The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  The mist looped around the stalks the way the cat had around her legs, and suddenly the water felt unpleasantly cool instead of cloyingly warm, the gravedirt—for that was what it was, after all—that had caught in her hair bringing a faint earthiness to her nostrils that she had never found in the sea. She must be careful here, she knew, far more careful than she had been before—Jan had told her there were no sharks nor jellyfish here, but as she treaded floodwater she wondered if he could be sure, here where the abyss had called without invitation and then elected to stay.

  “And how is the water, my fine bream?” Jan called as Sander and Andrei set their oars and brought the boat to a rocking halt. There was no more current or pull here than there had been in the canals and ponds she had practiced in, and the boat sat in the calm water as if beached on a sandbar.

  “Too warm,” she said, willing it to be so again. “And it smells.”

  “Then you had best be quick about your business, yes?”

  “Fucking prick,” she said. “Stone in the bottom of a her, a what, a hearth, on the upstairs?”

  “Yes, at the front of it, on the left. The hearth protrudes from the wall, so feel along the wainscoting until you find a ridge of rougher stones. From there it should dip well in, where the fire goes. I’d hoped to try and go down a chimney but they were both clogged up when I came through, and I can’t imagine the situation’s improved in the year since. But hopefully the roof will give, and if not Sander’s going to help you with a window.”

  “The devil I will.” Jo could hear Sander but couldn’t see him from her low vantage, only Jan leaning out over the nose of the looming vessel.

  “We’ve been over this, Sander,” said Jan, his lips now straining against his teeth. “And you agreed—”

  “You didn’t say nothing about swimming in no graveyard.”

  “The graveyard’s back there, not—”

  “Not for the love of God, so that leaves the odds of me doing it for the love of you awfully fucking short. Get in yourself, Graaf!”

  “Fine,” said Jan, casting a dirty look over his shoulder. “Grown man scared of his own shadow. Pathetic.”

  “But dry,” came the response, followed by a chuckle from the Muscovite.

  “Bring us closer to the roof, then,” said Jan, and following some muttered word from behind him, added, “Just give it one stroke and that’ll be that. Jo, climb up on the roof there and see if there’s any holes leading in.”

  She paddled closer to the island, and felt gooseflesh spread all over her back as the change in angle granted her a peek at what lay below. Instead of shallows giving way to land, there was indeed a house suspended in the water, its wall rising straight out of the dim depths. Squinting into the murk, she saw it was a right grand manor at that, with two rows of shuttered windows striping the brick wall and the blur of a wide door at its base, only instead of tile and chimney, or even straw and smokehole, there was a cap of mud and rushes topping the building. It was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen, yet also the spookiest—she half-expected one of the windows to spring open at the push of an occupant, so pristine did the sunken building appear. As she drew nearer, however, she better made out the details of decay and erosion writ on door and wall, shutter and stoop, and its proximity to the flooded graveyard made her wonder what sort of host might dwell there.

  Stupid fucking neuker Sander, putting such thoughts in her. Fish and eels were the only tenants in that dark keep, nothing more. As she reached the marshy roof, the house fell from her sight as neatly as if it had been swept away by the flood. Planting her hands in the mud to pull herself out of the water, she found the muck yielded to a hardness beneath, like stepping on a rotten fish at the shore and feeling bone beneath the putrescence. She heard Sander whistle as she hauled herself up, and as she got to her feet she took a handful of mud with her, tightening her fist to pack it as best she could.

  Jo twirled and fired. To her horror, the missile whizzed past Sander and struck the Muscovite in the back of the neck. He barked, and would have lost his oars if they weren’t secure in their locks as he threw up his hands in delayed defense. Everything went quiet, with no marsh bird or fish jump to break the hallowed silence, and then Sander howled with laughter, giving Andrei a vicious slap to the back as he winked at Jo.

  “Sorry!” Jo cried. “Shit, Andrei, I’m sorry, really!”

  The Muscovite had stood, his hands curled into tight fists, but, perhaps realizing it was Jo and not Sander who had hit him, his wrath seemingly left him. He unballed his hands, stretching the fingers.

  “Dermo,” said Andrei, wiping the mud from his nape. “You are a good aim, devushka.”

  “I was trying to hit the plaguebitch in front’ve you,” she said. “I swear!”

  “Lucky you didn’t,” said Sander.

  “Enough of that,” said Jan, but Jo thought his eyes seemed alight with shared mischief. “How firm does it feel?”

  She hopped demonstratively, sinking almost to her ankles before the slate or whatever it was stopped her.

  “Right, grab the nose and hold her steady,” said Jan, and with her help they got the prow of the boat well enough stuck against the lip of the roof. Then Jan slowly extended a foot, and, cautious as a cat examining its reflection in a puddle, patted the ground with his boot several good times before stepping down. The smile on his face as he relaxed and peered around was so genuine, so open, and so, well, happy, that it brought the same squirmy feeling to Jo that spying on him and Sander had several nights before. That was just weird, was what it was.

  “Shit, Jo, look out!” Sander called. “Something bit you!”

  “Huh?” She reflexively high-stepped it backward, trying to see what was around her ankles.

  “Here and here,” said Sander, touching his chest. “Gnat or mosquito, I’d say—nothing bigger than that.”

  “What?” She dug her chin into her chest to get a look, and then she got it. The sight of her pebbly nipples jutting from her chest brought a keen and cruel reminder of how exposed she was. She turned her back on the boat and the braying arsehole, Sander clearly not above laughing at his own joke. She would have found her rage and fought him then, surely she would have, but then Jan shouted triumphantly and waved her over to where he stood amongst the reeds on the little island they shared. Following his finger, she saw a small pool of water in the muck, and as he leaned forward beside it, pressing down with one foot, the puddle bubbled a little.

  “Ax,” he said, and returned to the boat while she squatted down beside the pool, telling herself it was to have a better look and not to shield herself from Sander’s further jeering inspection. Reaching into the hat-brim-wide puddle, she could not find its bottom, and dropped to her knees as she stretched farther and farther down until she was up to her elbow in the water. It was colder than the rest of the meer, and darker. Sitting back up, she brushed something sharp on the edge of the hole, an angry red stripe rising on her forearm as Jan returned with an ax.

  Neither Sander nor Andrei set foot on the roof, the men content to sit on their rowing boards and share a bottle the Muscovite had produced while Jan expanded the hole with his ax. In addition to all the splashing and squelching, the ax occasionally made clattering and crunching noises, after which he would pause and have her reach in to dislodge whatever scrap of wood or tile he had hacked loose. He had removed his old doublet, the fancy clothes he had worn in Dordrecht left in the care of Primm, and when this did not seem to speed up the work sufficiently, he hoisted his shirt over his head. Jo admired the fine hair on his chest, wondering how soft it must feel, but this only reminded her of how naked she was. If she had known how long it was going to take, she would have put her shift back on, at least. Jan finally stepped back and nodded down.

  “See if you can get in, then,” he said, and though the pool looked little bigger than it had when they’d started, the small heap of rotten wood and broken ceramic encouraged her. She sat down in the muck and scooted
forward, leading with her legs. Her feet found where the hole opened up, and as she slid into position, Jan came around on the other side of the pool and took her hands, helping steady her. “Ready?”

  Of course she wasn’t, and couldn’t even muster a lie, but he tugged her forward all the same. Her bottom cleared the edge of the roof just as he released her. With nothing to hold her aloft, she fell into blackness, one elbow cracking smartly against a tile and her back scraping on the rim as she went. The water was much murkier here, much colder and much darker, and she surfaced with a cry, Jan standing over her, impossibly tall.

  “Just like on the beach,” he said, so quiet she could barely hear him. “This is you, Jo. How I’ll always think of you, just like here.”

  “Cunting cold!” she gasped.

  “This will be the attic,” said Jan. “Your first trial is getting down from there, into the house proper. There are a few trapdoors, so find one of those and pull it up, and then you’ll be able to find the bedroom.”

  As he spoke, another face appeared between the rushes—Sander. He had lost whatever humor mocking her had given him, the same sort of mean expression on his ugly face that her father had worn on many a return from selling purple. He had a coil of rope in his hand that he thrust at Jan like an accusation.

  “Tie this around her.”

  “What?” That Jan was likewise perplexed by this heartened Jo; Jan making her feel stupid was one thing, but Sander making her feel thick was in no way acceptable.

  “If she drowns,” said Sander, looking down at her as he did. “We’ll be able to reel her back in.”

  “She won’t,” said Jan with a confidence Jo wished she shared.

  “Look, she drowns, we’ll bury her back in the mud of that churchyard. Least we can do for her after all she’s done, a Christian burial. I don’t care to think what’d happen to a soul that was left to float out here instead of put properly in the ground.”

  Jo didn’t, either, and went under at this, spinning down into the frigid ink for what should have been an eternity but instead only lasted a moment before she jabbed her toes through muck and into something hard, painfully jamming them. Pushing the rest of her air out to help her settle on the bottom, she peered all around but had stirred up too much silt to get a proper bearing on where she was. Beyond freezing her bits off in a flooded house on account of a shady man she fancied, of course. Now that she was down, however, she saw that it wasn’t so dark, after all—the hole let in enough light that the task would be easy once the bottom settled. Squinting through the gloom, she saw a patch of deeper blackness just beside her, and kicking above it, she saw that it was a narrow crack in the attic floor.

  Reaching down and feeling a beam as soft as young cheese beneath her fingernails, Jo pulled herself down through the crevice and found herself in a twilit room, the moldering shades of furniture floating beside her. It was at once beautiful and horrible, like smashing the snails to get at their brilliant guts, and she let herself sink all the way to the bottom, the little light that wound its way down through the stacked holes above casting a gray pallor. Forcing herself to be still and staying down long after she wanted to come up, at last she kicked off the floor and swam for the attic, and from there to the surface—the bottom of the room had a strange feel to it, nowhere near so muddy as above but with plenty of its own gritty sediment.

  “—fucking mouth’s to blame, so…” Jan trailed off, and she saw Sander’s face was the same bright red that his cock had been after Jan had given it a suck. She immediately hated having drawn the parallel and turned back to Jan. He smiled his familiar warm smile, and she cursed herself for having ever doubted him. He never smiled that way at Sander. “How is it down there, then?”

  “Simple,” she said, surprised to find her teeth chattering. “Going to be easy.”

  “Good! Wish I could have used the roof last time, as I said—had I known how straightforward it would be to get in this time, I would have come alone and never bothered finding you.”

  “Oh,” said Jo, but ever careful with her heart, Jan added,

  “But I’m glad I did.”

  “You’re the worst ball-washer of them all,” said Sander, not with anger, but something like sadness to his voice. “I might be a killer, yeah, sure, but you… you’re wrong inside, love, you’re truly fucking twisted. A pig’s dick.”

  “Give us a moment, Jo,” said Jan, his eyes never leaving hers. “And for God’s sake, be sure to come up often for air; there’s no need to push yourself when this hole’s right here.”

  Then she was back down, something awful as the rich man’s mutton twisting in her stomach. Part of her delighted to see Sander resigning himself to this, to know that it was all out there and Jan was taking care of it and there was a reason why Sander had always been so nasty to her, to know it was something as simple as jealousy. Still, it was a lousy time for it all to float up, with her down here recapturing Jan’s glory and Sander not having any place to run off to with his broken heart. She wondered what it would be like to be trapped out here in the swamp-sea knowing Jan was going to quit her when they got back to Dordrecht and settle down with Sander… but then that was hardly her fault. It wasn’t like she’d stolen Jan away, and even if she had, well, Sander wasn’t right in the head, and a total fucking arsehole besides.

  In her reverie she almost clipped her tits on the attic hole, but caught herself and flitted down into the room she had found, dodging lumpy, indiscernible obstructions and coming almost at once to a wall. It was alternately slimy and rough, and, orienting herself as best she could, she set to moving along the brick, feeling for the fireplace. This was going to be easy.

  IV.

  Once Jo got the knack of passing through the attic and reaching the bottom of the room beneath it without stirring up all the filth, her exploration went quickly indeed. She determined on her third dive that there definitely wasn’t a fireplace in the chamber, but she waited until surfacing from her sixth to tell Jan that. Part of it was reluctance to pass through the black doorway that led to the rest of the house, but part of it was also curiosity about this first room—now that her eyes had adjusted to the murk, she could properly explore. A chair had worn down most of its back scraping against the ceiling, and other, less identifiable scraps of wood drifted around her as she idly investigated the chamber—one hillock on the floor revealed itself to be the remains of a bed, and another a heap of mud-infused cloth that disintegrated between her fingers when she prodded it. It should have been great fun, but the dark rectangle of the room’s only doorway seemed to watch her like an unblinking eye, and if she had her back to it for more than a few moments, she felt a stupid panic rise in her that would respond to neither wisdom nor begging, only a glance over her shoulder to verify that nothing terrible was lurking there.

  “No fireplace,” she finally panted, bracing her elbows on the muddy rooftop to give herself a rest before further exploration.

  “Of course not,” said Jan. Sander had buggered off somewhere, and good riddance. “You’re in the middle of the house, one of the daughters’ rooms. His will be at the end of the hall, that way.”

  Following his finger, Jo scowled. “If you knew it weren’t his place, why’d you let me poke ’round so long? And why not dig through over there, in his room?”

  “Just getting you used to the task,” said Jan, offering her the coil of rope. “Clearing a new hole might cave in the whole roof, and besides, you’d still need to find a way out of the attic—this one will do just fine.”

  “You really think I’m going to drown?” she asked, not taking the rope. “I won’t tie it on, Jan—I’m coming back up, and with your ring.”

  “Do or don’t tie it, but take it with you, and unspool it as you go—it’s to find your way back if you get turned ’round in the dark. Here,” he said, picking up the ax and burying its head in the muck beside her, causing the lip of wood she rested on to vibrate. Tugging the haft, and confirming it was well embedded,
he tied the end of the rope around it and dropped the rest of the coil into the water beside her. “Sensible, yes? It will be darker in the rest of the house.”

  “All right,” she said, suddenly aware that she hadn’t checked the doorway in several minutes and from her current vantage couldn’t see shit. There could be a whole mob of the river demons Andrei had been talking about gathering beneath her, waiting to pull her down and—

  “Are you?” She blinked at his question, then nodded quickly. “Right, then, back down. Remember, it’s the end of the hall, that way.”

  In the short span it took her to reach the doorway she was utterly mixed up and had no idea which direction he had indicated, but that was all right. She was in no hurry, the stupid rope being a right pain in the arse to uncoil as she swam, and fish had balls if the water on the other side of the doorway wasn’t even colder and darker. She was dimly aware that a tunnel stretched in either direction, but beyond that could make out nothing. Total bullshit, as Sander would say. She set off down the hall, paddling slowly to feed the rope out evenly, and in only a few strokes the duskiness of the first room was replaced with impenetrable blackness. Her lungs began to burn as she slowly advanced, but she still hadn’t bumped into the end of the passage. Pivoting in the water, she dropped the coil and went back the way she’d come—it was much easier to return, for a weak light spilled out of the doorway, and besides, Jo always swam faster with dark water at her back.

  She stayed at the hole with Jan for a few dozen breaths, and when her breathing was again easy, she went back down to the corridor, feeling along the rope until she found the coil and scooped it up. Goddamn rope. She didn’t realize she had entered another room until she made out a faint line of light to her left, and swimming for it, she discovered the springy wood of closed shutters. She tried to push them open but they wouldn’t give, and when she tried pulling, the slat she gripped came off in her hand, letting another meager slash of twilight enter the room. Then she needed air again, but before she went, she wedged what remained of the coil into the gap she had made in the shutters. Swimming back down the hall, she realized from the stabbing in her chest that she had taken too long—she had to be careful about that down here, where it wasn’t as simple as kicking up to break the surface.