old tales. He was perhaps more kinetic than Isabella in that way.
The Barrister was one of Isabella’s many pet human projects. That’s at least how Fennel thought of them. Little projects that she would at some point put back on the shelf where they would gather dust. She got bored easily though she would never admit it. She liked to think of herself as sympathetic. Fennel, on the other hand, just couldn’t be bothered with this kind of deep interest mercurialness. He had to keep it moving. Had to have parts of the world in motion. There was his longstanding plan with the toxin that was going to help him do exactly what Isabella had been rambling about—solve the riddle of the city. (Well, by solve, he meant destroy.)
Barrister Bruno was waiting at the bar. Unbeknownst to Fennel, he had been summoned clandestinely by Isabella the night previous. She had already figured that she would need to speak to him about matters as soon as she saw the lunatics being loaded on the ship. This business about the riddle of the city was not going to slip away. She was dead set on it and when she got her mind onto something that was it.
The Barrister was in his late fifties, a man of many wars with a trimmed white beard, his brain a receptacle of knowledge, wise and prosaic. A man of constant dinner parties, constant jokes, constant drinks, constant gossip, constant love affairs, he strode about town with knowledge of every nook. He had traveled to Crail as a journalist for a five and dime newspaper to monitor the last anarchist revolution and was so overcome with its romance that he had, now famously, joined in—famously because he had written about it in several books that had made him a Barrenwood celebrity; his times throwing dynamite to stop the trains of the fascist government; his falling out with the anarcho-syndicalists about nationalism. He now spent his time like an ex-patriot of who knows where going from dive bar to House Imbetta, spinning his charming tales of battle, tortured love and metaphysical heroism.
Isabella had encountered him in an editorial she had read titled If they could only remember. It was a story about how the Mayor and City Council had forgotten the glorious claims on which Barrenwood had been founded. That amnesia wasn’t just a sign of old age but a sign of old government. TheBarrister had seen firsthand what happens to a place that forgets the torment that spawned it. Out in Cairn, the earth was soaked in the blood of benign tyrants, not unlike the United States of America, a revolutionary culture that had forgotten its roo
ts. Isabella had read it, slammed the newspaper down in the cave and had said to Fennel, "We will find this man!"
He wasn’t hard to find, of course. Isabella merely inquired with Heinrich who had directed her to Catfish Saturday where the Barrister held court. She had introduced herself and the Barrister had been intrigued, he had scooted her off to a private room to continue their conversation. He said he had heard rumors that she existed and that he was overwhelmed that it may, in fact, be true. He had stared at her most intently and said, “From the dust of stars comes a child of ever.” From there, their friendship had grown quite close.
Fennel knew the time had come to bid adieu.
“Don’t try to dupe a duper, my sis. I know you summoned that ol' coot here and you also know I have no intention of being bored to tears while he talks about the greatest toreador or something. So have it your way. I will head off on my own. It doesn’t bother me, you know.”
Isabella smiled at her brother. His words made her sad. He was smart and she wished he just would let these things go. But he would probably resent her for the rest of the night for breaking their unsaid bond of cohabitation.
She patted his hand. “You’re too smart for your own good, o’ Raven. Let's think of tonight as a homework night, a chance to get some things done before you know who returns.”
She winked at Fennel and Fennel demurred. He turned back at her and punched her in the shoulder. “You’ve lost it. I think I mentioned that.” With that, Fennel sprinted out of the building and out toward the city, leaving Isabella to meet with the Barrister. She made her way toward the bar where the room was half full of people visiting from far outside the Barrenwood gates.
“Isabella, so glad to have your company this evening,” the Barrister said as she made her appearance at the bar. He sat fat in a white cotton shirt. The numerous large rings on his fingers glinted as they turned the bourbon on ice in his hand.
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