Oddity

by Eli Brown

  Mr. Agate looked embarrassed. “One would think your father would have told you these things,” he said softly.

  “He didn’t tell me anything. Nothing at all.”

  Mr. Agate wrung his hands awkwardly. “Perhaps he was protecting you. We lost track of him almost immediately after the fire. He left his practice and fled to the edge of the world. Her death ruined him, I’m afraid.”

  Clover’s knees shook, and she leaned against the printing press.

  “Your mother . . .” Mr. Agate crouched beside Clover and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Well, she wanted to change the world. Some say her ambition ruined her, that she flew too close to the sun, so to speak. But those of us who knew her, we believed she could do it. She inspired us.”

  The strange man was telling the truth — Clover saw it in his eyes. The warmth she felt kindled inside her. Pride for being Miniver Elkin’s daughter was an answer Clover hadn’t known she needed.

  “Now, I’m sorry,” Mr. Agate stood and returned to his boxes. “We must pack as we talk. I’m told that poachers have been spotted here in New Manchester, just this last week, sniffing about. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “Father said oddities killed her.”

  “Well, yes,” Mr. Agate said, rolling a tapestry and tying it with a scrap of twine. “In a manner of speaking. But a spoon is a shovel in a manner of speaking. A wolf is a running shark in a manner of speaking. A turtle —”

  “Mr. Agate.”

  “What is it?”

  “How did my mother die?”

  The professor sat on a pile of books next to Clover and put his head between his hands. “The fire, of course. My dear girl, how is it that I know more about you than you know about yourself?”

  Just then, someone hollered from outside: “Aaron Agate! I’ve come to hear a lecture from the learned man!”

  Mr. Agate seized the Birdcage and thrust his head inside, only to groan and withdraw it just as quickly. Clover put her own head in and saw, from the rooftop, five rough horsemen with the fur-clad look of trappers. They wore slouch hats, long rifles, and knives strapped to their thighs. Their unkempt beards made them look like brothers, except for one man, who was tall and beardless. He had rabbit ears on his hat where other men might put feathers.

  Clover’s legs went numb.

  The rabbit-eared man knocked his pipe clean on his boot. Then he hollered again, “Agate! I know you’re home!”

  Clover pulled her head out of the cage with a desperate moan.

  Mr. Agate stood still. He was very pale. “We’re lost. It’s Willit Rummage. They’ve found us.”

  “That’s them,” Clover whispered. Her pulse roared in her ears like a storm-swollen river. “It’s the men who killed my father. Where are your guns?”

  “A gun fight with these men is not something we would survive.”

  “Call for the sheriff. A big city like this must have a strong sheriff,” said Clover.

  “But someone must go and fetch the sheriff,” Mr. Agate said. “And the sheriff isn’t eager to get killed by poachers. These men don’t fight fairly. Hush now, I’m thinking of a plan.”

  A moment passed, and Willit hollered again, “Have I caught you over the chamber pot? Do you need a minute?”

  “Well?” Clover whispered. “Do you have a plan?”

  Mr. Agate held up his finger. Then he said, “No.”

  Clover recognized another voice outside. The big man named Bolete said, “Maybe he prefers to be called ‘professor.’”

  “Do you reckon?” Willit asked. “Professor Agate! I get bored of peekaboo. I happen to be holding, in my hand, item number W Seventeen! I trust you remember it?”

  Mr. Agate paced back and forth, muttering to himself, “Of course I remember it; I catalogued the thing.”

  “W Seventeen.” Clover searched her memory. “The Pistol!”

  Clover made a dash for the printing press and crouched behind it, gripping the end of her braid between her teeth.

  A moment later a shot echoed in the alley. The bullet buzzed down the stovepipe like a hornet, through the grate, trailing hot ash, and punched a hole through Mr. Agate’s right ear. The metal passing through the flesh made a wet snapping sound. Mr. Agate screamed and dropped to his knees, cupping a hand over the bloody wound.

  “I only winged you this time!” Willit hollered. “The next one goes through your eye! I’m going to clean my pipe before I reload.”

  “I’m sorry, dear girl,” Mr. Agate said as he stood and wadded a kerchief against his dripping ear. “We’re cornered.”

  When Clover saw that he was going to open the door to let them in, she tried to hold him back, but Mr. Agate pushed her aside and freed the bolts. She turned in a terrified circle; there was no escape. She retreated to the back of the room as the gang sauntered in.

  Bolete entered first. He was built like a walking pickle barrel. The others followed, cackling and tugging on their beards. Their leathery faces were mostly hidden by their low-slung hats and unruly whiskers, and they smelled like a pot of burned onions. Their hunting knives clattered against boxes as they shoved their way around the room. Clover counted five of them, a herd of brutes.

  But it was Willit Rummage who terrified her most. Tall and narrow, he looked as if he’d been rolled through a laundry wringer. His hands trembled as he took the pipe from his mouth, and he scratched himself constantly, tugging his tawny coat up to reach bare skin. The stubble clinging to his cheeks was the color of sawdust. He wore a crude necklace made from half a walnut shell. He sniffed at a painting on the wall and gingerly touched the same dried tarantula Clover had.

  “You’ve even packed up the goods! How helpful,” Willit said. As he spoke, he scratched under his arm, then under his chin. He was like a man scrubbing himself in the bath, plagued by some terrible itch. In some places his skin was worn to bruises and scabs. “Here are the terms,” he continued. “We get your collection, and you get to live. Everyone wins.”

  Clover hardly heard the words; the icy river water was rising within her.

  When Willit spotted her trembling behind the press, his face lit up. “No river to jump into this time?”

  “Why?” she whispered, her tongue dry.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you kill my father?”

  “That was a heat-of-the-moment thing.” Willit spat a wad of yellow mucus on the floor and scuffed at it with his boot. “Bolete don’t enjoy killing folks, do you, Bolete?”

  Bolete shrugged.

  “We were following a lead on the Ice Hook when this sweet old woman told us her warts had been cured by ‘the Russian doctor.’ Well, who could that be but long-lost Constantine? I thought to myself, he might just have something better than the Ice Hook. I was going to ask nicely, but then your father went and got everybody agitated.”

  Willit held the Birdcage out the open door and whistled. The Canary flew obediently into the cage, and the poacher closed it with a satisfied grin. He handed the cage to Bolete. “All this time looking for you, Mr. Agate, and now I come to learn that I should have been looking for a songbird.”

  Clover wrenched the crowbar from the wall behind her and ran at him, screaming. She was going to smash his skull.

  But she was caught up by Bolete before she reached Willit. The ursine fiend crushed her in his arms. Her legs kicked in the air, and the crowbar rang as it hit the ground. She kept struggling until the breath was pressed from her lungs and purple fireflies spun before her eyes.

  Willit tapped her forehead with the bowl of his pipe. “That’s the agitation we just talked about. Listen, kid, I can put a bullet through your nose and have it come out your belly button. Tell her, Professor.”

  “It’s true,” Mr. Agate moaned. “Don’t test him.”

  “That’s fine advice. This here is a wise man.”

  “Take what you will and leave us alone,” Agate said.

  “Yes . . .” Willit said, studying Clover, “and no.�
� He lit his pipe and brought the smoldering bowl slowly under her chin. Clover held her head bravely still, trying not to flinch.

  Just before it burned her, Bolete said, “Professor might have sent a signal. He’s got his tricks, don’t he? Best to get on before something surprises us.”

  Willit sighed. He removed his hat to scratch his sweaty hair. The rabbit ears were worn furless in places and swung pathetically from where they were stitched to the hatband. Looking deeply into her eyes and exhaling a plume of smoke, Willit said, “Load it up!”

  Bolete threw Clover to the ground, and the poacher they called Digger stood on her braid. Clover was shaking, with her cheek pressed against the tea-damp floor. Death had found her and the entire journey had been for nothing. She’d never even seen her mother’s grave. She had failed her father again, her best efforts unraveling into a new nightmare. The watch was just a broken timepiece. She’d squandered even the hope her father had offered with his last breath, leading these monsters right to Mr. Agate’s collection. She watched the poachers carry the collection out. They were the worst kind of men. None of them had been anywhere near kindness or bathwater for a very long time. Their eyes looked like the holes a crow might peck in a heel of bread.

  As his men carried crates and paper-wrapped packages out the door, Willit sauntered around, tapping at oddities with the end of his pipe. He took a moment to scrub his back against a wall, like a raccoon with mange. He picked up a long chain with a small iron box dangling from one end. “Is the Heron’s Heart in here?” he asked.

  Mr. Agate nodded miserably, the blood from his wound blackening his shirt.

  Willit jumped up and clopped his heels together. He whooped and smacked his hat on his thigh as he danced a manic jig to music no one else heard. “I knew I’d find your little hidey-hole. Better than a gold mine, because there ain’t no digging. If even half of these are genuine, I’m going to be rich.” He pulled Mr. Agate toward him by his bloody ear and kissed him on the mouth.

  “We’ll be crapping money!” Bolete hollered as he hefted a crate. “Money just tumblin’ out our backsides!”

  Willit whistled as he wiped Mr. Agate’s blood from his fingers and began to sprinkle more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

  Clover reached for the crowbar, which lay just feet away, but Willit winked at her and touched the pistol in its holster. “Is this loaded? That’s the question you need to ask yourself.” His pipe waggled at her. He picked and scratched at himself like a monkey. Clover thought it might be the worst case of bedbugs she had ever seen. Or it could have been chiggers or a half-dozen diseases that she had helped her father cure. Whatever it was, she wanted Willit to die of it.

  When the room was empty except for books, Willit shook Mr. Agate’s hand and said, “You collect them; I sell them to the buyer. I can pay you a small finder’s fee in the future if you like. Don’t you go trying to disappear, Aaron. I’ll sniff you out.”

  Then Bolete came back in and lifted Clover off her feet, kicking and screaming, into the alley. Outside, a delivery wagon was heaped with the stolen crates. A wooden cage sat on the back of the wagon, open and waiting.

  Clover fought hard, but Bolete squeezed the air out of her again, and soon she found herself crammed inside the cage. She was forced to crouch with her thighs against her chest because the cage was too small to kneel in, let alone stand.

  Bolete slammed the lid shut and bent down to whisper, “You ever see a hog eat a duck? Feet first, face first, it don’t matter. Feathers and all. Crunch crunch. It ain’t polite, but it’s how things go. Life is like that; sometimes you’re the hog, and sometimes you’re the duck. I guess you know which one you are today. It ain’t your fault and nothing you can do, so don’t worry too much.”

  Frightened faces peered down at her from the windows in the buildings above. The people did nothing but watch. Terror was turning her lungs into a burlap sack, but Clover managed to wail, “Send for the sheriff!”

  “Oh, don’t bother,” Willit said, leaping onto his saddle and scratching at his chest. “He’s probably a busy man.”

  Among the stacked crates, Clover spotted Hannibal imprisoned in his own little wicker cage. They’d gotten him too! His bandage was gone and his wounded wing sagged. He nodded bravely and whispered, “Salutations, Nurse Elkin. I am glad to see you again, but wish it were under better circumstances.”

  Bolete threw her haversack and her father’s bag onto the heap and then covered her cage with a blanket, shutting out the light.

  The slats might as well have been the ribs of a wolf that had swallowed Clover whole. She screamed herself hoarse as the wagon shuddered down the cobblestone streets. But her cries were thin notes against the city’s orchestra of vendors, musicians, beggars’ bells, and workshops. Bolete and the other poachers bellowed drinking songs to drown her out completely. Soon the wagon rumbled out the city gates, and the clamor of New Manchester fell away behind them.

  “Father, I’m sorry.” Clover shook the slats and growled in the desperate darkness. Worse than the humiliation, worse than the fear, was the guilt of having failed her father. The oddity he had told her to protect, that last hope, now belonged to the poachers. The monsters had won.

  “Hannibal?” Clover whispered. “What happened?”

  “I had just sent my correspondence on to Senator Auburn’s caravan when I learned that poachers were roaming the city,” Hannibal said. “I rushed to find you, but just as I was getting close, these cowards ambushed me in an unfair fight.”

  Bolete interrupted, “That’s what you get for sticking your beak where it don’t belong. Willit don’t like his plans meddled with.”

  “Willit knows better than to cross Senator Auburn,” Hannibal declared. “You’ll all face a firing squad when this comes to light.”

  “Well, best not tell the senator, then! Maybe we’ll give you to the witch. On occasion, Willit has been known to make a generous donation to that hag. Or maybe we’ll just do a simple roast with gizzard-and-rosemary gravy —”

  “How dare you —”

  But Bolete burst into a drunken song, drowning Hannibal out.

  To market, to market to buy a fat pig!

  Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

  The Rooster was as helpless as Clover was, trapped in his own cage. And the Society that was supposed to protect her was nothing but an addled old man. Agate had given her a few scraps of information about her mother, but there were more questions than ever, and Clover couldn’t help but think that if she’d known enough, if she’d been given the whole story, she might have avoided this fate.

  The wagon jolted off the regular cobbles of the main highway into the softer ruts of a dirt road.

  Clover found that if she pinched the blanket over her cage between her fingers, she could tug it down half an inch at a time, widening a crack of light. She saw sheets of algae glittering in a roadside ditch. The leaves of apple orchards trembled, and starlings tumbled through the air like a school of minnows. She tugged the blanket until she could see the untarnished sky, like an enamel pot clapped over the earth.

  The world was stubbornly beautiful to the last, ignoring her entirely.

  She stopped crying as anger lit her nerves. What if a wolf had swallowed her? Wouldn’t she kick and claw and do her best to kill that wolf with indigestion?

  “Clover Elkin,” she said, “will not die without a fight.” She pulled the blanket off and let it drop behind them. Squinting against the light, she saw two of the poachers sitting in the driver’s seat: Bolete and Digger, a man whose knobby head bobbed on the end of a long neck like a pelican’s. The others must have ridden ahead.

  Hannibal gave her a sly nod and whispered, “Don’t fret, Nurse Elkin. We’ll find our way to victory.”

  When the blanket had disappeared in the distance, Clover wiped the snot from her upper lip and spoke. “Mr. Bolete, was it your bullet that killed my father?”

  Bolete turned and blinked at her. He was chewing a wa
d of tobacco thoughtfully, and he peered around the wagon, looking for the blanket.

  “Willit don’t like to waste bullets on easy pickings,” Bolete finally answered. “So he leaves the sure shots to me.” He leaned over to spit in the road, giving Clover a good view of a chapped neck between his greasy strands of hair.

  Bolete wore a necklace made of half a walnut strung on a leather cord, just as Willit did. Clover had never wanted anything as badly as she wanted to seize that cord and choke him with it. But all she could do was tremble in her cage like malaria itself, her vision blurred by white blooms of shame and rage. She heard herself say, “You’re rabid. You should be put down. Every one of you.”

  “Who will put us down? You?” Bolete chuckled, picking pinches of tobacco out of the skulls he had woven into his beard. “I don’t see that coming to pass — do you, Digger?” The long-necked man only cleared his throat, as if that were an answer. “For one thing,” Bolete continued, “you’re in a cage, little miss. And anyway, you’d have to come at us with better than a crowbar.”

  The wagon slowed as they approached a crossroads. Clover’s heart leaped when she saw the unmistakable yellow wagon parked on the side of the road, with the bright lettering on the side announcing BLEAKERMAN’S CURE-ALL!

  “Nessa!” Clover screamed. “Help me!”

  “Shut your hole!” Bolete snapped.

  Digger leaned back and whipped at her with the riding crop. A few of the lashes came through the slats to sting her, but Clover kept screaming.

  Willit and the other poachers were waiting in the shade of an oak tree. Clover twisted and leaned. “Nessa, it’s me!”

  Then Clover saw Nessa standing among them. She was looking at Clover with such bewilderment that the poachers burst out laughing.

  “Help you?” Willit crowed. “Why, Nessa just sold you.”

  Nessa took a few steps toward the wagon, her face red as a hammered thumb. “Why is Clover in a cage?” she blurted. “You said you only wanted the goods! You said you’d leave her alone!”

  Willit smacked Nessa’s ear. “She is the goods.”