A Mischief in the Woodwork

by Harper Alexander

  But in the end, I always seduced them.

  I...

  I lurched to extract myself from such retrospect, struggling to shed the skin that I had seemingly drawn over myself. My perspective snapped back into my body like a slingshot, a painful ricochet, glancing off the back of my skull and flooding my vision with black spots.

  Gold spots.

  I shook my head, drunk from it, reeling like a sailor on deck during a storm – drenched and disoriented. It was so forceful that I broke the woman's grasp, staggering against the ravine wall.

  She did not seem thrown off by the episode. With knowing eyes, she seized my wrist, and drew up my fingers for inspection. She looked first at the tattoo-burnt pattern on my fingerprints, then at the skin under my nails.

  Her skin.

  Four long welts were dragged across the underside of her forearm.

  Letting me go, she grabbed my face instead, forcing it straight to consider my face. Dizzily, I sought focus on her features. There was no dignity in failing to so much as meet the gaze of the one addressing you.

  Then she released me for good, and stepped back as I was recovering.

  “We all have something under our nails we wish we could shake,” she said in apparent empathy.

  I grimaced in recuperation, my throat feeling scorched from swallowing the visions. “Who are you?” I croaked. My noblest efforts to avoid the pitiful question had failed, and lay in a miserable heap at my feet.

  It was not a response that acknowledged or even accepted the significance of her comment, but there was no need. I knew what she meant by it. I had seen it. I had felt it; the decay under her own nails. It was akin to the concept of blood on her hands. Something to haunt her for the things she had done.

  “You tell me,” she said in a measuring tone, her eyes intent. They dared me. They probed me. They doubted me, but pressed me. She was still testing me for something.

  I had seen so many things in my time – things that didn't jive, things that simply were, that I lived to let go because that was how it worked, because there was just no putting a name to them. It was a rule of thumb, not putting a name to things. As such, naming a character in the midst of it was a ridiculous notion. I did not even know where to begin. There were no generic roles to be filled. Any role in this mess was one that was surely extremely complex or simply chaotic.

  “You're not a Serbaen,” I said.

  At least I was able to determine what she very much wasn't.

  She laughed. Evidently I had stated the obvious, or it was a joke to her for another reason.

  I was not dissuaded by her laughter. My mind was running wild with the possibilities – to me, very real possibilities. “A demon?” I tried. “An...angel?” Then it came to me, on silent, sharp wings. “Gods. You're the Angel of Death,” I breathed.

  And she laughed again. “Oh no, my dear – no one so noble.”

  “Then what? You have a contract with Death. You hail from a place not of this world, and enslave people in this...this trap. To die. How many?” There was something accusing in that question, straying from the point.

  “There are a great many,” she answered with a matter-of-fact, devastating honesty, “who wander my chasm.”

  “Who else from the heavens is warranted to harvest with such damnation?”

  “I do not harvest. I simply reduce. Reduce them to hysterical wanderers, chained just out of reach of the world above them. I simply render them stuck in a rut.”

  “Why?”

  “So the sun will come up in the morning.”

  “Because the sun demands blood?” I demanded, my tone hot with opinions.

  “And who are you,” she asked, “to question the greater scheme of things?”

  I could hear it in the way she said the first part, that she wanted to know.

  Who was I?

  She was not merely putting me in my place.

  It puzzled and intrigued me, realizing we were at a stalemate. That this being of power was at a loss over me, as I was over her.

  The difference between us: I could not begin to guess why.

  How to answer? A part of me suggested that now I had leverage, and could use it to my advantage, but suddenly I was also struggling with my own qualms regarding definition, underneath my sly motives.

  Indeed, who was I? What was the best truth?

  Surely 'Avante of Manor Dorn' would in no way satisfy any kind of curiosity. So what was she expecting me to say?

  But it was no use. Evidently, she grew impatient with my dimwitted sense of self, and my prolonged freedom there in her ravine. This was no self-respecting interrogation.

  “I am not the Archangel,” she said. “I am his ambassador. And you have fallen into my crack of the world, where I hold those that are due for their reckoning. It doesn't matter who you are. You have come to me in the same way many of them do. I will take you as such.”

  “No...” It was the senseless protest that would come out of anyone's lips. “My name is Avante,” I blurted in denial. “My name is Avante...” As if it would prove something. Perhaps it would prove whatever she had been looking for. Maybe it was in my name. Maybe Avante was a special name...

  “It works like a spider's web, Avante,” she explained patiently, ruthlessly. “You fall in, you become entwined. It's a properly functioning trap. And the louder your protests, the quicker you bring the beast down on you. Just a word of advice.”

  No... My fists clenched. “But I am the spider...”

  It was a small murmur, but something fluttered behind its pitiful existence.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I didn't know where it had come from either. But I looked up at her, meaning it.

  In realization, she humored me – but it was with little patience.

  My hand was in hers. She considered my fingers. The constellations in her eyes burned against the patterns of web there.

  “There are those in this world who can walk the cracks,” she said, as if admitting it, but not as if she'd been wrong before. She was simply saying it, now. “Those like me. I am not the Angel of Death. I can merely speak for him. An intercessor. A...bridge, if you will.”

  That, with a conspiratorial glance toward the bridge that loomed above.

  “If you can cross that bridge, I will speak for Death this day, in your interests.”

  My eyes went to the bridge. The half of it.

  “But you must cross it wearing this.” Her termite stick turned once again to its original shackle form, and I blanched inside. Her sympathy ran short of warming my heart.

  Whatever my claim about spiders and identity had meant to her, it had stemmed from desperation. There was no real noble uprising in my heart ready to fly me across a ravine. Especially with a ball and chain wrapped around my ankle.

  “I can't cross that,” I protested, as if I could now earn her sympathies the other way, with my all-too-human shortcomings.

  “No one can,” she replied matter-of-factly, and my fate was sealed, and thrown out on a ledge.

  In place of wings, I was given an anchor.

  E I g h t e e n –

  A Bridge's Wingspan

  She was brilliant in the sun as she marched me out onto the self-laden bridge. The gold of her was amplified in prisms of tarnish, an effect both flattering and not as it bared her dual true colors from the equilibrium of their shaded glaze. Termites scuttled in the folds of her dress, striving to hide from the light. Their retreat rang swift, but to where I could say not.

  Into the fabric itself, it seemed.

  Likewise, I longed to do just that – shrink into the crevices of my attire, and leave it in a swirled heap there on the ledge lacking my presence. The Ambassador would poke through it with her drug stick, stupefied, knowing, then dour. She would put the utensil to her lips, and dredge up a breath of her minions. Their wings would stick to her tongue and throat, a parching sludge of little bodies.

  Yet a cool drink of water for Death's right
hand.

  A dose of euphoria, quaintly morbid.

  She would return to her earthen catacomb, slighted.

  But only in that rendition of world that did not exist. For I would indeed not flourish any such stunt. My magician-al habits surpassed nothing beyond blending with the landscape behind a mask of powder; my finest cosmetic.

  And it had all run with my sweat in turrets down my face, streaking my neck. I was chameleon to nothing, there alighted on that spotlit precipice.

  It was a stage. The sun glared down on me, and the city held its powdery breath, waiting. I drank up the distance, the height – quivering once.

  The Ambassador pushed me forward.

  I resisted, tripping back.

  Stepping right into the shackle she had poised on the ground behind me, which sprang shut around my ankle like a trap – her intent all along, the reverse-psychology of her forward-bound ushering.

  Dismay closed around me as keenly as the kiss of cold-hot metal.

  I recalled standing on one such platform before – the broken bridge of my childhood, as I was cast out to be kicked off a fateful rung of civilization. I had landed at the bottom of a ravine that day too; a ravine below society. A respective gutter. The wretched rut that ran red with slavery.

  With a scraping sound, I dragged my shackle forward on the platform. My past was dragged with it. Now it was heavier even than its erstwhile conviction. An impossible weight, doubled.

  I felt it on my shoulders.

  Any respectable bearer of the world feels it there.

  The shackle on my ankle was really little more than an age-old allusion, reborn, for effect. I had carried its like for what manifested like decades.

  I did this each day.

  The realization melted the better part of the hindrance that I towed in my shadow. It puddled into a trail of molten metal and rust for the wind behind me, even as its image remained true to form.

  The Ambassador would think herself clever for installing it, but I had left it behind. It would not be what downed me. As I stood at the edge of that bridge, the chain was as light as the skirt that billowed about my legs, and might well have stirred in the wind right along with it. My gaze dipped like a summery wave into the ravine, the cold and salty taste of irrationally replete vertigo. Seasick sentiments of elation felt from the pride of going down with the ship.

  Sink her, gentlemen.

  Aye aye, Captain.

  My eyelids were bird wings, flapping for the last time. Closing before a heartfelt plummet to the ground.

  “Cross it, Avante.” The Ambassador's words, compelling me forward. “If you fail, I will most assuredly brand you.”

  Incentive ran wild. As good as horses stampeding across the plains of that platform, toward me. They churned across the bridge and spilled off the edges around me, and I could not bear the weight of it as the force of their galloping, muscle-hot bodies pummeled me. Only for a desperate moment did my resistance skid ever closer, but grounded, to the edge – then a muscled shoulder grazed me in the back, and I ruptured forward, letting go.

  I stepped off that bridge, into the abyss of nothing that would have its way with me.

  The strangest thing happened as a result: an opening of the sky above me, a flash of wings and talon-infested appendages dipping into the world. It bombed down out of the sky directly overhead and seized me most violently by the shoulders with its claws. It flung me across the expanse.

  I rolled to an astonished rest, delivered, left to gasp in wonder on the other side. Nothing but a vanished impression lay between my landing place and the precipice I had abandoned, and even that sizzled into ashes in the air's transparent memory. It had been nothing but a fleeting miracle, to register in nothing more than a glazed fashion.

  The Ambassador regarded me from across the ravine. She was a tarnished gem in the sun, staring with sour intrigue at the wonder that had become of me. She turned without further ado and walked back along the edge of her gulley, an honorable businesswoman, the hem of her dress spilling over the edge. It was longer than I recalled, a sea of train that reached all the way to the shadowed ground – and that, only half of it, one flank of it. It was a wonder it did not drag her down, but it proved a kin purpose as she lay down all amidst its glory, on her back with her dark hair spilling down the canyon wall, and then slithered down through its voluptuous folds as if sucked.

  She vanished head-first into the ravine, and was followed by the slithering billows of her golden portal.

  A snake.

  Sometimes a horse.

  Sometimes a human.

  N I n e t e e n –

  The Shackled Road of Friendship

  “Why in the gods' names, minda?” was Tanen's reaction, as he came upon me. It seemed, for lack of a better name to call me, he had adopted the Serbaen term for the purpose. With it, he managed to charm and mock at once, and not tread on the personal weight of my real name. “If you happen upon a ball and chain in the rubble, you do not apply it to your limbs unless you can also boast miraculously coming into possession of the matching key somewhere in the same vicinity. That is surely a rule of thumb.”

  I stood in sheepish disarray for him finding me this way, and not being able to denounce the theory. I could not explain otherwise. I could not explain anything.

  The long road home stretched out behind me. The toppled gate to the city was under my feet. In truth, I had waited for him here, for a very specific and most inconvenient reason:

  The anchor fastened to me.

  I had done my best, wrestling with it over the rubble. I had dragged it, even carried it. But I was spent, and my ankle was bloody. My arms trembled from the cumbersome burden, and the muscles in my leg were pulled in every way, like weeds taken to with a vengeance.

  “I don't suppose you at least feel inclined to conjure an excuse for your presence here today?” he inquired of my silence. “Or was this contraption merely the overdue failed attempt to keep you contained at Manor Dorn?”

  “Exceptionally funny,” I acknowledged dryly. “But never mind. If you would just–”

  “Dear gods. Is that blood on your ankle?”

  Suddenly he was kneeling, and inspecting the sullied appendage. A self-conscious shift took me, but I winced in regret of the movement, and jerked still.

  His upward glance fed empathy at my contorted face, and his hands were gentle as he turned back to the source of my pain. “Honestly, Avante... You would not do this, would you?” He was flourishing a handkerchief, wrapping it around my flesh on the inner side of the strangling metal clasp. When his eyes returned to mine, they were earnest, conspiratorial. “Is this mischief?”

  He meant: had the city done this to me?

  Perhaps. In a manner of speaking, and yet – no. There had been a woman. But what of her to him? No one for the blissfully ignorant to reckon with. He need not know, and I could not name her on my tongue. My tongue would not hear of it, and could not in fact recall the precise taste of it. Had she been the stuff of cinnamon? Earth? Heaven?

  Had she in fact been real at all?

  People could well go mad in this city. I was aware of such things.

  “I cannot explain it,” I said. “But that would be its closest name.”

  “Better to have stayed where you were put,” Tanen advised. “Or do you think it pays to go into the city more than necessary?”

  I would not blush, but my cheeks wished, for once, I might humor them. They clamored, their small bloody fists pounding against the smooth walls of my flesh. “It is not your business when it is necessary for me.”

  “And she, the spy, demands privacy,” he smirked as he stood.

  His face would have been perfect to slap on its way up. It wanted to be slapped.

  I was disappointed that I did not. How I could have brought the blood to his own smooth cheeks. It might even have looked lovely next to his sea-splashed eyes.

  The perfect touch.

  “And you, the one who ought to
be shackled to the ground,” I observed in defiance. “Any justice worth its salt would give you the anchor, climbing all over the the city as you were, with its unstable architecture. Is sport so unthinkable really necessary by nature, Mr. Nysim? At least I did not warrant this.”

  “If you must know, I happened–”

  “I must not. Thank you,” I refused, managing to turn away with an acceptable amount of indifference. “I'd just as soon be spared the nature of your endeavors.”

  “You don't want to like me,” he said, halfway between a conclusion and an accusation.

  “You can hardly win my affections with a straggly old nest.”

  “I beg your pardon. It's a token of some consequence.”

  “It's a gimmick. And I would not have even seen your efforts, given the secrecy of the operation. Unspeakable efforts. Hardly worth it, don't you think? Going to the trouble? Please, don't scale the un-scalable on my account.”

  “I do everything the best that I might, minda. I had a list; if I am able, I will quest to attain every item on that given list. I said I would get what you asked.”

  I had no precise response at the ready for that.

  “I know,” he said; “One redeeming quality is hardly sufficient on the long road to a man's redemption.” And he stooped to seize the bauble weighing me down, the most natural motion for him. I did not even have to ask.

  Perhaps he was a gentleman after all.

  But many of the lords who kept slaves were gentlemen. That was, after all, where gentlemen had been bred and born.

  He was only noble as far as he had been trained.

  Still, I hesitated, unable to simply march forth like a queen who had expected no less. I would not go as far as to say that I was humbled, on all accounts, but I could appreciate a thing. I could be pleasantly surprised by it, and reduced to a momentary state of courtesy in turn.

  I swallowed, coming to terms with the situation.

  “Come on,” he prompted, and put the crude anchor under an arm, starting forward. “You have lullabies to sing.”