The Order of Odd-Fish

by James Kennedy

  “Hey! Odd-Fish!”

  “Come on out!”

  “We know you’re here! You can’t hide forever!”

  So that’s why Ian didn’t want to talk to anyone, she thought—just as a horrible moistening sound came from behind her and a boneless arm wrapped itself up her leg.

  Jo didn’t even have time to scream before another tentacle pushed into her mouth. She turned, kicked, and struggled, but she couldn’t see what had grabbed hold of her. A huge tongue ran all over her. She was being dragged backward toward—what? She kicked out wildly, and her foot struck something soft and gooey in the darkness.

  The groping thing behind her moaned, the tentacles slackened, and she kept kicking, like kicking a bag of jelly, which finally burst with a liquid noise, spilling out in loose gulps. The tentacles went limp, and Jo, gasping, broke free and stumbled from her hiding place out into the open square.

  Her skin was pocked with little welts from the suckers. Still, there wasn’t enough time to think about injuries, because she was out in the open, with nowhere to hide.

  A silver sled hurtled into the square. Before Jo could run, the driver saw her and with a vicious whoop yanked the reins, sending the sled skidding in an arc, plunging toward her.

  Jo grabbed her Apology Gun and aimed it at the sled.

  At once the driver’s eyes went from cruel to panicked. The lizard-dogs continued to close the distance, but Jo stood still and pointed her gun. The driver pulled at the reins, and the lizard-dogs shrieked as their bits cut into their mouths. They bolted every which way, and the sled tilted, skating along on one runner, throwing a shower of sparks—and then the sled flipped, tumbling with the squealing lizard-dogs into the gutter.

  Jo turned to run, but there was nowhere to go. Already more sleds were screeching up the tunnels. And when Jo looked back at the wrecked sled and the limping lizard-dogs, she was startled to see the driver had already got up and was approaching her with quiet menace.

  Jo spun and pointed her gun at the driver.

  It was a girl with short black hair and fierce eyes. Her skin was sickly and pale, but her face was jarringly beautiful. Her hair was cropped short and bristly, as if to spite her delicate face, but this only made her more hypnotizing, as though she had beauty to throw away. Her lips wavered on the edge of a sneer, and she had merciless eyes, eyes so sharp that a stare hurt. This girl was named Fiona Fuorlini, and the first two words she said to Jo were “You’re dead.”

  Jo replied, “The gun is pointed at you.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” said Fiona.

  “You should be,” bluffed Jo. “You don’t want me to use this.”

  “You don’t have the nerve,” said Fiona. “You’re an Odd-Fish. You don’t have the guts.”

  Sleds clattered to a stop around them. The Wormbeard squires climbed out, surrounding Jo and Fiona with anticipation.

  Where is Ian? Jo thought, looking around, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  Fiona sensed the weakness and stepped toward Jo. Jo gripped the useless gun tighter and waggled it at her, saying, “I’m leaving. Get out of my way. I’m leaving.”

  “You’re not leaving.”

  “I’ll shoot you.”

  “Then shoot me!” said Fiona. “Go ahead, do it!”

  “What?”

  “I dare you!” snarled Fiona. “I want you to! I want you to shoot me! DO IT!”

  Jo pulled the trigger. With a puff of blue smoke, an apology shot out and hit Fiona’s nose with an almost inaudible bip.

  The other Wormbeard squires had been holding their breaths; now one whispered, “It’s an Apology Gun.”

  “Oh, an apology!” Fiona relaxed and nodded at Jo. “It’s fine, everyone. All she wanted to do was apologize. Let me just read this…. Wait—this apology is sarcastic!”

  The dial had been set to maximum sarcasm.

  With an angry bellow, the Wormbeards rushed in. Jo whirled around, looking for a way out, but in every direction she was surrounded by the purple-cloaked, yellow-scarf-wearing, steel-goggled squires.

  Then there was a deafening roar, and a powerful force knocked everyone on their backs. The roar went on and on, a mounting chorus of heightening howls, and everyone was picked up and tossed around as if they were caught in a hurricane. Jo blundered through the smoke and noise, staggering over the fallen bodies of the Wormbeards, and into Ian.

  He held his little bejeweled tube gingerly, looking embarrassed.

  “Sir Festus was right,” he said. “This is a pretty devastating bugger.”

  The temporary tornado whirled faster and faster, throwing the Wormbeards around like paper dolls. Jo and Ian tore themselves out of the miniature storm and took off running.

  “Where now?” gasped Jo.

  “I found a way out. Come on!”

  The lizard-dogs were released from their sleds and bounded after Jo and Ian with great springing leaps, barking and shrieking. The Wormbeards ran behind the lizard-dogs, roaring for blood. Fiona Fuorlini mounted another sled and whipped its lizard-dogs forward.

  Jo ran after Ian, twisting and turning through the tunnels of Snoodsbottom, clambering over fences and walls to throw off the lizard-dogs. Then Jo saw sunlight and sprinted toward it with all her might. A lizard-dog’s jaw nipped at her thigh, and she artfully kicked it and sent it squealing to the gutter.

  They ran out into East Squeamings, throwing it into an uproar, dashing through the fish markets, overturning tables of twitching squids and squishy blobs. The hawkers and merchants scattered as the Wormbeards and their lizard-dogs galloped after them, slipping on the slimy stones and crashing through the stalls with reckless glee.

  Jo and Ian blundered around a corner and onto the set of Teenage Ichthala. A couple of actors were reciting their lines as the cameras rolled. Nora was there, too, watching intently. Jo and Ian came barreling through, and cameras overturned with sparks and hissing smoke, scripts were flung into the air, and actors scattered as the lizard-dogs and Wormbeards came in pursuit.

  The police trundled up in their rolling towers, descending upon the scene with their red uniforms and swinging clubs. The Wormbeards shouted, “Cops!” and tried to scatter, but the policemen had them surrounded. Jo was whirled, yanked, and pushed through the roiling crowd, actors and Wormbeards and police thrown together, blindly bashing each other. Just as the police closed in to control the mob, Jo felt her shoulder grabbed. She turned to see who it was—and gave a little shriek.

  It was a hideous gray mask of scabs: the Ichthala.

  No—she looked into the monster’s eyes—it was the actress who played the Ichthala. Jo stared at Audrey Durdle, and the girl peered back at Jo with surprise and a strange sadness.

  “Jo! Over here!”

  Ian grabbed Jo away from the actress and pulled her over to Nora, who waved them through a door on the side of the road and slammed it shut behind them. A narrow stairway led up to the next level of the mountain. Jo and Ian ran up after Nora, leaving the roar of lizard-dogs and the angry shouts of policemen and Wormbeards below.

  Nora said, “I leave you two alone for one hour and you start a riot!”

  “Where are we going?” Ian wheezed behind her.

  The stairs led up into an abandoned garage, a quiet cave with a tall archway that looked out onto the cobbled streets. There were a few half-assembled automobiles here, in various states of rust and disrepair, and the garage curved and continued back into darkness.

  As soon as Jo and Ian realized they were safe, they broke into relieved laughter.

  “That was the most fun I’ve had in weeks!” said Jo.

  “Thanks, Nora,” said Ian. “We owe you one.”

  Nora scrunched her face. “You’ll get your chance to have fun again soon, Jo. The Wormbeards have a long memory.”

  “Oh, whatever, bring it on,” said Jo. “Woo!”

  “Hey,” said Ian. “What’s this red, yellow, and purple feather doing here?”

  For a dreadful second, J
o, Ian, and Nora stared at the feather on the ground.

  And then something burst out of the dark corner of the garage—a gargantuan, flapping, snorting, screeching bird, crashing through the garage toward the exit, bowling them all over and blasting out of the archway with a triumphant screech. When Jo, Ian, and Nora got up, they saw the proud shape of the Schwenk soaring overhead, all four of its wings outstretched, turning slowly in the sky; then it plunged away from the city, toward the forest, with incredible speed, and was seen no more.

  A few seconds later, Sir Festus, Colonel Korsakov, and a few squires came jogging up, their wild assortment of unreliable weapons cocked and wielded, but too late—the Schwenk was gone.

  “Too late!” sighed Colonel Korsakov. “And we were so close!”

  “Next time, Colonel Korsakov,” said Ian. “We almost had him.”

  “Oh, come on, Ian!” said Jo. “That was pure chance.”

  “Congratulations, nevertheless,” said Colonel Korsakov. “My digestion had deduced the Schwenk was in this neighborhood, but all my efforts to pinpoint its precise location were in vain. I blame the nearly indigestible soufflé I had for lunch, which had the effect of decalibrating my large intestine.”

  “I thought you said the Schwenk didn’t fly,” said Jo. “I thought you said it was modest.”

  “A disturbing development,” said Colonel Korsakov. “The Schwenk is getting cheeky.”

  “Does this happen every time you hunt the Schwenk?” said Jo.

  “More or less.”

  “Have you ever even come close to catching it?”

  “Not exactly. Not as such. No.”

  “I’ve never asked—what’s your specialty for the Odd-Fish?” said Jo.

  “Lost causes,” said Korsakov cheerfully.

  BUT what about Ken Kiang?

  Ken Kiang had come up against a wall—and that wall was the Belgian Prankster. Ken Kiang was overwhelmed. He was overpowered. He could not even think about the Belgian Prankster for too long before he would feel his soul dwindle and teeter on the precipice of being blasted to nothing by the sheer demonic grandeur that was the Belgian Prankster.

  Ken Kiang had gone to the Belgian Prankster to prove himself; he had come away baffled and reeling. He had hit his limit, and his soul broke upon it. He had staked the meaning of his life on becoming the most evil man in the world, and now he was shattered against something so much more evil, so hugely, senselessly lawless, that he was staggered by the almost infinite gulf between the piddling mischief he was capable of, and the unimaginably gargantuan evil of the Belgian Prankster. He knew, like a slap in the face, that he could never bridge that gulf.

  The envelope the Belgian Prankster had given him sat unopened on his desk. Ken Kiang had vowed never to open the envelope. He knew that would only play into the schemes of his incalculable foe. He understood that as soon as he opened it, he would cease to be the protagonist of his own story and would become a mere supporting character in the Belgian Prankster’s story, which engulfed all stories and made everyone bit players to his colossal personality.

  But late one cold, sleepless night, Ken Kiang’s curiosity got the better of him, and he sprang out of bed, ran down the stairs, and threw open the doors to his office, where the envelope sat innocently on the windowsill. He tore it open and started to read.

  His fascination only deepened as he read. When he realized he had been standing and reading for an hour, shivering in his thin dressing gown, he retreated to his cozy library, where he built a crackling fire and poured some brandy. He read the mass of papers until the early morning.

  They were instructions: instructions on how to get to Eldritch City, and orders detailing what he must do when he arrived there. The Belgian Prankster had drafted him as a foot soldier in some vast, complex plan, and Ken Kiang was told only what he needed to know to fulfill his small part; nevertheless, he could feel the shape of the sublime structure of evil he was invited to join, even if he could understand neither its methods nor its aim. The plan, like the Belgian Prankster, was a bottomless entity that threatened to swallow Ken Kiang if he thought about it too hard. He could, at best, play around the edges of this abyss; he could never defeat it.

  But it is the willingness to set oneself against the invincible that makes a hero. Of course, Ken Kiang wasn’t a hero in the sense that he would, say, save a child from a fire—the very notion nauseated him—but he was a hero in that he was willing to stake everything on a hopeless gamble. He was overwhelmed by the Belgian Prankster, but nevertheless he vowed to fight him. He might disrupt the inscrutable mechanisms and awesome calculations of the Belgian Prankster’s grand design; it might be impossible, for after all he was invited to be only a minor functionary in the great plan, but he would attempt it nonetheless. There was no swagger here, no vainglory. The Belgian Prankster had burned away Ken Kiang’s vanity. He resolved to fight the Belgian Prankster with the resignation of one who knows he will fail and die in the attempt.

  Sadly, but with a quiet dignity, Ken Kiang put his affairs in order. He knew that wherever he was going, there would be no coming back. He sold his vast collections; he gave away the villainous costumes he had so lovingly and painstakingly sewn himself; and he left the black zeppelins and jet fighters of his “Fleet of Fury” to freeze in the Antarctic.

  Ken Kiang felt he was saying goodbye to a kind of childhood. The nostalgia he felt was similar to what he’d experienced when, as a moody teenager, he had half contemptuously packed away his toys into cardboard boxes and stashed them under the stairs, vowing never to open them again. Just as then, when he had paused over a box of action figures, tempted to play with them one last time, Ken Kiang now lingered over a wicked-looking sacrificial knife. Should he perform that unspeakable ritual once more, on that blood-drenched altar deep in the New York subway tunnels, where the chanting of the damned reverberated with unholy magnificence and a crawling chaos was coaxed from the darkness to feed on innocence? Heck, just once more, for old times’ sake?

  Just as before, Ken Kiang mastered his childish whim and mildly packed the knife away. Ken Kiang was still committed to evil, but now it was evil of a higher sort. He needed no silly props or showy fanfare. Purity of heart is to will one thing, and Ken Kiang’s heart was pure with a single wish: to destroy the Belgian Prankster.

  But there was one last project from Ken Kiang’s former life that he had to attend to before he could wholeheartedly embrace his new cause. It was petty, yes, but Ken Kiang feared that to leave this task unfinished might disturb the peace of mind he needed to pursue his profound quest. Ken Kiang could not bear to leave anything undone; and so he resolved, before he left this world, to secure the damnation of Hoagland Shanks.

  For Ken Kiang loathed Hoagland Shanks. No, it went beyond loathing: Shanks repulsed him, filled him with almost unbearable disgust. Ken Kiang didn’t understand why, but there was something so smug about Shanks, so stupid and self-satisfied, that Ken Kiang could barely tolerate his existence.

  Thus Ken Kiang vowed to send the happy-go-lucky handyman to hell.

  Ken Kiang knew how a man could make a hell of his own life. Fortunately, most people are not exposed to the temptations that destroy souls, and so they muddle through their small lives harmlessly, a little frustrated but more or less content, enjoying the humdrum happiness that is the lot of the common man.

  Ken Kiang guessed that Hoagland Shanks led the life of the common man. But what if Ken Kiang provided Hoagland Shanks with the money and connections to experience wild pleasures that would inflame his appetites to unnatural heights? That is, what if Ken Kiang gave Hoagland Shanks unlimited access to any kind of pie he wanted?

  Ken Kiang calculated that five months would be sufficient to get Hoagland Shanks addicted. Then Ken Kiang would suddenly put a stop to his generosity, and Hoagland Shanks would be a changed man. This new Hoagland Shanks would do anything to get his pies back. He would steal; he would do desperate things with desperate people; he would sell everythi
ng he had, and what he could of himself; in the end, he would kill, not once but many times, in order to keep coming the pies that, by then, would not even be pleasant, but at best would serve to numb him against his sordid existence.

  Ken Kiang smiled. His work would then be complete. A real masterpiece, a last hurrah before he threw himself into the suicidal quest to dethrone the Belgian Prankster. Any idiot can fire a gun and kill someone. It takes real evil to ruin a soul.

  Ken Kiang dwelled on these plans at length, patiently fussing over each detail, if only to distract his sickened intellect from the Belgian Prankster, who loomed around every dark corner of his mind and encroached upon every idle moment. Something had happened at that Country Kitchen and implanted in Ken Kiang’s heart a horrifying idea, about a man who was not a man but an unquenchable emptiness, a ravenous nothing that grew hungrier each passing moment. Ken Kiang’s mind would gingerly approach this Belgian Prankster, but a moment’s contact made him jerk back as though burned. It was too unnerving for him to think about it for long, and he would push it away; but invariably, in due time, he would circle around it again, and approach it once more, with mounting terror, and a fascination no punishment could subdue.

  Ken Kiang summoned Hoagland Shanks to his Manhattan castle. Workmen had boxed up the last of the intriguing artifacts that had once filled his home. Now the cold hallways and empty rooms made Ken Kiang feel wistful. The next occupants were bound to desecrate his beloved castle, with their obligatory kitchen remodelings, their “rec rooms,” their ludicrous collections of what they took to be modern art.

  The meeting was brief and businesslike. Ken Kiang had once fantasized about this moment, the beginning of the process that would end in Hoagland Shanks’s damnation. And yet now Ken Kiang regarded the handyman with neither pity, nor anticipation, nor hope. Crafting the plan was what had satisfied Ken Kiang; its implementation was a mere formality.

  “Well, Mr. Shanks, as you can see, I am about to go on a long journey.”