The Order of Odd-Fish

by James Kennedy

  Jo said, “I still don’t understand this place, but I think I like it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. You’ll make a splendid Odd-Fish.”

  “Aunt Lily, why are you an Odd-Fish?” said Jo. “How did you come here in the first place?”

  “Ah, that’s a long story. Too long for now.” Aunt Lily took a deep breath and smiled. “What a day! You did yourself proud this morning, Jo. All the knights are talking about you. They expect big things.”

  “Do they still expect me to destroy Eldritch City?” chuckled Jo.

  She was stunned at how quickly Aunt Lily’s face fell. The old woman’s smile shrank to a tight grimace, and her eyes hardened.

  “Don’t do that again, Jo. Don’t ever, ever speak in public about that again.”

  “I…was just trying to joke about…”

  “Not even as a joke.”

  Aunt Lily was staring so ferociously Jo had to look away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

  “This isn’t the time.” Aunt Lily glanced around the party warily. “I’m warning you—be careful. You see all this? Everyone laughing, dancing, having a good time? If they knew the truth, this would all explode in our faces.”

  Jo was bewildered into silence. Aunt Lily turned and, as if a switch had been flipped, started laughing and making her way over to Dame Myra and Sir Oort.

  Jo moved away, too, and wandered the party, hanging around the edges of conversations. But she didn’t know what to say anymore. She still could feel everyone else’s happiness all around, but she felt locked out of it now. Aunt Lily had never spoken to her like that before.

  Then Jo saw Ian and Dugan, quietly arguing behind Dame Myra’s greenhouse. She made her way over to them and overheard Ian saying, “Where were you for the last few days?”

  “You heard me,” said Dugan. “Tracking the nangnang.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  “A squire for barely a day, and already you’re lecturing me? You’re not my mother, Ian.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. By the way, what’s up with that mustache?”

  “It’ll look better when it’s fully grown.”

  “No, it won’t.” Dugan noticed Jo. “Hey, Jo! What do you think of Ian’s mustache?”

  Ian muttered, “You don’t have to answer that.”

  “I’ll let you two discuss it. I’m off,” said Dugan, seeming relieved to get away.

  After Dugan was gone, Jo said, “What were you two fighting about?”

  “Nothing.” Ian’s eyes flicked tensely over to Dugan; then he turned to Jo and whispered, “Hey, this party’s almost over. Do you want to go downstairs?”

  “What’s downstairs?”

  Ian smiled strangely. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Jo hesitated. What, exactly, did he want to show her? But something about his smile sparked her curiosity, and she found herself saying, “Okay, but it had better be good.”

  “Make sure nobody notices,” said Ian, and slipped off into the shadows. Jo double-checked that nobody was watching them and then followed him downstairs into the empty lodge.

  With all the other Odd-Fish upstairs, the deserted halls felt lonely. Jo could still hear the cockroaches’ music, the thump of dancing, and the buzz of conversation above as they threaded their way down the corridors, turning left and right, and then down some more stairs, and then right and left and right again, and down even more stairs, and the music and conversation became fainter. Soon they were so deep into the lodge that Jo was lost.

  Finally they entered a closet with a trapdoor in the ceiling. Ian hoisted himself through the trapdoor, then reached down, gripped Jo’s wrists, and pulled her up into a vast dim room.

  At first Jo could see very little. But she smelled something raw and alive, like a forest after a hard rain. Ian lit some hanging lanterns, and as the room became brighter, Jo realized she was surrounded by a huge tapestry.

  The more she saw, the more she couldn’t stop staring. The tapestry was dazzling and full of pictures: fire-scorched, blood-spurting battles; immense jungles full of looping, twisty trees, scowling lizards, and secret golden rivers; a ballroom full of laughing girls dancing with beautiful monsters; an army of glitteringly armored spiders; queer-shaped people with sickly smiles and dead eyes cutting open their stomachs and pouring forth floods of centipedes and beetles and snakes. Jo could hardly take it all in, it was too relentlessly detailed, too hugely beautiful. The tapestry hung on every wall, from ceiling to floor, packed with color and detail, every last corner crammed with a capering tiger, convoluted flower, or snickering face.

  Ian wound up a large wooden wheel. And then—with a great creaking, clunking, and squealing—the tapestry began to move.

  Jo gasped, turning around, as the tapestry flowed past her—a scroll of tapestries, unspooling from one corner of the room, rolling around the walls in a circle, and disappearing back into the corner. A raucous parade of images danced past, with hardly enough time to take in each scene before it was gone, followed by even more scenes.

  The tapestry was full of stories about Eldritch City. In one scene, two enormous walrus-like demons wrestled each other, one neon green, the other candy-apple red, stomping up and down the mountain, kicking down buildings and tearing great gashes in the rock while thousands of people scattered away like ants. In another scene, Eldritch City was attacked from the sea by shambling beasts like a lobster crossed with an octopus, riding out of the ocean on jellyfish-like blobs. In yet another scene, the mountain itself split in half and a great chunk of Eldritch City floated off into the stars as tiny people on both halves reached out their arms, crying out, desperately trying to hang on to each other.

  Jo and Ian sat on a couch, watching the tapestry. For a long time there was no sound but the steady creaking of the spindles unwinding. It seemed the tapestry went on for miles.

  “It’s my favorite thing in the lodge,” said Ian. “I wanted to show you.”

  Jo glanced sideways at Ian. That morning, when Ian said he hated the Hazelwoods, she hadn’t known how to feel; she had been almost frightened of him. But in the end Ian was so earnest, so eager to show her his world, that she couldn’t help warming to him. She tentatively leaned up against him. He shifted closer to her. For a minute they were so close she could hear him breathing, smell his skin, feel his chest rise and fall.

  Then Ian became tense. Jo looked up at him, and his face had gone pale. The tapestry rolled on, Ian went very still, and a scene crawled into the room that struck Jo as familiar.

  Her bones turned to ice.

  It was…she swallowed, tried to stay calm. It couldn’t be anything else.

  The tapestry was a blizzard of demolishing gray fire, wave upon wave spiraling wildly outward, collapsing buildings and evaporating people into swirling ashes. In the eye of the storm there was a little white house, and inside the house…Jo tried not to stare, but she couldn’t help it. A thousand times she had imagined what her parents might have looked like. But this man, this woman, were nothing like what she’d expected.

  Her father was a gaunt, black-skinned man with round glasses and a mass of tangled hair; her mother boyish-looking, with straight red hair and startlingly white skin. Her father had turned away, hiding his eyes in horror, pointing at her mother, who writhed in bed, her face twisted in agony—and a scab-covered slug was bursting out of her.

  It was the birth of the Ichthala. She was looking at her own birth. Jo couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  Ian sat quite still, staring at a different spot on the tapestry—at a woman, far out on the edge. The gray waves of murderous fire were rolling straight at her. The woman had just started to turn around, her surprised face caught in the moment before she, too, was killed.

  “They say the entire history of Eldritch City is supposed to be in this tapestry,” said Ian. “Some people say you can even find yourself, if you search enough. Or your friends. Or…”<
br />
  Jo swallowed. She didn’t need him to tell her who the woman was. She recognized his wistful eyes, his blond hair, his slightly crooked nose. The image of Ian’s mother jerked past them, and Jo felt the world shrinking around her, drawing in closer, so tight she couldn’t move.

  “Dame Myra gave us a lecture once,” said Ian. “Said the tapestry’s alive, kind of—made out of a special moss that’s always growing, so the pictures are always shifting. It’s true. Sometimes my mother is smiling. Other times she just looks tired. Today…she just looks far away.”

  “Ian,” said Jo nervously, “why are you showing me this?”

  Ian stared at her with sudden intensity. “Jo, what do you think of the Hazelwoods?”

  Jo’s heart lurched. “Aunt Lily only told me about them this morning.” She cautiously added: “It, um…it sounded to me like they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or…”

  Ian’s lip curled.

  “What are you getting at, Ian?”

  “I know that Nora wants you to help her find the Ichthala. I think she’s crazy. But if this Ichthala nonsense turns out to be true…if you do find out who she is, or what she is, if you find out where the Ichthala’s hiding…I want you to tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to kill her.”

  Jo’s skin felt like cold jelly. Ian looked at her with strangely brutal eyes. She wanted to push him away, get out of the room, out of Eldritch City—the whole town was insane, Aunt Lily was right: they would murder her if they knew who she was. “I’ll do what I can,” she whispered.

  Ian smiled, and his teeth seemed sharper than Jo remembered. “I knew there was something about you I liked.”

  Jo stood up, tearing herself away.

  “Where are you going?” said Ian, startled.

  “Back upstairs,” said Jo. “They’re probably missing us.”

  “But Jo, don’t you—” began Ian. Then he stopped, for a part of the tapestry scrolled into view that stunned them both.

  A great hole had been hacked in the tapestry. Shreds of moss dangled from the hole, revealing a gray brick wall behind. Jo and Ian stared as the hole emerged from the corner and began circling the room, strangely menacing. Slashing through the gorgeous fertility of the tapestry, it looked not like a mere hole, but as if reality itself had been torn open.

  “That wasn’t there before,” breathed Ian.

  The hole steadily inched along, almost unbearably slowly. Then it passed over a wooden door on the other side of the tapestry—twelve feet off the ground, and closed—and marched on.

  “What’s that?” said Jo, but Ian had already leaped up and grabbed the wheel. The machinery groaned as he forced the tapestry to a halt; then he cranked the wheel backward, winding the tapestry in reverse, until the hole moved back over the door.

  “I never knew there was a door behind there,” whispered Ian.

  “Let’s go in!” said Jo.

  “No, Jo. We have to tell the knights.”

  “But I want to see what’s behind that door,” said Jo, and she only half heard Ian’s reply. She was staring transfixed at the tapestry, at the scene around the hole. The scene was dark and swallowed up in decoration, but once Jo saw it, it burned into her eyes.

  It was a circle of twelve women in blue cloaks and blue veils, standing around the hole, pointing toward the door.

  The Silent Sisters. Jo knew she should be afraid, but something pulled her toward it. Aunt Lily had told her almost nothing about the Silent Sisters. It almost seemed as though she was holding something back. And now here they were, ringed around a door, inviting her…where?

  “Let’s go tell Sir Oliver,” said Ian.

  “But Ian,” said Jo quickly. “It won’t hurt to just peek.”

  Ian frowned. “How would we even get up there?”

  “I don’t know, let’s see…You could stand on the couch, I guess, and then I could get up on your shoulders and—oh, come on, Ian! Are you scared or something?”

  Ian seemed about to protest, but his eyes hardened. “I’m not scared.”

  In guilty silence Jo helped Ian push the couch under the door. She knew she shouldn’t have said that, but she couldn’t help it; now the easy friendliness from before felt strained. Without a word Ian got up on the couch and Jo climbed onto his shoulders. She reached for the doorknob—at first she could just barely brush her fingers over it, but then she got a grip and turned it. The door opened slightly. Jo grabbed the threshold and pulled herself up into darkness.

  “What do you see?” said Ian.

  The passage was almost entirely dark, twisting upward in an odd way. Jo rose to her feet, every bit of her quickened and trembling. “It goes on a bit. I’m going to see what’s up there….”

  “Be careful.”

  Jo edged forward and upward, excited. The passage was cramped and dark and low, but there was something unnerving about the weird angles of the beams, something disorienting about the slope of the floor. Jo could barely see her hands, feeling her way upward almost blindly, until the passage contracted into a little hole, almost too small to get through. She couldn’t see anything beyond it.

  “Hey, Jo!” said Ian, far away now.

  Jo stopped, tingling with danger. If something happened to her up here…She suddenly felt very afraid. The darkness pressed in on her on all sides, and her buzzing confidence curdled in her stomach. “Okay, okay, I’m coming back,” she said shakily, and began to edge back down. But a last spasm of curiosity made her stop—and in a reckless rush she clambered up, squeezing through the hole.

  She was in a dark room full of motionless people. She couldn’t see anyone’s face. The people were absolutely still and silent, some sitting on chairs and sofas, a few standing or leaning on tables. But even in the darkness, Jo almost started to recognize their faces. She crept up to one of them, so close that her nose was only inches away.

  Suddenly she knew who it was—a very familiar face with a wicked yellow grin.

  “Aunt Lily?” whispered Jo.

  Aunt Lily’s head popped off, screeching with laughter. Jo stumbled back in shock, crashing into something like Colonel Korsakov, who grabbed her roughly, bulging and melting out of his uniform like a great hairy pudding. She punched, kicked to get free, but she was crushed between Aunt Lily and Colonel Korsakov, writhing and clutching each other, tearing each other’s bodies apart. Jo tried to scream but her throat locked up, she couldn’t even breathe.

  The knights of the Odd-Fish jerked and jiggled all around her, closing in, their mouths hanging open, their eyes hollow. A leering Sir Oliver grabbed Jo, his bony fingers all over her like spastic tarantulas. She broke free, pushing against Dame Myra, whose body collapsed like cottage cheese, and when Jo squirmed the other way she found an eyeless Dame Delia that seemed about to bite off her face. The knights were falling to pieces all around her, the floor strewn with a mishmash of arms and legs and torsos, and Jo was pulled into a mixed-up pile of Sir Alasdair, Sir Festus, and Sir Oort, their limbs twitching wildly. She squeezed her eyes tight, and finally she found she could scream, and she screamed and screamed.

  Jo didn’t know how long it was until someone came banging into the room. She opened her eyes and saw two Sir Olivers—a ghastly life-size doll, which had already fallen to pieces on the floor, and the real one, who was looking around the room in unsteady shock.

  Aunt Lily came running right after him and stopped, with the same look of confused horror; then she dashed over to Jo, gathering her up in her arms. Jo couldn’t stop shaking.

  “What happened here, Oliver?” whispered Aunt Lily.

  Sir Oliver said, as Jo kept trembling, “It seems the Belgian Prankster left us a little surprise.”

  Jo had a hard time falling asleep that night.

  After she found the secret room, all cleaning had stopped. The knights gathered for a closed-door meeting, without the squires, that lasted for hours. The dolls of the Odd-Fish knights were taken into th
e meeting for examination.

  But Jo couldn’t get them out of her mind. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the evil yellow grin on Aunt Lily’s face, felt herself trapped and suffocated between her and the grinding, groping Colonel Korsakov. The dolls had been vicious caricatures, made with a merciless accuracy by someone who knew the Odd-Fish not only in physical detail but also with a bitter emotional intimacy.

  Jo didn’t see the knights again before she went to bed, except for when one or two of them took a break for a smoke. Their faces showed them to be the opposite of the happy, laughing knights they had been only hours ago. She tried to eavesdrop, but they seemed guarded in their words; they obviously did not want to panic the squires. But Jo remembered what Aunt Lily had said that morning:

  “The Belgian Prankster may have something terrible planned.”

  Later that night, Jo woke up—and immediately knew there was someone else in her room.

  She froze in her bed. A scratching noise was coming from below the floor. In her bedside mirror, Jo saw a floorboard wriggle loose, and gray hands place it aside.

  Then a low, raspy voice: “Jo.”

  She didn’t move. Something crept out of the hole—she couldn’t tell what. Something was moving toward her bed. She tensed. A shadow loomed up around her.

  Jo spun around, ready to scream—

  “Are you awake?” whispered Ian.

  “I am now,” said Jo, her heart beating wildly. “Why are you in my room, Ian?”

  “Shhh. Follow me. Squires’ meeting.”

  Ian lowered himself back under the floorboards. Jo reluctantly sat up, her head fuzzy, still muddled as to whether she was dreaming or awake; finally she rolled out of her sheets and followed Ian under the floor into a narrow crawl space. She reached up and replaced the floorboards. The moon shone weakly on her empty bed.

  It was a tight, blind, prickly squeeze through the crawl spaces of the lodge. Exposed nails and splintered beams threatened from all sides, stabbing and scratching her in the dark; in some places the wood sagged, nearly collapsing under her weight. She felt like a tiny germ secretly swimming through the veins of a vast, mysterious body. The only sound was Ian, scraping quietly ahead, whispering “Go left” or “Careful here.” Everything smelled of rotting wood, old mothballs, and decades of dust.