When Abe opened his mouth to scream, “you monster!” he tasted tears and dirt and blood. He drove the point of his small knife into the Woodsman’s eye.
The Woodsman did not recoil. He stood perfectly still for a moment, as if to point out how little the knife in the eye bothered him, and then he turned his head swiftly to one side and snapped the blade off. He grabbed Abe by the back of his jacket and heaved him away, tossing him near the mouth of the tunnel with as much effort as if he’d been throwing a shoe.
“Go,” said the Woodsman, utterly monotone. Abe lay gasping for breath on the ground, seething now with as much embarrassment as rage.
Abe still held the knife in his hand, and as he got to his feet he tried to flip the blade back into place. It was then that he realized the blade was gone, snapped off and still buried in the Woodsman’s eye. Although it wasn’t an eye, obviously. It was, like everything about the Woodsman, a fairly passable carving of an eye, somewhat ruined by the presence of a cheap steel blade right in the middle. It pivoted disconcertingly as the Woodsman looked around.
Abe flipped out the next tool on the knife, the corkscrew. The Woodsman tried to laugh, sounding like a person being struck in the throat immediately after beginning to say ‘hungry’ repeatedly, a dispassionate “hu-hu-hu” that Abe understood to be dismissive and mocking.
The Woodsman swatted at Abe as he moved closer, but Abe ducked the blow and lashed out with his foot as he swung his arm as hard as he could and drove the corkscrew a few inches into the Woodsman’s back. Pain shot through him as his foot connected with the dense solidity of the Woodsman’s leg, and then the blackened metal hand smacked Abe in the side of his head hard enough to make his vision go blurry.
The Woodsman’s grip on the back of Abe’s neck was like a vice, and Abe braced himself for the end. The Woodsman lifted him up and Abe watched with dread as he drew back his hand. That was it, though. The Woodsman held Abe up by the back of his neck just high enough for Abe’s feet to find the ground, and the Woodsman walked him like a marionette.
When they reached the wall that separated the train tracks from the walkway of Underton, the Woodsman dropped Abe for just a second before he shifted his grip and threw him easily up beyond the wall.
Abe landed badly, too tired and hurt to break his fall, and to his great surprise he still held his pocket knife when he sat up. The corkscrew had a chunk of wood stuck to it, and so Abe flipped up the next implement – a nail file. He ached all over as he shuffled toward the tracks, but he couldn’t let the Woodsman just get away with what he’d done. Merry and Begonia were dead, and that fact was driving him on despite his own wounds.
When he looked down over the wall, prepared to leap over it at his enemy, though, he saw nothing but wreckage. The Woodsman was gone.
2.
Walking was very high on the list of things Abe didn’t want to do. In fact, there was only one thing he could think of that would be worse than walking, and that was staying in Underton a moment longer. It was massively inconvenient that the only way to get back to Highmark was to walk.
It was actually worse than just having to walk, because he didn’t really know where he was going. Abe knew exactly one route through Underton, and after attempting a few doors to no avail (there were, as far as he knew, several doors between Highmark and Underton, but he was having precisely the same luck finding one leading up as he had finding one leading down) he resigned himself to trudging along the train tracks until he got to a place he recognized.
Time had become sort of meaningless by the time he reached the familiar bridge from which he and Begonia had plummeted earlier. It felt like it was a year ago, or at least a week, but Abe couldn’t pin down how long it had actually been. The light in Underton was constant, and so it was impossible to tell if it had been more than a few hours. Abe felt incredibly tired, which could mean it had been days, but Abe was a champion of self-deprecation, which led him to suspect it hadn’t really been very long and that he was a huge baby.
He wasn’t hungry, anyway, which suggested that it had either been less than a full day since he left the office (no matter how long ago it seemed) or that the events he’d taken part in had had an adverse effect on his appetite. Again, no solid answers.
Abe eventually shuffled past the Spirit house and considered going in. He felt, deep down in his heart, a twinge for being rude when he didn’t stop, but by this point he was walking forward essentially by maintaining momentum. If he stopped, he was pretty sure he’d just slump down and fall asleep and probably be murdered.
Between Begonia and Merry and the Deepmen and Spirit House, Abe had managed to shed a lot of his Highmark fears of Underton. He had begun to think that it was a charming but peculiar place, a magical sort of danger about it, sure, but nothing to get too worked up about. His new-found appreciation for Underton was dashed, however, and he wouldn’t trust the denizens to so much as lift a foot to keep from kicking him if he were laying in their path.
Certainly a lot of this feeling was impotent rage that he’d failed to expend appropriately when the Woodsman was handy, but still…
Abe closed his eyes when he shuffled into Begonia’s house. He didn’t even know it was her house (cave… whatever). For all he knew, she’d gotten there five minutes before him. For all he knew she was there to nick all the china and had gotten distracted when the weirdo from uptown had kicked in the door… still, he choked back emotion and kept his eyes closed until he’d fumblingly found the door and pulled it closed behind him.
The stairs.
The stairs were the damn worst.
Abe fell, deadweight, against the door at the top of the stairs, and it fell open. He was scarcely aware of the two guardsmen – the same two guardsmen – looking down at him with mild shock and something like distaste. He did notice, however, that it had stopped raining. The sun was bright and the birds were chirping in Highmark and Abe was angry about that, too.
Chapter Eleven: The happy occasion
1.
Most people, after the ordeal Abe had been through, would have reacted differently. One would be forgiven if, upon emerging from Underton to find two doughty officers of the public trust standing at the ready, one simply passed out. If one managed to remain on one's feet, one would certainly have nothing to apologize for if one hired a carriage to take one straight home to one's bed, where one would remain for many, many days.
Abe went straight back to Ebensworth and Associates without a word of explanation to the officers who had been on duty (just the day before, it turns out) when Abe had passed them by on his way down, looking a great deal less damaged. They watched him limp down into the streets with surprise on their faces, and one of them (Abe didn't know which) actually called "sir!" after him. Abe wasn't sure which man had spoken because he didn't have the energy to turn his head.
The suit he was wearing had been relatively new and in excellent repair when Abe put it on before going to work the day before. A smart, if rather old-fashioned wheat-colored tweed, it had been so thoroughly soaked and torn and dirtied that it now would have been lucky to be mistaken for grey. As luck was not with Abe, the sun continued to shine down on him, highlighting the torn and muddied outfit for any onlooker while the fabric utterly failed to breath and clung unpleasantly to his body.
This would have made for a great deal of complaining most of the time, though likely not aloud. Abe often found himself mentally listing numerous small annoyances throughout his day, and a ruined, wet suit clinging horribly to his various bodily crevices and creating what is sure to be a truly top-notch rash would have been at the very top of that list. Today, however, he had other things to complain about. He almost certainly had suffered a few cracked ribs, and his ankle was only not in agony just now because it was numb from the long, painful walk. It would have been a much quicker task to name where he didn't ache, and Abe was not known to cope well with pain. Once as a child he'd complained about a stubbed toe for an entire month, only stoppi
ng when his mother confirmed that he couldn't even remember which toe he'd stubbed. And yet, Abe was numb as he trudged through the sunny late-morning streets of Highmark. He wasn't cataloging his complaints but was rather concentrating on how to report his failure. The details were elusive, and he felt very slow-witted as he tried to plan his story. More than once he stopped his slow trek, standing dumbly in the middle of the street until he was jarred into motion by a shout or, once, the whip of a carriage-driver.
The contrast between Underton and Highmark was so great that the only a combination of Abe's exhaustion, distraction, and familiarity with the streets around him kept him from gawking like a moron at everything around him as he made his way back toward the office. First, the similarities. Both Highmark and Underton were nominally composed of buildings separated by basically flat expanses of street or plant-life.
As for differences, they were far more numerous. For a start, there was the variation of surfaces underfoot. Here Abe walked on flagstone, there gravel. The roads were generally cobblestone of more-or-less solid construction, and there were even some wealthier neighborhoods where the sidewalk was made of a blushing, white-veined marble. The houses were not the same material as the road, either. In Highmark, houses and other buildings were sometimes made of similar material to the road, of course – bricks or stone being not-uncommon – but they were as often made of wood or plaster or, oh, any number of things. It was a novelty that went wholly unappreciated, but compared to Underton and its buildings of glowing rock it was a festival of variety. And speaking of glowing rock, there wasn't any. All the rocks behaved like normal, and there were trees instead of fungi and there was grass. Also, there was an open sky with a sun in it; there was weather; there was no glowing; day led into night; there were no trolls or lowmen; and there had been no recent murders perpetrated by wooden monsters... but other than that Highmark was exactly the same as Underton.
Abe wasn't noting any of this, but there an unconscious level of comfort about being back in familiar surroundings that wrapped around him like a blanket. So much like a warm, inviting blanket, in fact, that as soon as Abe reached Ebensworth and Associates, with his very hand on the door, he felt his eyelids grow heavy and he slid down the door jamb, dead asleep.
2.
"That is patently unacceptable balderdash," thundered Mr. Ebensworth. "Patently absurd, sir, and I'll not have it!" He slammed the door as he stormed out of the room, making the loose brass knob fall to the floor with a thud. Abe, lying on a short, battered sofa with a blanket over him, looked at the fallen knob and sighed. What was 'patently unacceptable balderdash' was the brief version of events that Abe had relayed to his employer upon waking up.
He considered that perhaps he should not have mentioned the Woodsman. An unfamiliar bit of Abe's brain suggested that perhaps Mr. Ebensworth would have been better pleased with Abe's report if his employer could have waited for him to wake up before demanding it.
"Bit of an ass," Abe whispered, barely audible even to himself.
"He can be, yes," said a voice that made Abe jump (as much as a man can jump while lying on a sofa). For a brief moment Abe wondered if there was a troll around or if perhaps Spirit House was able to communicate with him over such a great distance. He was even sleepily rationalizing the shift in pitch as probably due to passing through whatever layers of rock separated Underton from Highmark when the actual speaker slid from a shadow close by and derailed that train of thought.
The man was tall and slender and pale and wore nothing but black and seemed to unfold himself from a shadow that looked too small to conceal him. He was elegant in an effortless, disheveled way, and he managed to look both unremarkable and alluring. The man was McCallister Roods, the top agent at Ebensworth and Associates, and he was smiling rather magnetically at Abe at the moment. "...but he runs to cool quick enough, Mr. Crompton, after he gets a chance to blow off some steam. It is Mr. Crompton isn't it?"
Roods hooked a chair with his foot and slid it over beside the couch, lowering himself to sitting in a fluid manner which suggested all of these motions were carefully choreographed. He sat down backwards, leaning down toward Abe over the back of the chair while he simultaneously began rolling a cigarette. Abe managed to nod somewhere in there.
“I understand you’ve just returned from Underton,” said Roods. Abe nodded again. McCallister Roods was something of an aspirational figure for Abe. He was tall and elegant and smooth and easy-going, and he was the most accomplished investigator in the office by miles. He was perhaps only a few years older than Abe himself, barely half Mr. Ebensworth’s age, and yet he was responsible for more than twice as many successful outcomes as the company’s founder.
Between the view Abe had of his coworker and his exhausted and still-barely-awake state, he can be forgiven for not thinking much of the fact that Roods next flipped back the blanket that covered Abe’s feet and removed one of his shoes.
Roods peered at the shoe in his hand with an expert’s eye and turned it sideways. “Yes,” he said, “quite.” He cupped his free hand and shook the dirt from inside Abe’s shoe into his palm. “You were in the tunnels, I believe you said. Down with the moles…?”
“Lowmen,” Abe managed.
“Very polite of you to say, Abe.” Roods pocketed the frankly disturbing pile of dirt and tossed Abe’s shoe to the floor, then repeated the procedure with the other shoe. He smiled at the handful of dirt before slipping it into his jacket and rising quickly to his feet.
“Startling,” Roods said to himself before regarding Abe with the largest smile he’d ever been regarded with. “Well, Abe, I can see that your clothing is in far too severe a state for your return home, so I’ll just go and fetch you a suit from my office, shall I?”
“Mr. Roods, that’s very kind of you,” said Abe, “but—“
“Nonsense!” and Roods was out the door before Abe could say another word. A moment later, Roods came back with a very new-looking suit, which he hung on the chair where he’d been sitting.
“Here we are,” he said. “Now you just get changed and I’ll have a carriage take you straight home. I understand perfectly the sort of ordeal that Underton can be, of course, and am sure you would do better in your own bed.”
Abe sat up and turned his head to one side, generating a frightful series of popping sounds. “Yes, but if I’m going straight home, Mr. Roods…?”
Roods pivoted from the neck up in an owlish fashion. “Yes?” There was something a little malevolent about the up-turn on the end of the word, the way he stretched it out beyond a single syllable.
“Well, I don’t think my clothes are so dirty that I couldn’t wear them in a carriage.”
“Oh,” said McCallister Roods, smiling still, “but I insist.” Abe blinked and nodded and loosened his tie.
3.
Roods was so very slender that Abe was hugely relieved when he was able to take off the borrowed suit. Roods was, in fact, so much narrower than Abe that Abe would feel obliged to have the suit mended before returning it because his comparative girth (and Abe was hardly a broad or girthy man) had stretched many of the seams quite noticeably. The relief of escaping the too-small suit was substantially less than the succeeding relief of going to sleep, and Abe proceeded to do this almost immediately, despite the fact that it was still quite light outside and that he was exceptionally dirty.
When morning came, Abe ate an astonishing amount of food and sullenly reported his desire "not to talk about it" whenever either of his parents asked him where he had been. Rather than go to work, he took a very hot bath and put clean sheets on his bed and went back to sleep. It took a few days of this sort of behavior before Abe could walk comfortably or was even a bit willing to put his mangled foot into a shoe. Later on he started to wonder if his mother or perhaps one of the maids or cooks had taken pity on him and slipped some opium or other drug into his food. He would always have a vague memory of being in intense pain in those days whenever he tried to recall the
m later, but he would come to think, again, that he had probably just been being a baby at the time.
If pressed, Abe would have to admit that he had been various shades of purple from the neck down, though, so even if he'd been drugged perhaps he wasn't such a huge baby after all.
He lost track of time (which one could argue supports the notion that he was drugged or perhaps that he was very tired and rather distressed by his ordeal), and so he wasn't sure if it had been a mere few days or as much as a week when his dinner tray was brought in, not by a servant, but by McCallister Roods.
"Good evening, Abe!" said Roods with a wide smile. Abe reached for his sheets and pulled them up like a startled housewife even though he was fully dressed and also a man.
"Roods!?" Abe was so surprised he neglected to address his superior properly. He certainly didn't want to see him, but rather than say so he simply asked, weakly, "what are you doing here?"
“Why, I’ve brought your dinner, of course.” He walked to the side of Abe’s bed in too few steps, his long legs stretching out cartoonishly, and slid the tray, still covered, onto the bedside table. “And I’ve brought you back your suit, and I have your newest assignment.”
Abe turned up the gas in the lamp protruding from the wall and climbed out of bed. He used a cane to steady himself as he tried and failed to hurry. “Assignment?” he asked as he made his way across the room to a pair of chairs by the window.
Highmark Page 7