by Jeffrey Ford
“I suppose we need to appear unremarkable here as well,” he said.
“You’re catching on,” said Madi.
I lifted my glass and said, “To Fergus.”
The captain clinked glasses with me, but Madi waved a hand in front of his face and said, “I can’t think about that now. We never reported what happened to the poor fellow.”
“If you can’t manage the reality of your friend’s death, you might care to ponder the reality of the manticore,” I said.
“I’d prefer neither,” he replied. He removed the bird head knife from his belt and placed it on the table.
“So what are your intentions when the so-called Pale King Toad hops through the door?” I whispered.
“I believe I will directly slit his throat. It might be impossible to hunt down the specific member of the Jolly Host who murdered the children, and if I were to, I might be less likely to carry out the necessary punishment seeing as it’s probably some young lad with a head full of gullyfluff led astray. As for Malbaster, he’s ultimately in charge. Watching him choke on his own blood will go a long way to achieving satisfaction.”
“I can’t argue, the fellow seems a demon,” I said. “But you’ll kill him without a trial?”
“Catherine Thompson’s students, did they have a trial? And since when have the courts of white men sought justice for the African?”
I nodded. “Chances are, if caught you’ll be hanged. It doesn’t matter what a snake Malbaster is.”
“I’m counting on you to help me get away.”
I laughed quietly.
Ahab leaned forward and, trying to seem wholly unremarkable but failing miserably, said in rather too loud a voice, “Please don’t kill him till I question him about my son. If you wait, I’ll help you.”
“You two won’t mind if I sit this one out,” I said.
“Harrow, if only you were the champion you sometimes appear to be in your writing,” said Ahab.
“Do you not know the book and the world are separate voyages?” I asked.
15
We’d drained three-quarters of the cognac and had discussed everything from the weather to the charms of Arabella Dromen. Madi and I, after having listened to her story, were still not clear as to what part she played in our quest and why we were so willing to hand over a hundred pounds of opium to her—a hundred pounds we didn’t have. The amount now seemed ridiculous for one woman’s consumption, even over a lifetime.
“Trust me,” I said. “There’s more to her than meets the eye.”
“But what meets the eye is quite sufficient,” said the harpooneer.
I was about to agree when a slight commotion erupted at the entrance to the restaurant. I saw Ahab snap his head around and I did the same. There was a raised, friendly voice, speaking French (I think). It appeared the maître d’ and the chef were greeting someone who had just arrived for dinner. When those two parted, one in black formal attire and one in the white hat and apron of the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of the lauded guest.
Madi lifted his glass to cover his words and whispered “Pale King Toad” so that only Ahab and I could hear him.
Moving through the dim light of the place like some bloodless cave fish trolling the water for prey, Malbaster, or the man I assumed to be Malbaster, led by the maître d’, headed for a large table by the window. My God, his head was huge, like a small, hairless boulder resting upon his otherwise overly generous frame. He wore an exceedingly baggy indigo suit, which contrasted with his milk-white skin, so pale he glowed in the restaurant lighting. We all looked suddenly away as he took in his surroundings. I did catch sight of his small, dark eyes, a flat nose, and the thinnest lips one might have while still claiming to have lips. He wore a boutonniere in his lapel, a white rose.
Ahab toked his cigar to cover his words, saying, “Rather brave to travel alone. I don’t see any of the Host about, do you, Harrow?”
Feigning nonchalance, I shook my head.
Madi reached up to the table and wrapped his fingers around the handle of the Fang bieri. “I’ll be serving that big turnip in about a minute,” he said.
At that, Ahab rose and pushed his chair in beneath our table. He waited for the maître d’ to leave Malbaster’s side and then he walked directly to the table by the window and sat in the empty chair opposite our quarry. I was surprised Madi didn’t promptly leap to the attack, but it seemed he was going to give Ahab a few minutes to interrogate the rogue.
I watched the two figures in the dim light and could easily hear Ahab’s voice. The table they were at was only, at most, ten feet from us.
“Mr. Malbaster?” said the captain.
“Who’s asking,” said the pale one. The voice that came out of that outrage of a head was quieter than I’d imagined it might be. There was a silky smoothness to it, a mellifluous tone.
“Call me Ahab.”
“I’m about to eat, and I only dine alone. What is it you want?”
“I believe my son, Gabriel, is in your employ.”
“Gabriel? I do know a Gabriel. Whether he’s your son or not is another thing. I rather thought that given the bond the young man and I currently share that he is my son,” said Malbaster and snickered.
“You’re mistaken. My son will not be corrupted by a miscreant like yourself.”
“Oh, he won’t, eh?” Malbaster moved quick as a snake and drew a pistol from his coat pocket, held it out over the table, aimed directly at the captain’s face. “I’ll give you three seconds to vacate the premises before I blow a hole in your empty head.”
This all happened so quickly, and therefore I was useless. Numb with fright now that a gun was in the works, all I could do was stare at the scene that was about to get tragic for the prized focus of my articles. That’s when Madi stood up and in one fluid motion threw his odd knife. I saw it twirling head over tail for an instant. It hit Malbaster’s wrist directly and the gun went off, shooting a hole in the restaurant’s front window. Glass rained to the floor and Ahab leaped to his feet, the boarding ax in hand, and lunged across the table. Madi was there in a flash. Then there was screaming and the sound of shattering crystal and china as the other patrons fled for the exit. From out of the blue, there was an explosion of smoke, and a blur of motion, as I’d witnessed at a magic show of Paschal Randolph. I stood to run but was paralyzed by fear and confusion.
A moment later the smoke cleared, and I saw the head of Ahab’s ax buried in the back of the wooden chair where Malbaster had been sitting. Madi was on the floor. I looked up and saw the indigo-clad rogue lumbering away along the corridor beyond the half-smashed-out front window of Amberine.
“How?” cried Ahab.
I ran to Madi and helped him up. “He’s outside,” I yelled and pointed. We all caught sight of him before he disappeared past the front of the restaurant. Ahab lifted the chair he’d been sitting in and flung it through what remained of the window glass. He leaped through the new opening and landed outside, the tip of his peg leg sliding along the floor. Catching himself at the last, he regained his balance and was off, running as best he could with that distinctive alternating tap.
Madi and I had no choice but to follow him. We most certainly didn’t want to be around to pick up the bill for the destruction. We leaped out into the corridor and took off after Ahab and Malbaster. Whereas the captain was slowed by his false limb, the king of the Jolly Host was slowed by his girth. The harpooneer was the most agile of all of us and he sped ahead, gaining on our prey. I was certain Madi wouldn’t hesitate to kill him now. Behind me, at the opposite end of the vast hallway, I heard a police whistle and that distinctive tramping of shoe leather. I’d never before been in such a predicament, and never run as fast.
Up ahead I saw Malbaster duck out an exit of the Palace onto Sixth Avenue. Madi was close behind and followed by Ahab. In the few moments it took me to reach the doors, Madi was down on the sidewalk surrounded by a swarm of the Jolly Host. He was being pummeled and kicked. He
no longer had his weapon after having tossed it to save Ahab’s life. For his part, the captain was engaged in his own struggle with another half dozen of the youngsters. As they hung from his arms and back and kicked at him, he pulled the pistol from his waist and aimed at the Pale King Toad, who was, out of breath, moving toward the edge of the sidewalk where a coach-and-four had just pulled up.
The gun went off and missed its mark. Malbaster scrabbled into the conveyance. Madi and Ahab were dragged to the still-open door of the coach and thrown in. Some of the Host crowded in as well and the others leaped up onto the back of the thing. Two jumped onto the two horses, and the rest hung on and were carried straight out like flags in a strong wind as the overloaded boat of the streets quickly achieved getaway speed and disappeared into the night.
All this happened so quickly, I was stunned. My instinct of self-preservation kicked in, and I ran out into traffic, where I dodged an omnibus and a hansom cab and skirted a crowd on the opposite sidewalk. My greatest worry now was being caught by the police. I ducked down the first alley I could find and kept running. I know I stated earlier that alleys were to be avoided, but this wasn’t the Five Points, and I didn’t want to spend any time in the Tombs.
I headed south, keeping to the shadows and alleyways. At Twenty-Fifth Street, I cut over to Fifth Avenue and passed the burnt-out shell of the remains of the House of Refuge. Somewhere around there, I caught a hansom cab to take me down to James Street. I was hoping that my hailing the conveyance at that point was far enough away from the Palace that the police wouldn’t bother interrogating cab drivers from that area who’d been working that night.
By the time I got to my place, I was exhausted. Misha informed me that a strange white-headed scarecrow of a fellow had been pacing up and down outside the house for an hour or two earlier that evening. She had the pepperbox percussion pistol in her apron pocket. I was ill at ease, worrying what would become of Madi and the captain at the hands of Malbaster. I didn’t want to think they were as good as finished, but what were the alternatives? I collapsed into the chair in my office and Misha poured me a large, medicinal dose of gin.
She asked me what had happened, but I was in no mood to relate the misadventure. “Suffice it to say,” I told her, “things are looking grim for my compatriots.” After another two drinks and a long time staring into the fireplace where Misha had built one of her singular blazes, I fell into a nervous sleep wherein I felt often on the verge of waking but never did. In my dreams, or what I took to be dreams, I heard a purring noise outside the window beyond my desk, a constant, steady pulse of a sound like the whirring life of one of the machines on display in the Crystal Palace. In the morning, I woke just as the manticore pounced and the daylight streaming in disintegrated the creature before it could devour me. Still, I screamed.
For the next two days, I holed up in my house, occasionally peering out the windows to see if Bartleby or the Host were anywhere in sight. The streets were empty of threats. I didn’t write and I didn’t prepare for attack. Instead I mused upon the entire Ahab saga and the part I’d played in it. From my vantage point, I had a hard time believing the whole thing had actually happened. The most curious thing to me was Malbaster’s escape at the restaurant. There definitely seemed to be some aspect of legerdemain involved—the smoke, the warping of the very atmosphere, his instantaneous disappearance from his chair and subsequent appearance, fleeing away down the corridor.
More than one person used the word magic to describe Malbaster’s attributes, and that now appeared to be accurate. But was he using stage tricks or did he manipulate some supernatural energy? As that thought crossed my mind, I recalled Ahab speaking about “energy without conscience.” It wasn’t just the Pale King Toad’s getaway, though. It seemed outlandish, in retrospect, that Madi and the captain were so easily drawn into that coach, as if they’d been sucked in by a strong invisible ocean current. At the time it happened, my mind hadn’t questioned it, but upon solitary recollection it, too, appeared to have been an act of magic.
On the afternoon of my second day in hiding, I attempted to write a description of Malbaster. My work habits die hard, and even though I feared for the fate of my associates, I knew that I’d need an article for Garrick in the next day or so. No matter how many times I tried to describe our nemesis—even just his head, that grand, pale potato of a thing—I lost all confidence in my abilities with the pen. This was a circumstance I hadn’t experienced since the very earliest days of my writing career, when I spent too much time thinking and thus too little time making deadlines. Eventually, I turned away from my desk in frustration and sought the companionship of the gin bottle.
Late in the afternoon, Misha found me staggering around the house, three sheets to the wind. She made me eat something and go to bed. I told her I couldn’t sleep as Malbaster was sending strange creatures and demons to wake me up. She pushed my head back down on the pillow, and the last thing I saw before succumbing to Morpheus was her pulling her gun from her apron and nodding.
Early the next morning, jittery and somewhat queasy, having heard nothing from Ahab or Madi, I dressed and went out to the Gorgon’s Mirror to seek advice or solace or something from Garrick. I carried that pointless fid in my writing satchel as a gesture toward self-protection and constantly looked over my shoulder for fear that the manticore or Bartleby was about to pounce at any moment. At one point, as I passed the corner of Fulton Street, I suddenly heard a storm of footsteps behind me. My heart went into my mouth, and I gave an involuntary groan as I leaped to the side. A pack of schoolchildren went rushing by, giggling and yelling.
Garrick wasn’t exactly an angel of mercy. He shook his head in disbelief at the story I told him. “So, Ahab is gone,” he said. “A shame, the public loved him, his adventures, and your inventions. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t write about him anymore. Make it up out of whole cloth. That’s your specialty,” he said and puffed on his big cigar. “If Ahab is finished, he won’t mind you appropriating his name and bits and pieces of his existence. Same with the other fellow, the black.”
“It doesn’t feel quite right,” I said.
“All these years, Harrow. All these articles, and now you’re getting sensitive on me? Buck up, man. Simply think of it as back to your life as usual. Back to your cushy life as usual. Few earn as much money as you do for simply making stuff up. Let’s stop all the crying in your beer now.”
I remained quiet and nodded. Jack Coffee, the magazine’s head illustrator, entered Garrick’s office then to show him work for the next issue and when my boss turned his attention to the sketches, I slipped out the door and left the Mirror. Without Ahab and Madi along, the mystery of Malbaster, and the promise of rescuing Gabriel, I was lost. I didn’t want to go home, as sitting around with no desire to write and no assignment to avoid or contemplate seemed worse than exposing myself to the vagaries of the Jolly Host on the street. I strode along the waterfront, watching the stevedores at their work, hearing the hubbub of transactions, greetings and orders, smelling the pungent low tide stink of the East River.
I walked all the way to the Battery, contemplating my options, hoping to pass some scene that might dredge up the lint of story making. As far as trying to regain our trio, I realized I was only one man against Malbaster’s pervasive evil. We were outmatched as a threesome and by myself I had no chance of rescuing my friends. That is, if they were still alive. Besides, I thought, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Somewhere around Lent’s Basin, on the way back home, I had just the merest glimmer of a notion to do a story about a modern-day witch. Six blocks later, though, it came to me that the idea was but a plate of cold turds. I’d have gladly battled Bartleby for an idea. I looked up and around but saw no threat, just the cold, insular city of the Manhattoes.
16
My fear that they would attack me in my home passed in a few days, and it slowly dawned on me that I was out of the game. The brawling sagas of Ahab and Madi ha
d passed like a thunderstorm and left me stranded in silence. I fell back into a daily routine of walking, hoping the repetitive motion would dissolve the last of that drama’s hold on me. A deadline loomed and doubt loomed larger.
Finally, late one rainy afternoon, I sat down and took up my pen. I wrote into the night, knowing Mavis would be on my steps at daybreak. I resolved to get something done before she arrived. After a hundred false starts, I latched on to the next glimmering shard of nonsense and spun it out all the way to the finish line.
I titled the piece “Death of a Ghost” and referred to Ahab by name as I had done in all the other articles about him. In this one, he was kidnapped by the Jolly Host and held captive, forced to smoke opium in an attempt by Malbaster to create another Bartleby, a mindless assassin. I could see it. The article trafficked in the agonies of Ahab, tied to a chair, in a daze, head wreathed in a miasma of yellow smoke from which the drowned crew of the Pequod materialized and vanished, taunting their erstwhile captain.
I took “artistic liberties” and allowed my imagination to run wild. We had papers to sell, after all. It was clear as day in my mind’s eye: Two women and a man see to it that the captain smokes the tar on a regular schedule so that he is constantly wrapped in its spell. They put a mask over his head and blow clouds of the smoke into his lungs. Within days, he’s a wasted shell, his utterances less than blather. There’s no longer any need to tie him to the chair. He notices one day the rope is gone. Across the room, sitting on the dresser are his boarding ax and hat. He sees them there but can’t get up to get them.
Little does Ahab know, but his son, Gabriel, is one of the people attending to him, feeding him opium and thin gruel in unequal measures. The boy and his father become bitter enemies. One evening, the captain’s handlers, lost in their own opium-induced fog, neglect to dose the captain. In a moment of clarity, he rises from the chair, crosses the room, and picks up the boarding ax.