Finally he stopped moving at all, his hand on the cord, the room darker than when they’d come in.
Abe watched all this in silence and then said, slowly, “I’m not entirely sure he was telling the truth.”
Chapter Four: An unhelpful troll
1.
Begonia walked around the desk and tried to open the curtains again, but the stony grip Spirit House had on the cord completely immobilized it. Abe took a tentative step forward and reached out to touch the giant troll. The creature was cold to the touch, his entire personage now a nearly black shade of green. And he was hard and smooth, like polished marble. Abe rapped on the statue with his knuckles. “I don’t think he’s going to be much help now.”
“He’s just bein’ a big baby,” said Begonia. “Trolls are great for talkin’ even when they’re stone. All of them are... whatcha call it? Voice throwers?”
“Ventriloquists?”
“Somethin’ like that. Come on.” Begonia walked past the desk, casting an unappreciative glare at the troll as she did. “You’re not impressing anybody,” she said. And she opened the door he had been standing in front of.
“So he can still talk?” Abe asked watching the creature’s closed and stony lips.
“Depends on how you define ‘talk’ really,” said a voice that seemed to come from Abe’s foot. It was the same voice that had invited them in, but even higher pitched now, and faster. One could imagine there was a point when the creature spoke in a human-like pitch and speed, but the two seemed to increase in tandem and in direct counterbalance to the amount of movement Spirit House was capable of. “We’ll call it ‘communicate’. Which I’m not doing any more of. You’re on your own.”
“Jerk,” said Begonia. She held the door and looked at Abe impatiently.
“What’s in here?”
“It’s the Spirit house.”
Abe circled the desk and stepped through the door. “I thought he was Spirit House.”
“This is the Spirit house, proper.”
“I thought he was the Spirit House proper.”
Begonia actually stamped her foot in frustration. The troll’s voice piped up, seeming to come from the ceiling now. “Trolls are where they stay, and I stay at the Spirit house. It’s still a place. A place where people use Spirit, incidentally.”
“A house,” Abe said helpfully.
“Ugh,” Begonia said. “Come on! We’re not gonna find your Merry talking to Spirit House about the Spirit house!”
And Begonia stomped into the room leaving Abe to follow. When he did he found himself in a long, narrow room lined on both sides with beds. They were bunked three-high with ladders running up along the legs and pivoting trays in front of the heads of each bunk. Each ‘bed’ was barely as wide as Abe’s shoulders and tapered near the head. The trays were positioned a foot or so lower than the bunks themselves so that someone lying on one of these beds could hang his head off the narrowed end and have one’s face virtually pressed against one’s tray.
Abe stopped beside the first set of beds and pushed one of the trays. The top level tray was about five feet off the ground and Abe saw when he pushed it that it pivoted easily. He also saw that it was a painted white, but was blemished with traces of something dark. Whatever it was, it had been painstakingly removed so that only a faint discoloration remained.
Abe was completely ignorant of Spirit, but there had been whispers when he first arrived at Ebensworth about an investigator who had been an expert on Underton and on Spirit. He was gone by the time Abe came on board, and all Abe had been able to learn second-hand was that there would be no more experts on spirit at Ebensworth and Associates. “Is it better or worse for the Spirit to be dark?” he asked.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said the disembodied troll voice, emerging from the tray he was scrutinizing. “Darker is stronger and harsher and cheaper, which is good for the poor addict and very bad for him as well.”
“The Spirit here must be dark,” Abe said as he turned to look at another tray, this one also stained dark.
“Trolls deal in the darkest,” said the voice. “No troll in Underton would bother with good Spirit. It’s too easy to turn the lights off here. Up where there’s more light, where we can’t be seen unless we want to be, though...”
“Are you finished?” Begonia was much deeper in the room, standing silhouetted against light coming through another door at the far end. Seeing her there at the end of the long room of bunks brought to mind suddenly how much like a crypt this room was. Abe had been to several funerals for clients in his day, and the greatest families of Highmark had tombs like these, with shelves on either side for the dearly departed.
“I haven’t really started,” said Abe. “What are we looking for exactly?”
“Merry. But we won’t find her or anyone here. I found something, though. I think we need to go.” Begonia held up something that the distance and back-light made impossible to distinguish, then turned on her heel and went out the door.
Quietly, from beside his shoulder, the troll spoke to Abe. “Careful, Highmark,” it said. “Careful.”
2.
Abe rather hoped the disembodied troll would elaborate, but the creature seemed content to let that cryptic warning stand.
“Careful of what?” he said. Abe turned to one side and then the other, doing a full rotation in the middle of the drug den before he stopped himself, feeling dumb. “Hello...?”
“This is it!” Begonia was outside, using the light from the exterior wall to examine what looked like a small book. “I know where she is, come on!”
Abe glanced around the dim room warily, as if he could somehow see the voice he wanted an answer from. “So what am I being careful of, Spirit House?”
“Highmark, we need to hurry!” The girl sounded a little further away now, and more than a little angry.
“Thanks for all your great advice,” Abe muttered as he headed for the back door. He touched his hand to the butt of his revolver, still in his pocket, and said, “I still have my gun, anyway...”
“Good,” said Spirit House as Abe stepped out into the comparatively-bright street.
As soon as he was outside the house, Begonia rushed toward him, holding the book out and grinning from ear to ear. “This is what we needed! Look!” The little girl was actually doing a little hitched step, some sort of gleeful in-mid-stride-dance. Abe took the proffered book from her, unable to keep from smiling at her delight.
The smile vanished when he looked at the pages of the book, though. He turned the book sideways, squinted at the pages, and even tried flipping it upside down before he gave up. “I can’t read this.”
“Ugh,” Begonia said and snatched the book from him. “Honestly, I thought everybody in Highmark was supposed to be smart. It’s Poledran.” There was no look of recognition on Abe’s face. “Seriously?” she muttered with disgust.
Abe shrugged helplessly. “I know a little Hawthorne.”
Another of her trademark eyerolls and Begonia turned the book, holding it, Abe was pleased to observe, the same way he had been holding it. “It doesn’t look like your girl was an addict, basically.”
Abe nodded. “Right. Her aunt seemed to think she was involved with someone who was an addict, not an addict herself.”
“All aunts would think that, though.”
“This aunt was right.”
Begonia inclined her head to acknowledge that fact. “She was involved with someone... Spirit House.” She pointed to an entry in something that looked like a ledger. “See?” He didn’t, because to him it looked like someone had thrown black string on the page and glued it down; the squiggles were utterly meaningless.
“It’s her name,” she said. “If either of us was going to be illiterate, I think most people would have bet on the dirty Underton street urchin.”
“I’m not illiterate!”
Begonia was smirking. “Looks like she was a runner.”
Abe was still an i
nteresting shade of red when he said, “how does that justify the rush, though?”
Begonia showed him another page of the little book, tracing her finger along a row in a little table. Abe couldn’t be certain, but it looked like one of the - he assumed they were words - words on the page was the same one she’d claimed was Merry’s name. “Look, right here.” Begonia pressed a remarkably dirty fingernail against the paper to scratch a line. The line wasn’t just a result of pressing on the paper, she actually left a streak of dirt on the page. “Merry’s picking up some spirit right now.”
“So now we just have to go to every conceivable place she could be meeting someone with drugs, then, yes? Capital.”
Begonia closed the book with a snap, not even bothering to sigh. “There’s only one place spirit that dark comes from. It’s the moles for sure.”
“Moles...?”
If she heard him, she didn’t show it. “And the moles only come up on the train.” Her tone was becoming condescendingly didactic. “And the train has a schedule, so...?”
She looked at him with her brows up, expectantly. “...so we know where she’s going to be...?”
The smile was so big that it threatened to overwhelm the girl’s face. Her teeth were remarkably white, especially when contrasted to her dirty face. “And when!” She clapped him on the shoulder. “We need to hurry!”
And she tugged the sleeve of his jacket as she turned to run, her grip so strong that he had no choice but to start running as well. The gun bounced painfully against his side with every step.
Chapter Five: A train to catch
1.
The story is that the first people in Underton went there by choice because they disliked sunlight. These people crept back into the caves past where the rock glows and there they found the darkness they craved. They also found precious metals and veins of dark black Spirit so potent that it could made taking the drugs of Highmark seem like sipping water. They had little use for what they found—living, so the stories go, on aquifer water and mushrooms and mysterious slimes—but soon other people came to Underton who were not so averse to light.
These people, who legend says were banished from Highmark (but who were almost certainly driven there by economic pressures as the city above grew wealthier and denser), wanted to stay in the glowing light the first folk shunned, and these first folk were glad to trade what they had discovered. For though they shunned light, even after generations, the first folk still savored meat... and so they arranged to trade their mineral and narcotic wealth for freshly slaughtered livestock.
The arrangements were made slowly, in the places where the glow of the rocks faltered, too bright for the comfort of the first men and too dim for to comfort of anyone else. Even in these dim places, though, the men of Underton saw their forebears as something entirely new. The generations had changed the first people of Underton: they hunched and used their hands as often as their feet to navigate the darkness. Their faces and bodies were hairier than any man of Highmark, and their brows jutted out, thick bone under dense hair to shade their tiny, useless eyes. Their ears had grown, their noses turned up and receded, and their skin was as pale as a gentleman’s new shirt.
The men who traded with them called them moles amongst themselves, and when one of the creatures heard the name he laughed and did not kill the speaker. They were called moles ever since.
As the trade grew (as more and more people came to rely on the precious metals of the moles for jewelry and decoration and science and as more and more people became addicted to the dark spirit the moles provided) the system demanded modernization. This was when the great train project began.
2.
Even in the dim light of Underton, Abe saw the train a long way off. He saw it because it was enormous and glowing, like a massive slow-moving snake that had crawled through phosphorus. The train was much longer and much slower than any train in Highmark, and it appeared to be one long, continuous, segmented car rather than a series of small cars like Abe was used to.
As they got closer to it, running all the while, Abe saw that it wasn’t actually one car but three – one massive, nearly endless middle car with a flat, open platform on either end – and the front was rapidly approaching.
“How do we get on,” he asked when Begonia stopped running, mercifully. They were on a narrow bridge with a terrifying lack of rails that crossed over the train tracks below. She looked back toward the train fretfully and then moved close to the edge of the bridge. She looked as if she was preparing to step off.
“Oh, no,” said Abe.
There certainly wasn’t any sort of train station he could see, but surely people didn’t actually just jump on. Did they?
“You mean we’re actually going to try and… jump?”
“Not try,” said Begonia, stepping away from the edge with an eye toward the train. It didn’t appear to be moving much faster than a man could run, but it was getting closer and closer all the time. There was a sort of platform on the front car that Abe could distinguish as the train got closer – an open area that looked to be piled with, of all things, pillows.
It was small comfort as he stepped closer to the edge of the narrow bridge and looked down. How long of a drop was it going to be, he wondered as he tried to estimate the distance down as well as the height of the platform (the moving platform… the one attached to the massive, person-crushing train). Was it 15 feet? 25?
“Get ready,” said Begonia. She caught his hand with hers and walked back to the edge. He followed dumbly, fighting to suppress the image that presented itself as he was able to get a clear glimpse of the wheels. Those wheels are remarkably shiny and sharp looking, he thought, and with all that weight behind them would carve through a person like a cudgel through mayonnaise. He could not have explained why anyone would want to hit mayonnaise with a cudgel, but the splattery image it created certainly seemed appropriate.
“Go!” yelled Begonia as she stepped back behind him and pushed with surprising force on his hip.
Abe scrambled for purchase on the bridge as the girl shoved him, but he couldn’t quite manage to get his footing before he ran out of bridge to stand on. He screamed as he fell forward, tears streaming from his eyes as he plummeted toward the rapidly-approaching platform. He had time to think, as he fell, that those might not be pillows. What if they’re sacks of rocks? What if they’re soft cotton draped deceptively over steel bars or gold or something else terribly hard? What if they are sacks of pure spirit, and he was plunging headfirst into a swift, euphoric death by overdose? What if—
“Oof!” He landed rather badly, but they were, in fact, pillows. The thick, soft cushions were actually piled up on a surface that was at least as soft as a pillow itself, so a landing that should have resulted in a broken neck actually resulted in nothing worse than a sore shoulder and an embarrassing sprawl. Abe sat up just in time to see Begonia land in a billow of skirt in a much more dignified manner, settling into the pillows as if she had just been jumping on the bed and had, this moment, decided to stop.
“What the hell is the matter with you? I could’ve been killed!” Abe wanted to glower at her and shake his finger as he spoke, but he was having trouble getting his footing on the squishy surface and had to settle for long-distance scolding. Begonia shrugged.
“You made it, didn’t you?” She got to her feet and dusted herself off. He, of course, had no comment. “And you didn’t lose anything?” He patted himself down to make sure he still had his gun, which he did. “And you got to where you need to be to find your girl?”
Finally, something he could object to! “We’ll see about that!” he said and attempted to storm past Begonia and into the mole train proper. His ankle threatened to roll over when he planted his foot, though, and he fell down onto his knees. It was very hard for him to glower furiously while crawling across the soft platform toward the door, but he did it.
3.
The soft cushiony surface of that platform ended under
an awning that covered the door to the train’s interior. There was no locomotive that Abe could see, and how the enormous train managed to move (admittedly slowly) was a mystery. It was not one that he had time to ponder, though, because Begonia seemed to be in an awful hurry.
“Do you have your gun?” she asked as she put her small hand on the handle of the door – this much of the train, at least, was familiar to Abe, the small sliding door with the vertical handle. From, apparently, thin air Begonia had retrieved her crossbow, and she held it rather clumsily at her side as she regarded him.
For the millionth time, Abe patted his pocket. “Yep,” he said.
“Well, you might want to get it out.”
He held his jacket with one hand while he got a grip on what turned out to be the muzzle. There was a moment of embarrassing-to-watch juggling before he had a proper hold of the gun. “Is it dangerous?”
“Prob’ly not,” she said as she opened the door. “Light-hatin’ sub-human drug dealers are probably real sweet.”
Abe tightened the grip on his gun before following her.
Inside the train was incredibly dark, with shards of stone attached the ceiling at distant intervals that provided only the dimmest of light. The light was enough to make out vague outlines of seats and lumps of fabric that were probably people, but very little else. It had only been a few hours since Abe had first arrived in Underton, and he had only just begun to accustom his eyes to the dimness. This was a step-down in brightness of at least equal magnitude.
Gripping his gun tighter gave him slight comfort, and he was well aware that he was an unreliable shot in ideal circumstances. In this slowly shifting train with virtually no light he would be lucky to hit an elephant at a dozen paces. He would have a hard time seeing an elephant at that distance.
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