It had all been explained to him so breezily that he had thought it would be quick and easy. Already it had proved to be neither.
3.
Naturally he didn’t say all that to the girl. What he said was: “I’m looking for a girl from Highmark. I think she’s a bit older than you... name of Merry Richards.”
“Oh, Merry!” The girl immediately smiled and hopped up from the couch. She seemed to animate a great deal more when he said Merry’s name, as if she’d been hoping to hear it. “I should’ve known you was Merry’s friend. They all dress like great dopes.”
Abe was wearing a fairly standard brown tweed suit, and though the jacket was a bit too large and it was certainly a poor choice for being out in the rain as he had been, he hardly thought he was dressed like a ‘great dope.’
“Least I’m not wearing a burlap sack,” he muttered, then, more loudly, “You know where she is, then?”
“I might do,” the girl said and turned to go. She got a few steps before she turned back. “Are you coming?”
Abe planted his hand on the floor and pushed himself halfway up before wincing and falling back down. The pain that radiated out from his fresh crossbow wound was so intense it made his vision darken for a moment.
“Oh,” said the girl. She walked over and squatted down beside Abe and put her hand on his arm. Too busy recovering from the sudden pain to pull away, Abe prepared to grimace, anticipating pain. It was not, it turned out, necessary.
There was a cool feeling on his arm that wasn’t limited to where the girl’s hand rested. A sort of light was coming from her hand, too, as if she were blocking a candle with it – a warm, faint orange... and a look of intense concentration crossed her face for just a few seconds. Then she stood up and dusted her hands together as if she’d just moved something heavy. “Don’t know why you didn’t do it yourself,” she said. “Sorry about your coat.”
Abe reached for his arm. The pain was gone. He tried to look at where the wound had been but there was a rather unavoidable limitation in that he had a neck. He did manage to appear ridiculous – rather like a dog trying to chew its own ear – and made a bit of his wet black hair fall into his eye, shaped by the drizzle into a perfect spike.
Yesterday he’d probably have yelped at being stabbed in the eye by a hair-spike, but today he just blinked a few times as his fingers slipped into the bolt hole, probing the bloody but completely unbroken skin. “How in the hell did you do that?”
The girl shrugged. “I ‘unno.” The topic was apparently too dull to even merit a comprehensible response. She was already heading toward the open door out of the room once more, but then she stopped and looked back at him. “Merry couldn’t do it at first either. She was damned useless, just like you.”
She picked up his revolver again in a way not unlike how a cat might pick up a ball of yarn. If a cat had thumbs, anyway... “Life in Highmark must be so-o-o boring. C’mon.”
She tossed the revolver at him and headed for the door again. Abe was surprised at how fast he could move when he was concerned about being accidentally shot – he pushed painlessly up from the floor and reached his hand out for the gun. He managed to slap the butt with his finger, but couldn’t quite get a grip on it, and it spun back up toward the faintly glowing ceiling.
Fixated on it, Abe took small steps back and forth as he watched it arc as if in slow motion and begin to spin back down toward him. He reached his hand out to catch it and actually would have managed it if he hadn’t forgotten how heavy the thing was. It smacked into his palm hard. “Ow!” and he shook his hand in involuntary shock. Which, of course, tossed the revolver back up. He snatched at it again, this time with his left hand, and batted it toward the couch again.
It landed on the cushion, but Abe was taking no chances. He turned away and put his arms over his head as if the gun was going to somehow bring the ceiling down. After a second he peeked past his arm to see the revolver sitting non threateningly on the couch in almost precisely the spot it had been in before the girl picked it up.
He walked over and picked it up, slipping it into his pocket before cradling his right hand in his left. It was red and already starting to purple.
The girl shook her head, a look of some combination of amusement and disgust on her face, and walked back to him. Without a word she touched her glowing hand to his and made the pain vanish. She was looking up at him impatiently, and Abe brushed past her and headed for the door.
“Well...?” he said, as if the delay had been entirely her fault. The girl rolled her eyes and followed him out.
Chapter Three: Underton
1.
Stepping out the door made Abe want to cover his eyes, even though the light beyond the door was precisely the same as that within. It wasn’t brightness but grandeur that made him want to shield his eyes. Underton was...
“Amazing...” He breathed it more than said it, and he stopped just across the threshold to stare.
Abe had assumed that the Underton was one big cave and that ceiling of the cave-room he was in was as high as the ceiling got. He was half-right. The cave-room opened directly out into what amounted to an alley, the walls of which climbed impossibly high until terminating in the roof of the cave, at least a thousand feet overhead. There were other doors and windows carved into the walls, and paths between these different ‘buildings’ chiseled out of the monolithic rock that varied in size between alleys scarcely as wide as Abe’s shoulders to open squares as big as mansions. One such square stood at the end of the alley, and it resembled a sort of underground parody of the town squares of Highmark. Mushrooms twice as high as a man replaced the trees Abe was used to, and instead of grass there was a bright green, thick layer of lichen.
As in the room he’d entered, many of the buildings were painted thickly, often in bright colors and sometimes in impressive styles that must have taken artists of considerable patience. The outside of the girl’s house or cave or whatever—he supposed it was her house, though how a child that age could come to live alone was beyond him—was a bright shade of pink with dark green dots. He wondered if she’d done it herself.
The paint was decorative as well as functional. The walls and floor and roof of the monstrous cave all gave off the same faint glow as they had inside except where the bare rock was covered with paint or plant. The effect was to light everything evenly and somehow not quite enough, so that Abe found himself squinting a bit. It all looked just a little hazy, as if coming into a small room where a kettle had been let boil too long and there was moisture in the air.
Perhaps that feeling was due to the smell. It didn’t, to be honest, feel damp, but there was a pervading scent of dampness to the place. It smelled like a fresh mushroom just sliced, not unpleasant, but moist and earthy and just slightly strange.
It was a lot to take in. Consequently, Abe stood outside the door taking it all in while the girl walked away. She was out of the alley and halfway to the little mushroom park before he noticed.
“Hey!” he called after her, and then realized that he didn’t know her name. “Hey, erm... you!”
She did not turn, but a few other people gave him queer looks. Queerer, rather.
The square was not exactly bustling, but there were a few women gathered on a stoop having a chat and there was a boy trying to flirt with two girls in the park, both of whom were giggling. All of these people were dressed in coarse-looking and simple garments that looked a bit like costumes to Abe. Seeing the boy, really, is what finally made clear to him the thought that had been trying to present itself since he first saw the girl’s clothing – it all reminded him of the costumes he and his classmates had made for a theatrical production at university. It didn’t just seem old fashioned, but theatrically so.
Still, as odd as he found it, the odd man out here was clearly him in his pricey though somewhat too large tweed suit. No one here was wearing any sort of waistcoat or tie or anything... the boy was lounging about in public, with girls, in l
ess than what Abe would have considered appropriate to wear to bed. And his shouting and dashing after the girl who was guiding him was certainly not diminishing the stares.
“Excuse me,” he said as he caught up to her and she finally turned to look at him. “It occurs to me that I don’t even know your name, child.” He wasn’t sure what the etiquette was down here, but he straightened up and looked her in the eye and shot his hand out toward her. “My name is Abnerssen Crompton.”
She looked down at his hand then up to his face and smiled before sticking her hand out, as if the idea were to simply hold out one’s hand rather than shake. “My name’s Merry.”
Her smile widened as she watched his face quickly take on a look of stupefaction.
2.
“Gotcha!” The girl did a little dance of utter delight and spun around before throwing her hands out to her sides in a flourish that, coupled with the costume-i-ness of her clothing, seemed extra-theatrical. “My name’s Begonia.”
“Hardy and grows in the shade,” Abe recited from memory. He’d had to memorize a lot of information for a botany course in university, all the while having been assured by his professor that there were real-world applications to a deep and thorough knowledge of plant life. This was the very first time Abe had ever applied any of this knowledge.
“Is that what it means?” the girl – Begonia – asked.
“It’s what it is,” said Abe. “Makes sense...”
“My sister was named Sunflower,” she said brightly.
“That makes less sense. Where is she?”
Begonia’s smile vanished when he asked and all the playfulness seemed to go out of her. “I ‘unno,” she said, her voice dripping with sullen melancholy. Abe watched her, half expecting this was a joke as well, and after a moment he began to feel like a monster for suspecting it.
“Come on, then... I don’t know the way.” And he started through the square, passing by her and trying not to give away that he was deliberately walking slowly to give her a chance to catch up.
Begonia recovered smartly and in a moment she was overtaking him with a smile that was precisely like the one she’d been wearing all along – which made one suspect that perhaps that smile hadn’t been entirely unforced, either.
“It isn’t far,” she said, turning and walking backwards over the faintly glowing stone. She slowed and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper then. “Best keep your hand on your gun, though, Mr. Abnerssen. The Spirit house is no place for a man with no spirit.”
Spirit is something that Abe has only a cursory understanding of. He knows it’s a powder and that only the worst sorts of degenerates would ever go near the stuff. He knows it flourishes in Underton to a level far exceeding its presence in Highmark. He knows that the people who use it will go to any extremes to feed their habit. That’s it. He, like most Highmarkers, has never seen it, has no idea what it does or even what it is, and is perfectly content to keep it that way, thank you very much.
“I should hope I have no Spirit.”
Begonia shook her head, an eyeroll threatening. “Not Spirit, spirit. Magic, I s’pose. You’ve got none.”
“No,” he said huffily. How was he supposed to know she meant something other than the drug? “I certainly have not.”
“‘s why you need to keep ahold of your gun, sir.” She nodded matter-of-factly and led him down a dim alley.
3.
The path to the Spirit house was so circuitous that Abe never would have been able to find his way back to Begonia’s house. It wasn’t just that there were twists and turns aplenty, either. There was also the incredible strangeness of the surroundings. For starters, there was no sun in the sky – there was no sky, for that matter – so Abe had no sense of which direction he was facing. To make matters more confusing, the width of their path seemed to change block by block. Some alleys were so narrow that Abe’s shoulders touched either side and he was filled with a dread of having to try and turn around should Begonia come to a dead end, while others were wide enough for ten Abe’s (or, he approximated, 5-6 horses) to walk comfortably abreast. Then there was the variation in lighting. Some of the more reputable seeming parts of Underton – the places where the stone was carved into elegant faux-brick or featured actual statuary – used a great deal more paint than others. In one impressive area that Abe only caught a bare glimpse of as Begonia led him across a courtyard, the glow was only allowed to peek through the paint in carefully-wrought faux-lamps and tiny carved fireflies. It cast the whole neighborhood in a mysterious and enchanting perpetual twilight, and Abe felt genuinely entranced by Underton for the first time.
That was the end of the spectrum that they seemed to be moving away from, though. When Begonia stopped, finally, it was in an area that seemed to be the opposite of that pleasant courtyard. Here was a section of Underton where the only thing blocking the glow from the walls was the growth of slimy green mold and moss. It felt damper here, and while Abe had seen several people at work or play as they walked – all of them dressed in styles that seemed hundreds of years out of fashion – here there wasn’t a soul. There was, though, the distinct impression of being watched.
Begonia climbed the single step that led to a particular dark-varnished door and raised her hand to knock. She stopped herself and turned to Abe, then she extended her index finger and thumb, nodding toward his pocket. Abe shrugged stupidly and she nodded again, more emphatically.
He moved his hand to where she was nodding and felt the revolver in his pocket. “Oh, right,” he said as he shoved his hand into his pocket and got a grip on the butt of the gun.
She narrowed her eyes at him and glared and then turned and rapped on the door.
“Password,” came a tiny voice from near Begonia’s feet.
“Bacon,”
The door opened a tiny crack and the same small voice said, “come in,” this time from, it seemed, Abe’s shoulder. he spun around as he looked for it, making a full rotation before Begonia stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Come on,” she said and pushed the door open with her hip.
Right inside the door was a rather large and dim room furnished with a few benches and some potted plants. They were not the sort that Abe was used to because the environment was not conducive to the sorts of ferns he expected in a lobby – which this appeared to be. These were smaller versions of the mammoth mushroom that stood in that first square Abe had encountered in Underton, and while they were petite compared to that first one, they were, it should be noted, quite a bit larger than any mushroom Abe had seen prior to today.
Adding to the sense of the room as a sort of lobby was the only other piece of furniture, a large, waist-high desk behind which stood a very, very large man who appeared to be a disconcerting shade of pale green.
Begonia didn’t even glance at him, and the man returned the favor. In fact, the man didn’t move at all, and there was a very real possibility that he was a statue.
Abe walked toward the desk tentatively. “Um... hello?”
“What do you want?” said Begonia.
Abe narrowed his eyes as he regarded her. “What do you mean? You know perfectly well what I want.”
Begonia looked at him with an expression of pure confusion on her face. “Wha... Oh,” understanding dawned. “You thought that was me? Don’t have trolls up where you live?” A few steps carried her to a pulley behind the desk, and, when she started pulling, curtains that Abe hadn’t noticed began to open. The walls were bare rock, glowing faintly behind the thick, heavy curtains, and as more light was allowed to flood the room the statue behind the desk began to move.
“Ahh... that’s nice.” The creature was moving and speaking slowly, it’s voice the same one that had invited them in but slower and much deeper now. “Could’ve let me play with him a bit longer, but I won’t complain.” He turned his head to the side much further than seemed reasonable (or possible), and the cracks that accompanied the movement sounded like a rockslid
e.
More used to the sound than Abe, Begonia didn’t even notice. “You sound very much like you’re complaining, Spirit House.” The green stone man shrugged glacially.
“You are Spirit House?” Abe asked. “I thought this was a Spirit house.”
The creature leaned down to get on Begonia’s level (a tremendous lean – he was several feet taller than Abe) and smiled in a manner that would have been playful if executed at double or triple speed. “He never dealt with trolls before, hmm?”
The little girl shook her head and then turned back to Abe. “It’s not like they don’t have trolls up where you are, honestly. Do you live under a rock?”
“You actually, literally, live under a rock. Both of you. And trust me, there are no trolls in Highmark.”
“Look,” Begonia pointed at the troll behind the desk. Abe turned and looked and after a moment he saw what she must be talking about. The creature was changing color. The green was getting lighter, it looked like. Not lighter... less.
“What in the world...?”
“We fade as we get warm, and light makes us warm. With enough light...?” The creature gestured with his hand, encouraging Abe to finish the thought.
“...you would fade until you couldn’t be seen at all...?”
“He takes the long road, but he arrives.” Begonia nodded.
“Hey, this is all pretty strange, and I think I’m doing just fine, thanks!”
The creature ignored Abe’s protest. “What brings you and the upworldo to Spirit House?”
“There’s a patron of yours he needs to find, is all. Girl from his level.” Begonia turned to the still-spluttering Abe. “The name was Merry, right?”
At the mention of the name, Spirit House suddenly ceased smiling and he turned and reached for the curtain cord. “Can’t help you, little plant.” And he deliberately began pulling the cord. It was slow going to begin with, but as the curtains closed more and more the room grew dimmer and the giant’s movements grew slower still.
Highmark Page 2