Oddity

by Eli Brown

  “The healing power of the Powder is strong,” said the widow, “but the venom of a Sweetwater rattlesnake is too. It is still in your veins. The Powder couldn’t pull it out of you, so it managed something like a truce, I suppose. You are alive, but your blood and the venom are mingled for good.”

  “Mingled?”

  “Just one more ingredient in your soup. No one has to know. But here’s the tricky part,” the widow said. “Look here.”

  Widow Henshaw pulled the blanket off the heap of straw to reveal the Sweetwater viper coiled like a noose. Clover covered her mouth to stifle a scream.

  “It followed you here, and it’s been waiting all this time.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For you to die, I suppose.”

  “Can’t we push it out with a broom or something?”

  “I tried that,” the widow said. “But every time I got it out the door, you took a turn for the worse.”

  “Susanna, will you dispose of this beast for us?” Clover asked.

  Susanna jumped out of the bag, eager to help.

  The widow climbed onto the mattress with Clover, gathering the trailing loops of her scarf, then Clover nodded at Susanna.

  Susanna grabbed the serpent by the tail. The snake hissed like frying bacon and, in a flurry, struck Susanna three times with savage bites. But the Doll just marched toward the door, dragging the writhing snake behind her. With no blood to poison, the fang marks were nothing more than a few more stitches in Susanna’s quilted body.

  As the snake disappeared out the door, Clover felt suddenly dizzy and breathless. “Oh dear,” she whispered. “What is happening?”

  “You see?” said the widow. “Susanna, you’d best let it go.”

  As soon as Susanna released its tail, the serpent darted back toward the bed. Clover had nearly fainted against the widow’s shoulder. She couldn’t lift her head until the viper was coiled again in the straw nest, its tongue unsheathed to taste the air.

  “I felt it,” Clover whispered, recovering. “I felt Susanna pulling me by the tail. And the farther I got away from myself, the worse I felt.”

  “You and the rattlesnake are knotted together now,” the widow declared, holding up her knitting needles. “Knitted! Your fates are joined. It is the best the medicine could manage. It looks like you have another traveling companion, dear.”

  Clover limped toward the Golden Cannon Inn. The Sweetwater viper hung in a heavy coil around her neck, the weight of danger itself. Yet Clover was not dead.

  “Thanks for nothing, Nessa,” Clover muttered as she weaved through town. “I’ve got your memento close to my heart.”

  She had tried to get the serpent into her haversack, but Susanna had crumpled Clover’s tin mug into a gray wad in protest. Anyway, Sweetwater seemed to want to be as close as possible, and as terrifying as it was, Clover felt the same way. When the snake was even five feet away, the bite wound throbbed and a flu-like vertigo threatened to topple her. But if the snake was actually touching her, she felt perfectly healthy. In fact, she felt even stronger, braver than she had before she’d been bitten.

  Clover knew she couldn’t walk around holding the world’s deadliest viper in her hands, so after some fumbling negotiations, Sweetwater found comfort draped around Clover’s collarbone, mostly hidden under her coat.

  Clover passed a crowd of people on the corner, pointing at the Golden Cannon and talking about Smalt.

  Murdered her on a whim. I saw it!

  As Clover staggered past, one of the bystanders spotted her.

  Isn’t that her?

  Impossible.

  But it is!

  Clover ignored them. Her leg was still throbbing, and walking took all her focus.

  She’s going back!

  A crowd had gathered, following her and filling the air with awed whispers.

  But she was bitten! I saw it myself!

  When the Sweetwater viper poked its head out of her collar, the crowd gasped. Clover reached to push the snake’s head back under her shirt, but the serpent retreated before she touched it. Clover paused.

  She willed the snake to rattle. A piercing hiss rose from her coat.

  The crowd behind her scattered.

  So this was how tangled they were. Clover imagined the snake wrapping around her waist. The snake obeyed, dry scales hugging her rib cage. “I never liked corsets,” Clover muttered. “Now I’ve got a poisonous one.”

  Braced by the creature that had killed her, Clover looked toward the inn where Smalt waited. Her courage was as unsteady as her knees, and her heart felt like a fish gasping on the shore, but there was no other way to find her mother.

  “If Smalt won’t tell me,” she muttered to the snake, “maybe he’ll tell you.”

  She paused at the door of the Golden Cannon, leaning on the jamb to gather her wits before stepping into the darkened hall. The barkeep was cleaning up broken chairs and spilled food. He pointed at her. “You, out!”

  “Who is it?” Smalt asked, still in the rafters. He leaned over the railing and clapped his gloved hands. “Pest?” He tittered. “Didn’t I watch you die?”

  The crowd had regrouped in the doorway, larger than before. Dozens gathered to watch the strange girl confront Smalt a second time. They followed her inside, and their muttering echoed off the rafters. She’s a witch. She has the snake. I saw her familiar dragging her dead body.

  Clover hobbled toward the stairway. Her leg ached, but Sweetwater tightened around her, giving her courage. Susanna shifted in the haversack. Clover felt the intimidating heft of her companions.

  “I’m here for the secrets you owe me, Mr. Smalt. I will not leave without them.”

  “No one can lie to the Hat,” Smalt said. “So why do I feel lied to? What exactly is your game, pest?”

  “You’re a bully,” Clover said, reaching the middle stair. Smalt’s dog woke up growling. When it saw Clover, it stood, lifting the table and knocking over the vinegar glass.

  “Enough!” Smalt said, and the hound lunged at Clover.

  It leaped from the top stair, its yellow fangs bared as it barreled toward her. Its wounded paw seemed only to have made it angrier. Clover ducked its bite, but the dog’s chest hit her hard, and together they fell over the railing onto a table below. The dog rolled to the floor, scrambling for footing in the spilled beer and broken glass. The crowd backed away from the fearsome animal.

  Clover got to her feet just as the hound put its front paws on the table. As the table wobbled beneath her, Clover jumped as high as she could, catching hold of the iron ring of lanterns above. There she hung, like the ham over the fire, with the hound growling and snapping at her feet.

  The swaying lanterns spilled oil down her arm as she scrambled with the other to reach the buckle on the haversack. Susanna tumbled out and landed at the feet of the hound. The dog bent to snatch the Doll up, but it might as well have tried to attack a ship’s anchor. Susanna grabbed it by the ear and slammed its massive head onto the ground. Before it could get back up, Susanna had gotten a grip on the scruff of its neck.

  Susanna threw the hound. It shattered a window and disappeared, yelping as it went.

  “Barkeep!” Smalt yelled. “Put this urchin out!”

  The barkeep pulled an old musket from beneath the bar and came toward Clover, saying, “C’mon now, girl. This has gone too far.”

  At that moment Clover screamed with excruciating pain. At first she thought the barkeep had shot her. Then she saw the flames. The lantern oil had caught fire, and her right arm was blazing. Clover dropped to the table, squirming in agony.

  Time seemed to slow as her mind raced. Memories of blistered and scarred patients flashed in her mind. She tried to remember that she was different, but the pain was real, like shards of glass raking down her arm. As she scrambled for something to put the flames out, she saw Smalt at the top of the stairs, trying to escape.

  Every tendon and muscle screamed, but Clover forced herself to ignore
the pain. As the flames crept to her neck, she climbed over the banister, blocking Smalt’s exit. She marched up the stairs, backing Smalt into a corner of the mezzanine, leaving a trail of fire as she went.

  Down below, Susanna smashed tables with the barkeep’s gun.

  As the flames reached their crescendo, the pain was a banshee in her skull. But she kept her eyes locked on Smalt. In the corner of her vision, she saw wisps of her hair glowing red-hot.

  Smalt was cowering against a wall, eyes wide. “What are you?” he asked.

  The question stopped Clover at the top of the stairs. The Sweetwater viper cramped against her in agony, but, wedded to Clover, it did not burn.

  Just as the unbearable incandescence threatened to devour her mind, she heard her own molten voice saying, “My name is Clover Constantinovna Elkin, and I am angry with you, Mr. Smalt.” The flames roiling around her were matched by a rage within that felt very old, like unseen magma rising into the light. “You take what is not yours. You manipulate. You bully . . .”

  Finally the oil exhausted itself, and the flames began to sputter and die. The cool air on her bare arm was the sweetest sensation she had ever felt. She snatched the Hat straight from Smalt’s hands and held it behind her back for a moment as if she were about to do a magic trick.

  “We all have our secrets, Mr. Smalt. But you have more than your share. Kindly tell me what you know about my mother,” she said, holding the Hat toward Smalt.

  Smalt shook his head, powder falling like snow from his wig.

  “I forgot to say, ‘Don’t look inside the hat.’”

  “Do you think that would work on me?” Smalt snapped. But a strange sound came from the Hat, a sharp jingle like the sound of a crystal bell. Startled, Smalt looked inside and gasped.

  As the power of the Hat seized Smalt, the Sweetwater viper crawled out of the Hat where it had hidden and, still steaming, encircled Clover’s waist.

  Smalt let out a haunting moan. His eyes bugged, and his knees buckled. Clover placed the Hat on the floor and stepped away as Smalt writhed in his ridiculous clothes.

  Then, all at once, a great gush of sticky secrets burst out of Smalt and poured into the Hat. It kept coming, a deluge of wet whispers and distant screams. Clover had only hoped to use the serpent to get an advantage, to convince Smalt to tell her what she wanted to know. But now the Hat was in control. After a few seconds, Smalt’s clothes began to bunch on his thinning frame. His false teeth clattered to the floor, and his wig slipped off, revealing a pale, dimpled skull.

  “Why am I odd?” Clover shouted, not knowing if she was asking the Hat or Smalt. “What can counter the Ice Hook? Where can I find the Seamstress?”

  But if the answers were in the clotted river of sludge, Clover could not grasp them. Years of hoarded secrets rushed into the Hat until Smalt was lifted off his feet by the force of it. He floated in midair like a marionette caught up by an angry child. Smalt was so steeped in secrets that every dram of his blood and tissue was being squeezed up and out of him. Even his ears leaked streams of indigo fluid.

  Clover covered her mouth, gagging, but she forced herself to keep her eyes open, watching for any hint of her mother’s secrets in the acrid outpour.

  Smalt’s shoes fell from his withering stockings, and his gloves went slack as the Hat consumed him. Not everything made it into the whirlpool of the Hat. Some secrets floated in the air like smoke; some pooled in puddles on the floor. They spread into the cracks of the walls and nattered out the windows on wasp wings. Those with spider legs scattered quickly; the slugs smacked wetly against the walls. The room filled with haunted voices.

  The torrent slopped over the Hat’s brim, and Clover flinched as the voices of the ghosts howled past her. She covered her ears against the deafening wails. For several desperate seconds, the floor was flooded, and Clover scrambled to keep her footing in the riotous filth. Then she was on her feet again.

  Smalt was gone. He’d been completely wrung out. With mist still swirling in an eddy above the rim of the hat, nothing was left but his clothes, his false teeth, and his crusty wig.

  It was over. The hall was a creaking ruin. The smashed window let in a shaft of ragged light, the staircase was charred, and everyone had fled. Clover wasn’t sure how much of the deluge the Hat had swallowed, but she knew plenty had escaped out into the city.

  She slumped to the floor, touching the arm that had, moments ago, blazed oven hot. She touched her neck, her hair, her side. The pain was fading to a dull throb. She was unharmed, but if Smalt had said anything about her mother, she hadn’t heard.

  “I missed it,” she whispered. “I’ll never know.”

  Susanna pulled herself over the top step and nuzzled Clover’s leg like a tired puppy. Clover hummed a few bars of Susanna’s song, and the Doll crawled back into the haversack.

  The Hat bubbled and burped, a cauldron of putrid stew. Clover was careful not to look inside. The purple mist hissed over the brim. Clover knew it would be madness to reach in searching for her mother’s secrets. This was an unclean object, sloppy and contaminating. After corrupting Smalt’s heart, saturating his flesh until he was no longer human, this Hat had gobbled him up as a dog swallows a sausage.

  Clover knew she was looking at evil itself.

  She watched as the Hat digested Smalt. Shameful memories, the wretched thoughts that victims had hoped to take to the grave, now stained the room, shimmering images and rank odors. Just when it looked as if the Hat had absorbed the mess and gone quiet, one last dollop burped over the brim, buzzing into the air like a horsefly. Clover tried to catch it, but it darted out the door, whispering about a sunken ship.

  At last the Hat went still and began to look again like any old hat, dropped by a drunkard. Was Clover’s secret history still inside? Clover kicked it over. It seemed empty, but she knew better than to reach in. Still, she couldn’t leave it here to seize some poor victim. She considered burning it in the cooking fire, but she feared it might release more haunted voices to rain onto the city.

  Already people outside were calling for the sheriff. “Witchcraft and mayhem!” they shouted.

  Clover reached into her father’s bag and found the cool weight of the tools: the rolled leathers of scalpels and lancets, the rows of glass vials. Everything in its place. Then she hefted her haversack onto one shoulder, her father’s bag onto the other. The Hat wouldn’t fit in either. She knew she had no other choice.

  With a shudder, Clover put the Hat on her head and carefully descended the groaning stairway. Outside, the commotion grew, as if the panic she had just survived had spread. The Hat occasionally slipped over her eyes as she went. Clover didn’t know that an oyster-colored secret lingered just inside the rim, where she dared not look. This secret, heavier than the others, carrying, as it did, the secrets of an entire nation, had barely escaped the Hat’s gravity. It clung to the velvet lining with fierce mandibles. It had waited decades for the unsuspecting warmth of a host.

  When Clover reached the last step, this secret uncurled its centipede loops and scuttled down into her hair. Clover gasped and knocked the hat off her head, but the secret was already surging into her right ear. And just like that, Clover knew how the Louisiana War really began.

  The French ambassadors still smelled of the mildew and tar of their ship cabins. Ambassador Durand was tall and horse chinned, dignified despite the white splotch a seagull had left on his vest. Ambassador Bertolette was short and still wore his woolen traveling mantle, which he used to wipe his dripping nose. In need of baths, sleep, and a good meal, the men were out of place in the marble chamber whose echoes were muffled by draped tapestries. They held their teacups with both hands to warm them.

  Gerald Lee Auburn, secretary to the president, lounged on a silk couch across from his guests, opening pecans with a silver nutcracker.

  “First France gives the territories to Spain,” he was saying, “and now Spanish nobles have traded New Orleans for plum titles. Grease-fingered royals a
re using the continent as a bargaining chip. Everyone is profiting from our furs, our tobacco, our silver. Everyone but us.”

  Durand reached into his purse and withdrew a letter bearing the crimson seal of Napoléon Bonaparte. “Happily, these frustrations will soon be behind you, Secretary Auburn.” He handed the letter to Auburn. “This is to be delivered to your President Cooper without delay. It relays the final terms for the purchase of New Orleans, including” — the ambassador grinned generously before delivering the good news — “the entirety of the Louisiana territories. The West will finally be yours.”

  Auburn leaned over the dwindling pecans, poking around for a promising nut. It was not the reaction the ambassador had expected.

  Bertolette cleared his throat. “Did you hear? Your Congress can buy your beloved West! You will double the size of your nation in a single day. Ride a carriage from the Atlantic to Spanish California and never leave the Unified States!”

  Auburn was not impressed. “I was born into a family so poor that we celebrated Christmas by whitewashing the grave posts behind our house.” Auburn paused to pick a bit of pecan out of his teeth. “My seven siblings planted in the earth like so much corn. Later, my father and older brother died in a factory explosion. But I survived the fevers and the hunger and the debtors’ houses, and now I own that munitions factory and five more.”

  “You have every reason to be proud,” Bertolette said, touching his lips as if they’d gone numb. “You’re a specimen of American enterprise.”

  “This humble estate” — Auburn’s gesture encompassed the chandelier and the marble statue of Aphrodite in the corner — “was earned by selling a better rifle. A dependable firearm.”

  “Commendable, sir, but what does this have to do with —”

  “I was not born into wealth,” Auburn said. “I wrenched it from an unyielding world. The industrious man sees a need and fills it. But the wealthy man creates the need. I’ll say it outright: your emperor is desperate.”