The concierge lurched his chest over the counter, until we were eye to eye.
“No, you listen,” said the concierge. “I will not have the sacred halls of Baudelaire Quatro’s Place sullied by the likes of a couple of mouthy little tramps that just so happened to drift downriver. I detect in your manner a deep lack of respect, both for myself and for the esteemed Mr. Quatro, and I will have no disrespect on these grounds.”
“Is that so?” I said.
“Indeed, child, that is so!” said the concierge. “In fact, I ought to bend you over my knee and spank you for speaking to me in such a way. I ought to grab you by the hair and chuck you out the front door and let the gators have their way with you. I ought to do any such thing than sit behind this counter and endure your insolence, but that is what I choose to do, and you may commence thanking whatever higher power you believe in that I don’t slit you stomach to gullet and feed your entrails to the nutria. How does that sound?”
He dipped his big feather quill in the inkbottle and got back to it.
“Actually, mister,” said Tally, “we come to play.”
She whispered to me, “Show him the cards.”
I took Pop’s cards out of the knapsack and dropped them on the desk.
The concierge stopped his writing for a second. He picked up the cards and unwrapped them carefully. He shuffled them back and forth a few times so fast it looked like he was playing an accordion, same as how I’d seen Pop do it. He flipped over Bright Candle Burning and dragged a long hooked fingernail across it.
Then he sniffed his finger.
His face brightened immediately, and he smiled so big I thought his cheeks would split. He had a heck of a gleaming row of teeth, this concierge sure did.
“Well why didn’t you say so?” He handed the cards back to me. “And you are?”
“I’m Tally,” she said, “and this here’s Buddy. He’ll be the one actually playing the game.”
“Buddy and Tally,” said the concierge, scribbling in his notebook. “There are currently no duelists seeking challenge,” he said, “but you are welcome to wait in the fourth-floor lounge until one should arrive. Though, as according to house rules, if you are challenged, you must of course accept. Until then, you may have use of the facilities.” The concierge looked me up and down then, from my mud-splattered boots to my ripped shirt. He cocked a cold eye at me. “I need not tell you to mind yourselves, do I?”
That made me right mad, it did. Just because a fella’s had a hard time don’t mean he can’t conduct himself like a good and proper gentleman. I was about to tell this concierge to learn himself some manners good and quick before he wound up with a split lip and an aching noggin, but Tally cut me off before I could get started.
“Rest assured,” said Tally, “you don’t need to tell us a durn thing.”
“What’s behind that door?” I said, pointing toward the vault.
“Nothing that you shall ever see,” he said.
“Well you ain’t got to be rude about it,” I said. “I got an inquiring mind. My mom says that’s a noble faculty.”
“Perhaps it is,” said the concierge, “in little schoolchildren who need their diapers changed.”
I said, “Now hold up a minute—”
“If I consent to let you into this establishment,” said the concierge, “then you consent to act like a grown-up. Not some ankle-biting snot-nosed little roughneck who belongs in a boys’ home for delinquents.”
“Thank you,” said Tally. “We’ll behave, and treat this house with due respect.”
“Very well,” said the concierge. He turned to me. “You’re lucky to have her, you know that, boy?”
I tell you, I was about to say a few words to wipe that smirk right off his face. Tally pinched my arm. Hard. I almost yipped right there in the lobby.
“He knows it,” said Tally. “Thank you kindly.”
The concierge gestured to the door on the right. It opened by itself to reveal a long, twisty staircase that wove around the whole head, a red carpet laid down, doors every so often, like a hotel. We made our way out of the lobby and up the staircase. The door slammed shut behind us. I was cooling down about then. Man, if Tally hadn’t been there I probably would have mouthed off and got us tossed right out of this place. I might have messed everything up, same as me and my no-good hexed-blood luck always did.
“What would I do without you, Tally?” I said.
“You’d probably still be bundled up with that magician, a knife to your throat,” she said.
“Good point,” I said.
We made our way up the stairs, peeking in each open door, a Parsnit duel happening behind every one. It was hard not to stop and watch.
In one room was an old woman, wrinkled and hunched and stuffed-looking, like a fluffy toy grandma. She sat there with her eyes closed mostly. She didn’t even need to look at the cards. She just brushed her fingers over the backs of them and smiled, turning the card she wanted. On a stool next to her sat a girl about my age. She was tiny and pale and blond and could have been the old lady stumbled back in time, so identical they were. She was so short her feet didn’t touch the ground, they just kicked and dangled like a restless toddler’s. It looked like they were playing as a team, something I’d never seen happen before in a Parsnit duel. But Parsnit could be tricky like that, I guessed, and if it was okay with Baudelaire Quatro, then it was okay with me.
Their opponent was some sweaty-looking fella with bushy hair and a twitch to his lip. He looked like he’d been awake for three days straight, like he could use a shower or two as well. The sitting witch was a bald man with sharp eyebrows whose fingers never quit moving. It was like he was conducting some invisible magic orchestra, like he conjured every whirring syllable into the lantern-bright air. His eyes were dull and stone gray and I felt cold in his presence, like he had lived a long time and seen too much and my soul would shiver at the telling of it all.
The old lady smiled and flipped another card. The Old Crumbly Castle, that’s the card she turned. Now it was time for the old lady to Orate. The girl next to her went stiff and rigid, her eyes gone a pupil-less glassy white. Her arms hung limp down at her sides, and as the old lady’s lips began to move, the girl’s did too. It was like a ventriloquist dummy, you ever seen one of those? The old lady’s words belted out through the sticky-sweet girl voice, a long weird tale of being a fair maiden trapped in a rotting old castle with no doors and no windows and no way out. Just a window she could peek out from and watch the world change.
“And the maiden was a hostage,” the doll girl said sweetly. “A hostage to her body, which was small and frail, and a hostage to her land. The only window in the castle was in her mind, and that window was great and wide and through it she could see everything.”
I realized she was talking about herself, the old lady was, about having a bright springtime soul latched to a rusty old barge of a body. Or maybe she was talking about her granddaughter, or whoever the girl was, forced always to be a durn bullhorn for a frail old whispering woman. Or else she meant something else altogether, some big question floating over all our heads, like what’s a soul and what’s a spirit, and what makes the candle snuff out behind our eyes when we die? She could have been saying any of those things, or all of those things, or even none of them. That was her power, this old lady Orator and her flesh-and-blood dummy.
It was working too, as the poor fella playing opposite her was staring goggle-eyed at the act, his jaw gone slack, looking with a sort of stammering terror like he was toast and he already knew it.
“Come on,” said Tally. “Your daddy ain’t here.”
We passed room after room of Parsnit players deep in concentration, a witch glowering over each table. I never before realized what a collaboration Parsnit is, like it ain’t just the two players dueling, but it’s also the witch making the story come alive too, so that it’s all three of them working together to tell the same story. I passed a fella losing bad to a
woman in an ascot and cowboy boots. Her story was the only thing happening in that game, and the best the fella could do was dot the scenery here and there. He just couldn’t make his character matter, and that’s the truth of it. The presiding witch seemed to agree with me, as she let a tiny twitch of a smile show in the corner of her lips, like it was fun to watch this massacre, like she could see straight into his heart and knew he deserved every bit of what was coming to him.
That thought scared me, if you want to know the truth of it. It scared me plenty.
In one room I saw the lawyer from Gentlesburg. I couldn’t believe he’d made it all the way out here, same as I had. He was calm and in his suit, same as before, like he’d just come back from some rich guy board meeting or something. His opponent was a real pretty woman with black hair and a tall top hat with a feather in it. She had a fiddle at the ready. They were about eight cards into the game. It seemed as if they had been dueling for hours and hours.
The woman turned Fire in the Sky and sat rigid and upright. She brought her fiddle to her neck and let it rip, playing a sad low melancholy song, something bright and burning in the night, something far off and lovely, something you felt couldn’t last. It was so beautiful I almost burst into tears right then. Tally grabbed my hand and we stood there in the doorway, listening. All of a sudden the lawyer came in singing a harmony, his voice high and pure, not an ounce of grit to it, and together they sang the song of the high far-off burning thing, a star maybe, that was falling fast and low, already doomed. When they finished both the woman and the lawyer laid their heads on the table and wept, and the witch stretched her plump hands out to each of them, as if in a blessing.
“I guess that’s one you’d call a tie,” said Tally.
“Yeah,” I said. “They both won that one, and that’s the truth of it.”
We kept walking until we ran out of rooms. There was only one door left, and that led to the top floor. We opened the door to a big room, right where the head’s brain would be. It was some kind of restaurant or lounge. There weren’t any windows to the place, so no daylight or starlight or moonlight got in there, just the high gleaming chandeliers and lamps scattered all over, like we were in some kind of cave, like there wasn’t any outside world at all. A small band was playing—a banjo and an accordion and a washboard—with a tiny man like a carnival barker hollering over them, doing a funny little dance in wooden shoes. He had on a bowler hat and every time he took it off the air above his head filled with little glittering sparkles. Folks ate, folks drank, folks argued. Waiters in crisp suits zipped around with plates of food. There must have been a hundred people in that upper room, truth be told.
Tally snatched a loaf of bread from a waiter walking by and broke me off a piece. It was hot and soft and reminded me of home, it did, it was just the way Mom would have baked it. That made me sad a little bit, because all of a sudden I missed Mom, I missed our house bakery, I missed even tiny sleepy Collardsville, dump that it was. But now wasn’t the time for pitiful thoughts like that, no sir. I was on a mission to find Pop. He was counting on me. There wasn’t time yet to miss where I came from.
Over in the far corner sat a bunch of bedraggled folks, so tired they weren’t hardly blinking. They just stared off into nothing, their eyes bloodshot and shattered looking.
“What’s wrong with those guys?” I said.
“I’ve heard about this,” said Tally. “They got the wore-outs. It’s when the magic in Parsnit starts to get too much for folks and they can’t leave it alone. They can’t eat or sleep or hardly do nothing. They just want another taste of the game, a bit more of that magic working on them from the cards. It’s a sad state, it is.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I never knew Parsnit had a downside. I mean, apart from witches’ bonds and whatever it was that turned Sinclair into the Creepy.”
“Magic’s always got a consequence,” said Tally. “Granddad used to tell me that all the time.” And she looked sad a minute, like maybe she missed her granddad a little bit, cruel and awful as he was.
“Looking for somebody?” said a portly fella with red cheeks and massive muttonchops.
“Yes sir,” I said. “I’m looking for my pop.” Tally elbowed me in the side, like hush your durn mouth. But what could I do about it? “You don’t work for Boss Authority, do you?”
“’Course not,” said the man. He crossed himself three times and spit on the carpet. “And I got a mind to whoop your scrawny little butt for asking me a question like that.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t want to get my pop in any more trouble. His name’s David Josiah Pennington, you ever heard of him?”
The man’s eyes went wide and his smile did a little jump. “Your dad is Davey Boy Pennington? Is he here?”
“If I knew the answer to that,” I said, “then I wouldn’t be looking for him.”
“Quite right, quite right,” said the man. He thrust his hand out to me. “Name’s Radegar Kelly.”
“Buddy,” I said.
“I’m Tally,” said Tally, and Radegar bowed.
“Imagine that,” he said “Davey Boy Pennington back in the Swamplands. It might be time for a shakeup here, and let me tell you, that shakeup is rightly due. Boss Authority has ruined this swamp, he has. We are standing in the last free house left.”
“Sorry,” said Tally, “but those folks over there don’t look too free.” She pointed at the half-dead men, sitting there all smelly and foul-clothed and glazy-eyed.
“You’re right about that,” said the man. “Parsnit takes an awful toll on folks who ain’t got the proper constitution. Heck, it takes a toll on all of us who play. And yet we do. Peculiar predicament, ain’t it?”
“I guess,” said Tally. “I tell you right now, this game ain’t for me.”
“But I reckon it is for this one, ain’t it?” he said, pointing at me. “Bet you can’t drag this little fella away from a Parsnit table once his number’s called. On account of who his daddy is, I mean.”
“What are you getting at, mister?” I said.
“What I’m getting at is how about we have us a little duel, you and me?” he said. “I know you got a deck, else they wouldn’t have let you past the front room. How about it, son? How about you play ol’ Radegar?”
That flat flabbergasted me. I never counted on being actually challenged in Baudelaire Quatro’s Place. I didn’t figure there’d be anybody who would want to.
“I don’t know, mister,” I said. “I think I ought to get back to finding Pop. Don’t got much time for games right now.”
“But this ain’t any mere game, son,” said Radegar. “It’s Parsnit. Knowing him, your pop will keep just fine, wherever he is.”
“It ain’t right,” I said. “I got to go.”
A voice spoke up behind me.
“In point of fact, Master Pennington, you may not go.”
The concierge was standing right there behind me in his little suit.
“What have you got to do with anything?” I said. “I’m leaving. I got to find my pop.”
“I have everything to do with everything,” said the concierge, “and I say to you, if you are offered a duel, you must accept. Those are Mr. Baudelaire Quatro’s House Rules.”
“Thank you, Mr. Concierge,” said Radegar, bowing a little. “I was afraid this little scamp was gonna try and weasel out of a duel.”
“How’d you get up here so fast?” I said.
“Mr. Quatro himself told me,” said the concierge. “I was informed that a challenge had been issued.”
“Is the old fella around?” said Radegar. “I’ve been wanting to meet him for ages, him being an original Parsnit player and all. Heard he was quite the Orator in his day, could flat talk you to weeping. Gent must be old now though, huh? Least over a hundred.”
“Mr. Quatro is indisposed at the moment,” said the concierge.
“Then how did he hear us?” I said.
“This house is Mr. Quatro, in a m
anner of speaking,” said the concierge. “Not a word is uttered that he does not hear, and there is not a nook, cranny, or closet in which Mr. Quatro is not somehow present. If you are in his House, in a sense, then you are inside Mr. Quatro’s Head as well.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“And you don’t have to,” said the concierge. “The fact remains, a challenge has been issued, and you must accept it.”
“But I ain’t ever played before,” I said. “Not really.”
“Well I’ll be sure and go easy on you,” said Radegar with a wink. “Besides, your daddy being who he is, I’m sure you’re a durn natural.”
I looked at Tally, and she looked back at me. The heck was I supposed to do?
“Don’t worry now,” said Radegar. “We won’t put nothing up for wager, no witch’s bond to keep us true. We’ll just play a few rounds and you can see how a real pro does it. Who knows? Maybe I can teach you a few things that your daddy never got around to.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just a few rounds, not even a full duel. And remember, I ain’t never played before.”
“That a boy!” shouted Radegar. “Grab me a bottle of something nice and lead us on, Mr. Concierge!”
The concierge took us downstairs, to an empty room on the third floor. Me and Radegar took a seat at either side of the table. Tally stood next to me, looking about as nervous as I’d ever seen her.
“Who’s sitting witch?” said Radegar. “It better not be Betty Wettach again. That woman durn hates me, she does. Always gives me the weak magic.”
“I’ll be presiding.” A beautiful silver-haired woman in a long white gown with sequins glimmering in little eyeballs all over her dress walked into the room. “Call me Miss Arabella.”
She held her hand out to us. Radegar took it and kissed it. When it was my turn I just gave it a little shake, and the lady laughed, a sparkling high sound like bells.
Radegar clapped his hands twice. “Gather around folks, we’re about to play some Parsnit!”
That’s when I noticed it wasn’t just us in the room anymore. All kinds of folks had crammed into the back, gamblers and duelists and drinkers, the lawyer and the violin woman (who seemed to be holding hands), the stinky folks and the well-dressed, all of them, guests and house regulars and new players who probably only just darkened the doors like us, some even spilling out into the hallway, peeking in on tiptoes—all to watch me, Davey Boy Pennington’s son, play his first game of Parsnit.
The Rambling Page 11