The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  “I’d put a leash ’round her neck,” said Verf by way of good-bye to his daughter. “She runs off, it’s your fault, herring-fucker.”

  The door shut, leaving them alone with the moon and the sand and the twisted sloe girding the trail. He waited for her to spring on him, but instead she exhaled a long breath and touched her bloody hand to her bloody nose. That was that, then.

  “Don’t forget your knife,” Jan told Jolanda, and she pawed around in the sand where she had ditched it beside the door. He walked on to where his horse was tethered among the blackthorn, his back exposed, his gait steady, the night swallowing him like it takes all those who seek it. Finding the knife, she followed him.

  IV.

  A dream come true, to be bound in blackness, to be constricted at every joint, to have the air turn to something thicker, heavier, hotter. To be noose-drowned, once and for all. Except drowning, really drowning, was altogether different from hanging, and from the pressure on his clouded skull and the scum slithering across his open, blind eyes, Sander realized he wasn’t on the end of a rope. He was underwater.

  Canal. Drowning. Arms and legs wrapped in chains.

  No, not chains. Clothes caught on something, trapping him down in the filth. Too dark to see.

  Canal. Drowning.

  Total bullshit. Not like this. Not without rope.

  Sander fought his own garments, tearing through the membrane of his ancient tunic. Still snared, somewhere lower. Wriggling out of the tacky sheaths of his breeches, or trying to, his boots complicating the attempt. Really fucking dying down here, only a few moments from passing out again, and for good this time. One leg free and bootless, but the other held at the ankle. All his bones shrieking under his skin, belly feeling like he’d gobbled a plate of hot coals, dead fingers fumbling over dead flesh to get at the boot mooring him to the canal floor like a barnacle’s root.

  The worn-out leather boot felt like jagged stone, cutting his fingertips as he blindly groped around for the buckle, the slimy webbing of his ruined clothes tickling his face as they floated away while he—

  Release! Though, yeah, there was no way of knowing if his foot had come free or if he’d gone and died on himself. Erring on the side of life, he wheeled his arms and legs, but there was fuck all means of telling which way was up in the black water. Funniest joke of all, to free himself from the bottom but drown for want of a top. Funny.

  In darkness that was absolute on both sides of the water, Sander surfaced with a spume, which almost immediately became a significantly thicker sort of discharge. It is no easy thing to tread water and vomit simultaneously, but Sander had pulled the trick before and did so again now. The feat would likely have been impossible if the elbow he had pulled in the hanging hadn’t somehow righted itself during his panic-propelled thrashing at the bottom of the canal, or perhaps he had simply overestimated the injury when it had occured; Sander wasn’t the sort to question his luck in the best of times, let alone when the devil was clearly still kicking his balls. He couldn’t see shit, which was a problem, and he had no idea how long he had been down or where he might have come up, but as another eruption yanked his spewing face beneath the oily water, he tried to concern himself only with the present—it was black as sin, he was still in the canal, and he was puking his guts up like it was Ash Wednesday after a Shrovetide bender.

  When his retching trailed off, the coughing began, but finally that passed, too, and Sander took stock of things—first and foremost, he felt like he was dead, which, to date, had always meant he wasn’t. Second, the citizens of Sneek couldn’t be close or they would have heard his ruckus and nabbed him. Third, where the fuck was he, anyway?

  Sander awkwardly swam in the direction he was already facing, trying to stifle the anxiety that any reasonable swimmer might suffer at finding himself alone in black water of unknown depth and distance to shore. There were no stars above him, or anything else for that matter, which was supremely goddamn creepy. He told himself he had floated downstream and gone under a building. That didn’t explain how such a thing could come to pass, unless the Frisians were so goddamn stupid they built their towns over water instead of channeling canals through them, but then with Frisians he supposed anything was possible. Better that than his having somehow gone blind, which was too dreadful a thought to entertain.

  The black, aquatic experience was unpleasantly nostalgic for Sander, reminding him keenly of the well his father had tossed him in whenever the old man had caught his son sucking cock or stealing coins. The cocks invariably belonged to the other boys in the village, whereas the coin always came from whatever ineffectual hiding place Sander’s drunk begetter had settled on that particular day. Regardless of the crime, down into the well went Sander, and down slapped the lid over its mouth, blotting out the world above. At least the well had been full of water; the short freefall into the dark pool was the only part of the ordeal he remembered with fondness, and that would have been far less pleasant had it been followed by a dry landing.

  After all the long days and nights spent treading water in perfect darkness with only slimy leaves in the autumn and tadpoles in the spring to keep him company, Sander had done his best to avoid similar situations. And, it must be said, up until this point he had enjoyed some success in that regard. If ever there was a hell built especially for him, he knew it would be just this: cold water, no light, and, worse than the well, no walls to cling to until his fingernails gave out.

  Compounding matters, the demon it had taken Sander years of well-paddling to vanquish had evidently regenerated itself, growing strong again in his absence from black water—the unavoidable, obvious fear of what might be underneath him in all that darkness, watching. Sander always supposed his serenity in even the hairiest of hairy fucking situations he owed to his father and that watery pit—nothing was worse than not knowing what was beneath you.

  The strategies he had honed as a young man to keep those thoughts at bay had deserted him, or perhaps simply fallen into disrepair, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop worrying. The farther he swam, the more he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off being hanged, and with that thought came the dreadful realization that this could have been their plan all along, staging an easily escapable execution only to drive him here, into whatever abyss they had prepared. He kicked harder, trying to get angry about it all instead of disheartened, and, as if by Providence, the canal became warmer, a sure sign he was approaching either shallow water or the wrong side of a latrine. Which wouldn’t be the worst place Sander had crawled from, if it came to that.

  Almost safe now, Sander told himself. He must be under a building, surely, or the streets of Sneek, somehow. Where else could he be, to not have a hint of moonlight or starshine or—

  His hand bumped something solid and he recoiled with a shudder, finding the unseen object far too long, yielding, and slippery for his liking. Then he smelled it, a pungent stench like frogs and fucksweat. Sander got his legs under him to swim back the other way—none of whatever the fuck that was, thank you kindly—when his feet brushed the mucky bottom, arresting his flight. Letting his weight settle, the squelching of canal filth between his toes made him wish he hadn’t shed his boots before coming to whatever midnight shore he now gained. He was naked and blind, and there was something awful in the dark with him—any two of those in tandem would be bad enough; all three was simply depressing.

  Extending his fingers with the trepidation of a man seeking to pluck a golden ring from its unlikely position around the tooth of a dog of unproven disposition, Sander prodded the bobbing object. He felt a puckered rind give beneath his overgrown fingernails. Sliding his hand down what he was hoping was a soaked-to-softness tree branch, he located what could only be a clenched fist. He confirmed this by running his fingers back up the length of the arm to a shoulder, and gave it a push.

  A corpse was nothing to worry about, and Sander relaxed as it rocked in the water. Then the water exploded all around the body, and so
mething small bit Sander on the wrist. It held fast, whatever it was, scratching bone, gnawing flesh. He clumsily took a step back and tried to snatch it off but slipped in the muck and flailed about. He found his balance, the water churning under his woolly chin, and another bite struck him, this time a sharp, gravelly pressure closing over the thumb of his free left hand.

  Sander gave a hollow little scream, hoisting his right arm from the water and whipping himself in the face with the serpentine horror that had attached itself to his wrist. He made his left hand into the exact sort of fist you should never make if you value your thumbs, with that digit clenched to the palm by the fingers, and bore down on the greasy, mouth-tipped cable coiling around his hand and gnawing his thumb. He felt alien skin and bone give beneath his pressure, his thumb burning worse than ever as he crushed its attacker. The ropy creatures seemed thin enough, and so he brought his right arm to his mouth and bit the one latched to his wrist, which his mind was now calling eel, even if the rest of him was not of a mood to hear whatever it was his mind had to say at the moment. The thing was slimy and salty and his teeth went clean through it, a bitter, burning blood flooding his mouth as the length of it fell back into the water. He spit frantically, the numbing liquid convincing his mouth what his mind already knew, for every Low Country boy is taught that eel blood is pure poison.

  The unseen surface of the water was roiling all around him, and he felt them butting their heads against his chest and legs, struggling to find a grip with their small mouths. He turbulently abandoned the bottom and made a swim for it. There were several terrible moments when Sander realized he had no idea if he was swimming in the direction of the shore that might not even exist or back the way he had come. Then his palm slapped down into mud and the bottom rose up to slide against his chest. Salvation, but before he could slither onto dry land, an eel nosed against his pouch, coiling its length around his very balls.

  Dragging himself out of the water, Sander gave little strangled noises somewhere between barks and sobs as he snatched the monster from his privates and mashed it in his fingers. He was yanking the other eels off him then, a dozen of the snake-fish clinging to his skin and hair with their curved jaws. Spray was still reaching him from the agitated water and he scooted backward in the muck, shivering and slapping himself down to see if he had missed any of the creatures. He had never heard of eels biting much of anyone, say naught of being so fucking vicious about it, but he supposed he had ired a swarm or nest or whatever the fuck you called it. As his heart calmed, he felt around in the muck to retrieve any he hadn’t thrown back into the water in his rush to be rid of them; he only found four, and they were small ones at that, but if he could drain their nasty blood, a free dinner was nothing to pass up.

  “Grue ruin ger drinner,” a voice said far too goddamn close for Sander’s comfort. It was a sticky, rattling sort of voice, the sound like a farmer trying to get a wagon wheel free of a muddy pothole.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” Sander whispered, his tone hard for its softness. He rolled up onto the balls of his feet and twisted around to face the voice in the blackness. Glory’s End was at the bottom of the goddamn canal, but the eel bites, while stinging like the devil’s own kisses, had nowhere near incapacitated the arms and legs of a man who had recently killed a lippy Frisian barkeep using only his forehead and a running start.

  “All grite,” said the voice, and a flopping wet sound punctuated the retreat. “Shrudn’t ruin tit, ish all.”

  “Who’re you?” Sander wondered what sick fucking jerk-off hid under buildings, tactfully forgetting the many occasions where he had been obliged to do the same. “Where am I?”

  “Bell-djrin.” It was more of a croak than anything else, come to think it. “Arm Bell-djrin. Grue Bell-djrin.”

  “Belgium? No, Belgian? Your name’s Belgian? Or we’re in Belgian? What the fuck does it mean, Belgian? Where. Am. I?”

  “Yarsh!” said the voice. “Bell-djrins in Bell-jic-an!”

  “Listen here, Belgian, we’re under Sneek, yeah?”

  “Yarsh, sneak. Sneak undrer Bell-jic-an.”

  “Fuck. Me.” Sander gritted his teeth. Whatever passed for speech with this Belgian made Frisian seem like a coherent, lyrical language. Even if Belgian wasn’t a stiffhead working for whoever the mastermind was that had been hiring men to watch Sander and set him up and try to kill him all those times and everything else, well, even then this cunt was taxing Sander’s patience.

  “Shrow mush,” said Belgian. “To trell, to shrow, shrow—”

  “Light,” said Sander. “Windows, a trapdoor, a goddamn spark on a godloved flinty—light. Understand, Belgian?”

  “Grite, grite,” Belgian said. “Un momen.”

  There was the sound of metal scraping on glass, and a faint glow began to emerge in the darkness, a hovering marshlight that blinded Sander as it grew brighter and brighter. He turned away, shielding his eyes with his palm, and as the shadows were shoved back across the softly lapping water, he saw there were dozens of corpses floating before him, windblown leaves on the surface of a well. Beyond the dead men, the far wall of whatever cavern or tunnel he was in rose up into deeper blackness. His eyes were streaming and he rubbed them hard, too hard, milling his muddy palms into the sockets. What in the name of the devil’s favorite whore was going on?

  There was another flopping noise in the mud behind Sander and, taking a breath, he clenched his fists and turned to Belgian. His host held up the lantern, which, try to puzzle that out, looked to be a small glass jug filled with glowing liquid and writhing eels. It was blinding to look at straight on, but the man’s webbed fingers partially blocked out the light, and besides, Sander’s attention was focused far more on Belgian than on his mysterious eel lamp. Belgian was naked, and rather knobby and bent-looking, but that wasn’t what captured Sander’s attention—it was Belgian’s face.

  The man was all chin, the wrinkly, mustard-colored prominence jutting straight out past the rest of his features, which fell progressively farther back as they went up, like a face set in the side of a triangle. Sander immediately realized the word man was out of order given the circumstances. Lips that looked like overcooked sausages bursting from their skins stretched around to where Belgian’s ears should have been but weren’t, and then it smiled. This revealed a dozen twig-thin teeth seemingly placed at random in the nightmare maw, with two fangs the width of Sander’s thumbs at the forefront. Above its horrid mouth were two little black slits, and just below where the lumpy forehead arrested the backward slide of its face were a pair of bulbous eyes. They looked like cracked hard-boiled eggs webbed in pond scum.

  It took him a moment, but Sander realized with deepening horror that he was looking at whatever it was he’d always supposed was under him in the well. It was even worse than he’d imagined.

  “Grite!” said Belgian, holding up a long, crooked piece of serrated bone or shell in one hand and waving the lamp with the other. “All grite?”

  It was most certainly not. Sander was far faster than the demon, and before Belgian could use the weapon, Sander had closed the distance and sent his right fist into that giant goddamn chin. The horrid thing started to shriek even before Sander had beaten it to the ground, and as he punched it again and again in the face and throat, he heard its call returned from the darkness. Even with his light-burned eyes watering to the point of blindness Sander could not deny the monstrousness of his foe, the sharp bones too close to the surface of Belgian’s cold, clammy skin. He, no, it, had gone down hard in the mud, Sander riding it all the way, intending to sit on its chest, pin its arms with his knees, and pound its face until it stopped moving… But like a lazing souse dunked in a rain trough, Belgian suddenly began to thrash and fight back.

  The thing was fucking stronger than it looked, and fast, and its backward-jointed, froglike legs were evidently suited to propelling itself out of the mud; before he could stop the tables from turning, Sander was the one on his back in the muck, Belgian
chirping and spitting atop him. It reared back, its jagged weapon held in both hands, and there came a desperate moment where it paused, blathering unintelligibly at him. Sander used that moment to gamble on monsters having genitals.

  Aided by the slick mud, Sander jerked his lower body toward his chest, his knees popping out from under the squat Belgian, and then he sent both feet hammering into the shadowy gap between its half-folded legs. A ridge of bone or spine caught between the toes of his right foot, cutting deep, but his left connected with something dangly and soft. Belgian gave a strangled gasp and collapsed in the mud, dropping the bone knife. The weapon was in Sander’s hand before he was even on his feet, and he would have ended the monster right there if he hadn’t put his weight on his gashed foot. Sander toppled back in the mud beside Belgian, cursing along with the wet noises his incapacitated opponent was making.

  Sander rose again, more carefully this time, and, favoring his good leg, leaned over the crying demon and cut its throat. The handle of the knife-thing was flat bone, and slippery for it, and the serrated teeth of the blade caught on something halfway across, but it did the job, and monster or no, Belgian evidently wasn’t shrugging off a sliced gullet. It made sloppy hiccupping noises as it bled out, and Sander realized the light was dying, too—in the struggle the luminous jug-lamp had fallen and tipped over in the muck. The glowing liquid faded as it mixed with the filth, the luminescent elvers leaving shiny trails on the shore as they abandoned the vessel and squirmed back into the water.

  Before the light dissipated, Sander saw that in addition to the very wrong legs and head Belgian had a stumpy, finned tail, the sight of which made Sander want to throw up all over again. This was what had been in the well, this was what had harried him all his life, the villain orchestrating the whole let’s-get-Sander scheme that just about every cunt he’d ever met was somehow in on, from his father all the way down to the judges of Sneek, this was it: Belgian.