Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  The Raven waits for no-one. Fennel bashed through the front door, the sound of which scared the entire occupants.

  “Gather round, gather round. A Eureka moment has happened!” screeched Fennel.

  He ran to the radio and turned it off. He rushed down to the basement and took the clothes out of the mother’s hands, he ran up the stairs and shook the children out of bed, and then he ran down into the living room and proceeded to bang his cane on the floor.

  “Gather round I say!” the Raven screeched and the family didn’t quite know what was going on. Granddad Toby remained on the couch. His eyes squinted and he stared at Fennel as though in a dream. Marisa Never came running up the stairs and the kids came running down the stairs to stare at Fennel from their perch. No one said a thing but instead just stared intently at the strange young boy causing a scene in their living room.

  “Dr. Never! You are being summoned to the family gathering!” shouted Fennel and sure enough Dr. Eldridge Never made his way past his two boys to the living room. He immediately recognized the odd child from many nights' past.

  “Persifell Pemberton?” said the doctor in a bit of shock.

  Fennel looked up to see his prey standing dead in his sights. There he was—the jailer, the teacher, the brother’s keeper, standing in all his deadpan pretension. The sight of him stirred the Raven into full bloom. Fennel raised his arms and swirled around in a circle in the living room as though he was, in fact, a bird.

  One didn’t have to be a doctor to know something wasn’t quite right about Persifell Pemberton. Eldridge Never could feel fear rising up inside him. Something primeval had been let loose in his sanctuary.

  He took a breath. “Children, go back to your room. Marisa, could you please take granddad upstairs. Mr. Pemberton and I have business to discuss.”

  Fennel grabbed one of the small boys, Davie, by the hand. “Be a good lad, will you? Sit right there on the couch. I think you should see this. Daddy is going to finally grow up. Don’t you want to see that?”

  “Don’t touch my boy!” shouted the doctor rushing in to take Fennel’s hands off his child.

  Fennel’s eyes were as yellow as smeared sun at sunset and gave the doc a good whack across the head with his cane. The doctor went tumbling to the floor and the room erupted with the wailing of the children and Marisa Never. Davey went running up the stairs, his small feet playing a beat of retreat.

  “Stop it, you beast!” shouted Marisa.

  The volume only made Fennel’s fury grow. Marisa Never came running at Fennel and he twisted his body to let her momentum carry her across the room. She bounced off the wall and fell, a sack, to the floor.

  “Tut, tut, Little Miss Muffet, you really don’t want to tempt the Raven. Not at this moment. You are not my quarry, but I am unpredictable. Do that again, and I will punish you as equally as I will your pedantic spouse.”

  The two boys sat at the top of the stairs, hands covering their sweet frightened faces, and looked down at Fennel as he paced over the body of the fallen Dr. Never.

  “I won’t regret this, you realize. I am a force of nature and you only pretend to be one. Justice isn’t cruel. It is just a force that acts down on you. I am not after you, Dr. Never. I’m following a trail of popcorn and you are but one kernel. I am eating you now. Are you or aren’t you responsible for the carting off of the mad onto the drunken boat? Is it your organization that is doing the rounding up?”

  The doctor looked up from his sprawled out position on the floor. “Was one of them your relation or associate? We can always track them down for you if you have a grievance, Mr. Pemberton.”

  “I do have a grievance!” said Fennel, slamming his cane onto the floor near Dr. Never’s head. “The entire flock is my relation as they are yours, you myopic fool. You need not answer, I know it is you that is coordinating this massacre.”

  The doctor shifted to sit up on his legs. He was rubbing his head as it pained him most severely. “If I may interrupt, it is entirely the opposite of a massacre. These are patients that we are retrieving. They need proper medical consideration.”

  “Dr. Never. This word medical, it is misleading so often. Who needs it and who doesn't. If all need it, then none do as well. You can’t cure the mind, my friend. But it matters not. Tell me, please, I would very much enjoy knowing, who is it that pays the bills at your institute? This isn’t entirely your idea. I know that much.”

  The doctor looked up from his sprawled out position on the floor. His eyes were sad. The fight in him was already gone. He was a deflated balloon. It made Fennel laugh.

  “Such a wussy you are. Okay. You don’t want this to continue I know. Just tell me, who pays the bills? I’m following a trail here. I’m a detective, but I am investigating crimes that humanity commits without knowing it. Your laws, your health codes, your curriculum, your mores, they are of no concern to me. Well, that isn’t true. They are of concern to me in that many of them go against any higher sense of reason. Be that as it may, I leave most of that up to you to do as you will. What do I care if idiot number one ruins the life of idiot number two? That is not the kind of skirmish I tend to intercede on. But I will not sit by while people like you haul off the brilliant, the dreamers, those in touch with the actual free spirit that gives the earth its juice and flavor. I can’t tolerate the arrogance, the hypocrisy, the pathetic claims of benevolence. I am the Raven and I am here to place on trial those responsible for robbing the world of its mystery. It is a crime that must be met with punitive actions much like you feel on your saggy frame. So tell me, who pays the bills?”

  The doctor tried his best to shake the cobwebs out of his head. He couldn’t comprehend what was happening, but he knew that he had to get this ferocious child out of his house. He had to protect his family and all he had ever possessed as a weapon were his words.

  “My underwriters are straightforward. It is on public record. It isn’t even a secret. You didn’t need to come here to find out who pays the bills. Our receptionist could have told you. It is written on our building for the love of god!”

  Fennel laughed loud and monstrous. As much as it scared everyone, whether lying on the floor or sitting on the stairs, the laughter came from a genuine place of humor. Fennel really hadn’t thought about looking in the obvious place such as what was written on the front door of Wellington Manor. Maybe he wasn’t really a detective. He shrugged his shoulders. The Raven was really in the mood for justice with just a taste for detective work. So what if he had taken the long road?

  “A god’s love indeed. Nothing makes punishment more tasty than one enacted with a sense of absurdist irony. Do me a favor ol’ wise father of the floor, tell me, what does it say written in big black letters across the front of your impressive new building? I really don’t have the time to go and pay a visit.”

  The doctor looked up exasperated. He wanted to move to the couch just to be more presentable. He hated what was happening in a very deep way. Every therapist secretly fears the wrath of their patients and though Persifell Pemberton wasn’t specifically a patient, the idea remained the same.

  “It says Gaventas. This is an initiative of the company Gaventas. I dearly hope that is what you are looking for. Please leave my family alone. They don’t deserve this.”

  “Gaventas,” Fennel whispered. Castilla, that lucrative little twit that Fennel so admired was a water stealer. Fennel felt dumb again and it made him angry. And with that Fennel gave the doctor a good whack accompanied by the sounds of the wailing of the entire family. It was a horrible scene and when it was over, the doctor was still alive, but his body was damaged most extreme.

  Fennel cleaned himself off with his handkerchief and bid the family adieu.

  “Justice, dear family Never, has been served.”

  Chapter 22

  “Time for some ninja work,” Isabella thought. She placed her pillows under her blanket to mimic her tiny body and slid out of the room. Her cot was in a maze of many acolytes. Their
little boy snores a chorus of bad breath. She snuck out of the barracks and made her way, ever so gently, toward the welcome hall from whence she had arrived many moons ago. It felt good to walk about at night. The air up in these mountains was much drier, but the smell of sage on the wind awoke her senses. The sand below her feet spoke of a non-marsh world—a world dry with ideas. She kicked the sand and felt the familiar, yet annoying, sickness tucked inside her. She could not bound, nor walk lightly like a bird, nor disappear into the folds of darkness. Instead, she was forced to rely on her more human skills. Prowling about the grounds like a cat, she made her gentle way toward the entry home.

  The path wound around the entire campus. Perhaps they wanted to keep the acolytes as far from escape as possible (unless they wanted to run wild into the Scanderville Range as she had tried). She walked across the campus, staring at each different building, wondering what amazing subjects they were studying inside. Architecture, botany, metaphysics, cynics, theology, engineering. As wrong as she found some of the impulses here, she also appreciated the pursuit. The subjects fascinated her. She couldn’t deny that. She imagined that if she were in charge she would just re-arrange things a little—the theology of botany, the metaphysics of architecture, just some tweaking to keep the big spirit ingrained inside the mix of the real.

  The route wound far out along the western edge of the grounds, where the sagebrush pushed against the upward slope of the foothills. Tucked up on the range, she spied a gated area with barbed wire fences, surveillance cameras and, for the first time, men with weapons. She could make out Coriander Monks, AK47s in hand, stationed at a distance around a large sign that read Research and Development. The monks stood in their robes in the darkness—pacing. Behind the gates, Isabella could hear the murmur of machines with gears grinding and furnaces burning, the gears turning with great momentum and fury.

  It was tempting to shift her gears and set upon the R&D facility, but she was in a hurry. Not only that but her entire adventure felt like something she and Fennel would have done together. Two peas in a pod. Her heart sank briefly, but she continued on. She walked away from the range and toward the entrance hall. With every step, she was getting closer to potential escape. The illness continued to grow inside her.

  The entrance hall was not guarded. Its innocuous front door opened with ease and she was surprised to find the halls unattended. The monks, it seemed, were asleep. Perhaps the monks didn’t really need all that much security. It was a school after all. She poked her head in different rooms recognizing at one point the depressing interrogation office where they had attached the electrodes to her to discover the truth. The thought made her laugh. People are so strange. She continued to poke about until she found what she was looking for—the lockers where they stored the incoming acolytes clothes. She inhaled, trying to hold back the growing bubbling in her stomach and located her robe. Strange, how things are left. They just sit there until something moves them. Her robe just sat in this locker waiting for her. She eyed her clothes carefully, hoping against hope to find them. And there they were—four slight, sparkly, luminescent wires that came from that nasty head of Marty McGuinn. She had stuffed some in her pocket back when she was free. There were just enough to get her the heck out of here.

  The sickness rose up in her. She had no desire to linger. Isabella scampered her way back out of the entrance hall to start winding her way back to the barracks. Not far from the entrance hall, she spied the biology building. She had quite a lot to accomplish in that dour place of inquiry. Between her deal with Jada and making the fish sauce, she had to get it all done before morning. She patted her pocket with Marty’s hairs and the fish scales and got a move on.

  Again, security, in general, was not a top priority. She opened the massive front door and immediately smelled formaldehyde. It crept up her nose in putrescence of science. She could sense the prowling fingers of the anatomists and dissectors, the prying eyes of the doctors to be and the numerous skeletons hung up like a bearskin on a post for the world to view. The School was a place of vast voyeurism—ever looking deeper and deeper into the subcutaneous possibilities that were the body. Each room was a place of scopic investigation and wonderfully shiny metallic tools for digging, scraping, cutting, and folding.

  She had her pick of empty laboratories. She didn’t need much: Bunsen burner, volumetric flask, Buchner funnel and her fairly extensive list of ingredients that were now in her pocket. The time of chemistry had arrived. She put on a lab coat hanging up on the wall. It was too big, but it would work. She placed goggles on her little beautiful face and got to work. This with that and that with this. The hours whiled away as she heated things, up, separated them and placed them. In a few hours' time, the sauce came together without a hitch. She had another batch and her freedom, again, was in her grasp. She took a nice gulp and found her body twitch and preen at the sudden surge of strength in her. The almighty stirred in her bones.

  Now she was off to task number three. Jada’s test scores. As up to no good as she was, she remained true to her word. She could sense monks awake in the building. She was not alone. As she journeyed up the large stairs, she could sense the footsteps of thousands of solemn monk feet over time. She spied the familiar flicker of fluorescent lights. They buzzed and sputtered, causing a strobe effect in the halls. Inside, two rectors sat muddling over some papers. Their hoods pulled back, their sandy hair descended over their faces. The lines in their faces ran deep and the concentration in their brows were ever on point.

  “Such are the findings. There is little disputing it. The entire matrix of the body circulates around this code. A simple collection of complex amino acids grouped into a complex formula is clearly the source of our inquiry. The next attempt is simply translation.”

  The monks shifted on their feet. They stood in front of a strange sculpture that twisted with metal rods in a rotating circle. Small red and yellow orbs adorned the rods in what would be known as a double helix.

  “What a ton of work it is. I can’t even think about that. I just need some sleep.”

  The other monk got up from his chair and paced the room, the creases in his face growing impossibly deeper still.

  “Time enough to sleep in the grave, Galston. We have done our duty. That is what we are asked to do. We still need those last batches of formulae gone over and then the Beta studies.”

  Galston laughed and pushed a red orb along the wire sculpture. “Don’t I know it. This is a long journey we are on. I swear I see these little twisting shapes in my sleep. You know I’m not one to complain, but I’m tired. It’s not like Teddy does any of our work. But you can bet he will be pretending he was with us in the wee hours like now, sweating over combinations.”

  “Such as it has always been. We both know the Rectors have been taking credit for the work of the monks for as long as the school has been around. That is the way of the world. I just don’t question it. Nose to the grindstone.”

  “So you tell yourself. Frankly, I have heard this project is going straight up into the Restoration shortly. It might skip Teddy altogether.” Galston snorted a strange laugh.

  “I would enjoy that,” said the other monk and he got up from his seat.

  Isabella thought he might be exiting the room and snuck her way further down the hall. She felt as though she liked these monks. Working on odd formulae late at night complaining about work. She could get into that. She hurried down the musty hall where bookshelves lined the walls and water fountains spit water in the corners. The hum of the building was noticeable even with the fluorescents out and the windows open. The building was the body electric. She spotted the obvious sign of biology—the skeleton with a heart—picked the lock with just but a flick of the wrist and she was in.

  The test answers were easy enough to find. They rested on the top of what could only be the professor's writing desk in the second room to the back. But since she was there, she thought she would look around. See what she might find. The files wer
e endless with names of what must be the last twenty years of monks' names. Boring. Fortunately, the bottom drawer of the rector’s desk had a lock on it, a sure sign of worthwhile adventure. She popped the lock to find file upon file regarding budgets—vast paperwork of numbers in rows totaling up the cost of one initiative or another. It barely interested Isabella except in the general sense that biology seemed to have a lucrative component. Pure science in the real world never felt all that pure.

  Isabella shrugged her shoulders, placed the folder and its contents back in the drawer and skipped back down the hall. Money. What a strange phenomenon that was. She never seemed to worry about. Marty had paid for everything for so long. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she would ever need such a thing. She sort of looked at money as this odd naïve phenomenon that people dealt with, but what did she know? She lived in a cave with her mean-spirited brother ruining people’s lives as they tried their hardest just to get by. She decided then and there not to be mad at the monks for being involved with money. Perhaps she would need to know more before making some kind of authoritative decision on it.

  She made her way quickly out of the biology building and scampered down the trail back toward the barracks. The night had proven most edifying. It was at that moment as she was fiddling about the grounds as the first rays of sun began to lightly tinge the sky that she noticed, as if out of nowhere, the presence of Harrison.