Jo looked up. “Would you really, Ian?”
“Don’t mention it. I know what it’s like for your knight to go…missing. I hope they’re all right. I’ll go find him.” Ian squeezed her hand and was gone.
Maurice said, “So what happened to that crazy Ken Kiang guy?”
“They threw him in jail,” said Albert. “Disturbing the peace, bomb threats…he’ll be locked up for years.”
“Hey, Nora,” said Daphne. “It looks like the Belgian Prankster is back, but nothing’s happened. How does your theory explain that?”
“Well…it doesn’t,” said Nora. “If reality truly followed the show, the Ichthala should’ve appeared at the same time. That didn’t happen. I guess Teenage Ichthala doesn’t predict the future after all.”
“Aren’t you disappointed?” said Daphne.
Nora looked at Daphne strangely. “Disappointed that the city hasn’t been devoured?”
“So you were wrong!” said Daphne.
“Yes, Daphne,” sighed Nora. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I was wrong.”
Daphne nodded. “Well, I’m glad you can admit it, at least.”
Maurice said, “So how do you feel about the duel, Jo? You ready to fight Fiona Fuorlini?”
Jo was staring blankly into her coffee.
“Jo!”
“Huh?”
“Are you ready for the duel?”
“Oh…yeah, I guess.”
“Are you okay?” said Nora.
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Then drink your coffee. The tea ceremony is over an hour long,” said Nora. “You don’t seem so hot, Jo. Your skin almost looks green. Where’s Sefino?”
“I’m here, I’m here,” muttered Sefino, entering with Ian. He had been in a foul mood ever since the cockroaches’ debacle at the Founders’ Festival.
“All the butlers,” fumed Sefino, “resplendent in our most glittering finery, majestically rocketing into the sky like so many brilliant fireworks, showering the crowd with genuine signed portraits of ourselves—free of charge, if you please—and nobody even notices!”
“The Belgian Prankster had just returned. Everyone thought the world was about to end,” said Daphne. “Don’t you think your timing was off?”
“Timing has nothing to do with it!” raged Sefino. “Can’t people notice two things at once? Can’t people say, ‘Ah, there’s the Belgian Prankster, we’re all going to die—very nice’—and then! Behold the glamorous Odd-Fish butlers streaking across the firmament, thoughtfully distributing signed portraits to fans and collectors! I ask you: did the Belgian Prankster fly? Did he distribute signed portraits of himself? No, and no! He just sat and chortled, and he got all the attention! It’s unfair, it’s unjust, it’s actually immoral…and nothing, nothing about us in the Snitch!”
Eventually Sefino was subdued by sympathy and a few drinks. The squires left Jo and Sefino to a booth in the back, where Sefino spread out some blank paper and licked his pencil.
“So you need help with your poem?” said Sefino. “Let’s see. What rhymes with Fiona? Almost nothing, I’m afraid. How about Fuorlini? Hmmm. Genie…meanie…fettuccine…not much there, either. You should get a different opponent.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Then again, Larouche is tough to rhyme, too,” mused Sefino. “But she’s got you on Jo. Let’s see, Vertigo, overthrow, gazebo, comme il faut…there’s a lot to work with. Have you considered changing your name to Orange? Nothing rhymes with orange. Orange Larouche?”
“I’ve already changed my name, remember?” murmured Jo. “From Hazelwood?”
“Do you know, Jo, I’d almost completely forgotten.”
“Of course you have.”
“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” said Sefino. “The Belgian Prankster came back, but he didn’t touch a hair on your head! You were right next to him; he could have grabbed you on the spot! And now he’s safely locked up in the asylum. Everything can go back to normal, and nobody need know about your nasty little secret…. Seriously, though, don’t you think Chatterbox should have at least written something about me?”
Jo stared at Sefino in disbelief. The depth of his vanity had never fully struck her until now. Sefino was the only one who knew about her secret, and Colonel Korsakov was missing, along with Aunt Lily and Sir Oliver, all whom might be dead; yet he felt his progress in the society pages was of greater importance. Jo was bewildered into silence.
“Jo?…Jo! Enough moping, let’s get this poem done.”
Jo lay in her bed, painfully awake.
She had disgraced herself at the Grudge Hut. Woozy with exhaustion, she’d spilled the tea as she poured it in Fiona’s cup. When Fiona read her poem denouncing Jo, Jo couldn’t keep her eyes open. When she stood up to read the poem Sefino had written, the words looked garbled, a rushing filled her ears, she felt dizzyingly empty, and she collapsed.
The Grudge Hut broke into angry shouts. Fiona’s seconds demanded Jo forfeit, but Fiona calmed them down; she wanted the duel to go on. Jo could hardly look at Fiona. In three days Fiona was going to kill her, or at the very least expose her. In three days her life was going to be over, disastrously.
Ian and Nora helped Jo back to the lodge and put her to bed. Her insides felt sour and scraped-out. She watched the afternoon light shining from behind the drapes. After a few hours it faded to a mellow evening glow and then dissolved into night.
She couldn’t fall asleep. She could hear activity all throughout the lodge as knights and squires and butlers came and went, slamming doors and talking and laughing; she heard them become quiet and whisper as they approached her room, thinking she was asleep, and then resume normal volume when they were almost out of earshot. Jo felt as though she had been stricken by a plague, isolated so she didn’t spread her infection to others. She wasn’t called down for dinner, but Ian brought up her food for her.
“Jo?” he said softly.
She pretended to be asleep. Ian laid the tray next to her bed. He gently touched her face and said something soft, something she couldn’t hear. Then he was gone.
Jo watched the ceiling as another sleepless night dragged on. It was so late it was nearly morning. The sun sulked beyond the dark horizon. Jo was listless but twitching with an energy that would eat her up if she didn’t do something. She felt as if she were full of squirming baby mice.
Jo got out of bed. Her head tingled with needles and ice and tiny fires. She wandered the halls of the lodge restlessly. Nobody else was up and about. The lodge felt as deserted as the very first time she had entered it. Her duel was in less than three days, but she wasn’t thinking about that anymore.
She was thinking about the Belgian Prankster. She couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life awake, forever terrified of him. She burned to kill him—and her father’s message may have told her how to do it. If you cut off his stinger and turn it on him…was that what her father meant? Could she trick the Belgian Prankster? Could she go to him, pretend that she wanted the Ichthala blood? And then…
Jo went to the kitchen. She opened drawer after drawer until she found a knife.
She was going to do it.
Jo opened the front door and stepped outside.
The neighborhood was deserted. Jo walked the dim streets in a daze. She rode an empty subway train for a while. The doors opened and closed, opened and closed, but all the platforms were empty. She got off in Flurd-Poffle, all the way on the other side of town, and started walking again. Here, too, the streets were empty in the dark morning.
She had come to the asylum.
Jo took a deep breath. She put her hand in her pocket and touched the knife. The Belgian Prankster had something that belonged to her. Ever since his return to Eldritch City, Jo had felt an ache, as though he had stolen part of her that night. The pull only became stronger the closer she came to him, the ache sharper. Jo pushed open the big glass doors of the asylum.
The lobb
y was empty, a large, cold room with glass walls. Harsh light highlighted the dark blotches in the gray carpet, the little rips in the furniture, the ashen pallor of the dead plants. It was still dark outside, and the lobby was reflected in the glass window walls like a shadow world. The only sound was an electric hum.
Jo looked for a guard or a receptionist. But nobody was there. She walked up to the door that led into the asylum proper, and entered. Nobody was there to stop her.
But she wasn’t surprised. Everything was unfolding with the logic of a nightmare. She was going to kill the Belgian Prankster, and the world seemed to hold its breath in dread. She could hardly believe she was actually going to him. She watched herself climb the stairways of the asylum, as if she were watching herself on TV.
Jo searched the empty white hallways for the Belgian Prankster. The silence was eerie. There were no doctors or patients. Jo wondered where everyone had gone. She had a hollow pain throughout her body. She felt like someone had stolen her heart, her stomach, everything inside her, and she was a walking empty skin.
She came to the Belgian Prankster’s cell, on the top floor of the asylum, in the maximum security section. There were no guards. The door was open.
Jo stopped. What on earth was she doing? Aunt Lily had told her to stay away from the Belgian Prankster. And the Belgian Prankster obviously expected her. Why else had it been so easy to get to him? The Belgian Prankster had probably killed all the doctors and nurses so that it would be that much easier for her to come. Why was she doing this? The Belgian Prankster had made his long-dreaded return, and hadn’t hurt her. Why seek him out?
But Jo couldn’t help herself. Her mind was cloudy with sleeplessness. She touched the knife in her pocket. She had to be calm.
She clenched her fists and slowly relaxed.
Jo passed through the door, and into a cocktail party.
The Belgian Prankster had redecorated his cell in the style of a swank bachelor’s pad. The white room was furnished with mod plastic couches and multicolored cubes, space-age art hung on the padded walls, and the centerpiece was a groovy sculpture of aluminum cylinders. Swinging lounge music crackled from the PA system.
Jo was baffled. She had braced herself for a nightmare; a cocktail party caught her off balance. If she had entered the cell to find the Belgian Prankster howling atop a bloody heap of dead doctors and patients, she would’ve been frightened, but it would have made some kind of sense. But this…
The cocktail party was so crowded that Jo couldn’t even see the Belgian Prankster. She was jostled on all sides by the asylum’s doctors, nurses, and patients, who mixed freely and chatted as they sipped cocktails out of laboratory glassware. The staff and inmates of the asylum all had a happy look in their eyes, and conversed exclusively in quips. There was a robotic merriness in the room that creeped Jo out, a desperate lightheartedness; she felt she had strayed onto the set of a sitcom that was about to be canceled and was only getting worse by trying harder.
Jo heard a familiar chortle. She froze—but then she gripped the knife, breathing deeply. She forced her way through the chattering crowd, pushing past the doctors and nurses, who blithely ignored her—until, finally, in the back of the room, she found him.
The Belgian Prankster lounged in a booth, surrounded by fawning psychoanalysts. He had just told a joke, and they were all laughing uproariously.
“Too true! Too, too true!” guffawed a venerable therapist. “Belgian Prankster, you hit the nail on the head!”
“You’re the toast of the town, Belgian Prankster!” cooed a spinster nurse. “Now what you need is the love of a good woman.”
“No, what he needs is a stiff drink! I’ll go get him one!”
“No, I will!”
“No, me!”
“Me! Me!”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen…ladies,” murmured the Belgian Prankster. “Take it down a notch.”
“Whatever you want, Belgian Prankster!”
“You’re the boss—that’s what I always say.”
“You can take me down a notch any time you like, Belgian Prankster,” said the nurse breathlessly.
“Why, you’re a regular ding-a-ling ding-dang-doodle, Belgian Prankster!” chirped a young doctor. “A first-class, blue-ribbon, dippity-doopity ding-a-ling ding-dang-doodle, and you can take that to the bank! Huh, fellas?”
The Belgian Prankster grimaced at Jo in embarrassment. Then he cleared his throat (immediately causing all the psychoanalysts to go silent) and said, “Esteemed doctors—”
“He called us ‘esteemed’!” whispered a doctor excitedly—
“May I introduce you to my friend Jo Hazelwood,” continued the Belgian Prankster. “Jo Hazelwood, please meet the most eminent authorities on psychology in Eldritch City. I won’t introduce them individually, for they are interchangeable turds.”
“Score another point for the Belgian Prankster!” said a therapist giddily. “You got us that time, I’ll give you that!”
“That’s what I’d call a ‘zinger,’” another psychoanalyst said, nodding. “The Belgian Prankster’s got a lot of ‘zingers,’ I assure you.”
“They’re funny because they’re true!” added another doctor.
Jo said, “What have you done to them?”
“Oh, I host these little social mixers in the mornings,” sighed the Belgian Prankster. “It loosens everyone up for the rigors of the workday. Don’t worry, they won’t remember a thing when they wake up. But oh, the headaches they’ll have!”
The Belgian Prankster took out a cigar. At once a dozen matches and lighters blazed in front of him, held by eager hands. The Belgian Prankster picked one at random and lit his cigar, puffing contemplatively.
Jo stood before the table, uncertain. She bit her cheek, reminding herself what was real. Reality was outside this place. This was just another one of the Belgian Prankster’s jokes. Wherever he went, he warped everything around him into an empty jest.
“Doctors,” said the Belgian Prankster quietly. “I apologize. But please excuse me and Miss Hazelwood for a few minutes. Why don’t you all refresh your drinks.”
“Whatever you say, Belgian Prankster!”
“We’ll be here if you need us!”
“Need anything while I’m up, Belgian Prankster?”
“No, no; that will be quite unnecessary.” The Belgian Prankster smiled as the psychoanalysts drifted away, bleating compliments; and then they were gone.
The party was over.
Jo and the Belgian Prankster were alone.
Jo faced the Belgian Prankster at last. As always, he was clad in his dirty fur pelts, green ski goggles, and enormous rawhide diaper. His breathing was forced and shallow, making the fatty bulk beneath his revolting patchwork of furs rise and fall irregularly. Sweating and snuffling, slowly smacking his lips, the Belgian Prankster twitched his monstrous tongue in and out of his mouth and started to fondle his purple, runny nose.
Jo was more terrified than she had ever been. How could she have been so stupid to come here? The Belgian Prankster had her in the palm of his hand now. If he could brainwash all these doctors and patients, couldn’t he force her to do whatever he wanted? With all her might Jo resisted the mad urge to run away screaming—and the even madder urge to throw herself upon the Belgian Prankster and surrender. If there was some peace in letting him have his way, she was almost tempted to give in.
But Jo held her ground with the last shred of her fingernails, even as it seemed to be crumbling away from her. She was determined not to let this loathsome man get the better of her. He would not have the satisfaction of seeing her afraid.
“Please, sit down,” said the Belgian Prankster.
Jo remained standing.
“You like my little amusement?” said the Belgian Prankster.
“Subtle,” said Jo.
“Why the sarcasm?” said the Belgian Prankster mildly. “Just trying to make you feel at ease. But nobody ever really appreciates me. Look at me, Jo: I�
�m forlorn.”
“The heart breaks.”
The Belgian Prankster turned his head slightly, surprised. Jo gritted her teeth. She was sure he saw through her icy attitude and would come back with a nasty insult. But the Belgian Prankster only grinned.
“Where’s Aunt Lily?” said Jo, her voice close to breaking. “Did you kill her?”
The Belgian Prankster yawned, showing his enormous tongue. Jo could see it pulse grotesquely. He smacked his lips, leaned back, and spread his arms wide.
“Let’s talk about why you’re really here,” he said. “You’ve come to me in the dead of morning. You don’t know why you came, but you came anyway, at great risk. Who knows what I’ll do? You’ve been frightened of me for years. But here I am, as mild as a lamb. Who could’ve guessed? The truth is, I’m the only one who can give you what you want. You came to me because you want to know who you are.”
“I know who I am.”
“Do you? Please, sit down. You make me nervous. Who are you?”
I make him nervous? thought Jo. But she sat down. So far, she was holding her own. At first she was just faking being brave, but now, to her surprise, Jo found she actually was almost brave. She said, “I am the All-Devouring Mother. And I am here for my blood.”
The Belgian Prankster grinned. “You didn’t come here for that.”
“Yes, I did,” said Jo, her insides scraping against each other.
The Belgian Prankster shook his head. “That’s not why you came.”
“I know why I’m here,” said Jo, more frantically than she intended.
“No, you don’t,” snickered the Belgian Prankster.
“I came here for my blood!” shouted Jo.
“No!” barked the Belgian Prankster. “You came here to kill me.”
A wave of dread crashed through her. Of course the Belgian Prankster knew she wanted to kill him. He knew everything. And how could she possibly fight him? The Belgian Prankster had all the powers of the Silent Sisters. She had a kitchen knife.
But she said nothing and just stared at him.
The Order of Odd-Fish Page 32