Ahab's Return

by Jeffrey Ford

  We plunged into the dark of the woods, toward the thicket where we’d planned the assault. We went through there without slowing. As we ran, I became aware of two things: One was that Ahab, wasted and forlorn, was no more than a few yards behind me. The other was that it was snowing. This wasn’t the flake here and there I’d noted earlier on Mavis’s coat, but a full-fledged snowfall. I ran headlong into it, my fear blazing.

  I could hear the Host as clearly as if they stood next to me. When I turned, I saw their torches sweeping through the woods behind us. We made it to Madi’s cave, and he waved us ahead toward the trail lined with boulders that led uphill. Arabella and the prisoner, Gabriel, stayed behind with him. Ahab’s bad leg slowed him on the hill, and I feared we’d be overtaken by our pursuers. He looked at us and yelled, “Go on. They’ll get us all if you wait for me.”

  Despite my fear, I wasn’t about to let go of him. I legged it back down the hill and grabbed him by the arm. Mavis did the same, and as the two of us sped the captain to the crest, the Jolly Host beginning the ascent behind us, she said, “Twenty dollars more.”

  “Fifteen,” I said as we stopped at the top of the hill to catch an instant’s breath.

  “Agreed,” she said. We resumed our hold on the captain and moved across the meadow. I heard a loud noise behind us, coming closer. Just as it was upon us, I realized it was Madi’s horse. Arabella was in the saddle and Ahab’s boy was strapped like a bedroll across its haunches. They flew by us, and the freshly fallen snow swirled behind them.

  “As long as we can reach the tree line,” said Mavis, “we can lose them in the woods.”

  The snow was coming down even harder now, limiting vision, and making the ground slippery. Ahab was huffing and puffing like a steam engine about to explode, yet we held on tight and kept him upright. As soon as we passed into the greater darkness of the wood, Mavis directed us toward a small thicket of trees that stood close amid the larger forest.

  “Get down,” she said. “We’ve only a second.”

  I dropped to the ground and pulled Ahab down with me. We all huddled with the tops of our heads touching, hoping to hide our faces from the light of the torches. Luckily, the snowstorm had only increased in its ferocity.

  “Shhh,” said Madi, and only then did I realize he was somehow among us.

  The woods filled with movement all around. Flickering torches erratically revealed what the shadows hid. We lay in tense silence; I was nearly sick with fear. The sound of the boys’ voices waxed and waned. I expected any second to be shot in the ass or stabbed in the back of the neck with an ice pick. But either they were too high on the smoke or we were too well concealed for them to notice us through the driving snow. In minutes they were gone, heading down toward the river, laughing and grunting and calling to one another like a pack of wild dogs.

  Mavis whispered, “I remember the way to the coach,” and we were off, running yet again. Now Madi held Ahab by the left arm as I had him by the right. Like the Host, we also were a single creature—yet we were awkward, slow, and dim. I’m sure the snow had helped us to escape certain death, but now the white fall was coalescing in dunes upon the ground. The gale picked up the fine frozen dust off the tops of these white hills and slapped us in the face with it.

  Madi yelled over the wind, “Watch her footprints.”

  It was getting increasingly difficult to see Mavis through the storm. At moments, she was invisible. I turned my gaze to the ground and squinted, following one print after another. With neither a lantern nor a torch, we made our way back over treacherous ground toward the enormous tulip tree and the coach. Madi told us that Arabella was taking Gabriel to her home and that we were to meet her there if we got away. At this news, Ahab straightened, and I thought I saw a spark rekindle in his sad, old eyes. The only one of us near capable of piloting the conveyance was Mavis.

  “An extra five if you get us back to Miss Dromen’s alive,” I said as we relieved the horses of their feed bags.

  “Ten,” she said as she handed her bag to me and climbed up into the driver’s seat. She blew into her cupped hands and lifted the reins. I got into the cab, which was already crowded with Ahab and Madi. No sooner was I huddled in the corner than the coach jolted forward and sped away through the trees. We were going treacherously fast, and the wheels in the snow slid side to side behind the horses. I was going to stick my head out the cab door and yell up to her to slow the pace, but as I reached for the handle, I glanced out the window and saw the light of torches emerging from the woods.

  I closed my eyes and turned my face to the wall like a child as we were buffeted by the wind and the rutted path. Eventually, I felt the coach decrease its speed, and I opened my eyes. Looking out, the torches of the Host were nowhere to be seen. I looked to my companions, neither of whom seemed in the least perturbed at our narrow escape from death. Ahab was just starting to doze off, and Madi was staring out the window, deep in thought. Before Ahab fell into the arms of Morpheus, I had a few questions I wanted answered.

  “Captain, did you see Malbaster while you were a prisoner at the caves?”

  Ahab came suddenly back to full consciousness. “Aye. He oversaw their treatment of me. Gave them orders on how to use the poppy to smoke my mind to ash. He came and went between the city and the cave. It’s one of his hideouts.”

  “Did you make contact with your son?” asked Madi.

  “I was able to tell the boy I was his father. He laughed at me at first. But I could tell him details about his mother only he and I would know. Her favorite flower, the black-eyed Susan; how her father died, at sea aboard the ill-fated Cormorant, a ship that was discovered with all hands missing, not a hint of a struggle, not a drop of blood left behind. I think my revelations terrified him. He’d pledged his allegiance to Malbaster.”

  “Did it give him pause to doubt the Pale King Toad?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but at one point I thought he whispered something to me about escape. It may have been wishful thinking on my part, though. I was somewhere up beyond the crow’s nest when I thought I heard it.”

  “And what of Malbaster?” said Madi.

  The captain looked weary unto death. “Malbaster’s head is like a prop. It’s too large to be believed. And the placement of his face within that pale rock seems all crowded into the very center. The rest of his large form, at times, wavers tenuously between being and not. If I hadn’t felt the back of his hand strike me across the cheek thirty-seven times, I’d have said he was a puppet or a person in disguise. He has a very refined manner, polite in speech.”

  “The curtesy of cruelty,” said Madi.

  “Aye. The thing that made me lose pieces of my mind wasn’t the smoke, it was the lectures, his insane rationale for intimidating and murdering people. An inane corkscrew philosophy that pierced the heart of a world without humanity. At first it was frightening and then it was deadening. What a harangue. Spit flying, finger in the air. And in the end, it all could be traced back to the Puritans and the Great Awakening. Daft, I tell ya. Moby Dick was never so fierce.”

  We rode on for a quarter of an hour in silence before I asked him, “Was there magic?”

  But both he and Madi were asleep.

  21

  Arabella beat us back to her place and had the boy tied into a bed by the time we arrived. She was out on the sidewalk, waiting to direct Mavis to bring the coach down the alley next to the house. I woke my traveling companions, and we disembarked beneath an old oak tree that blocked the moonlight. The snow had stopped falling, and the white ground was bright and slippery.

  I was impressed with Miss Dromen. I’d assumed her an aesthete—the blue room, the opium. Not necessarily a phony, but something within hailing distance: a transcendentalist. But when she flew past in the dark, through the snow, with the boy strapped on the back of Madi’s horse, my perception of her was altered forever. I’d been so wrong.

  Madi and I helped Ahab into the parlor and set him down on a yellow sat
in couch. He was asleep or passed out before his head touched the armrest. Arabella looked down at his disheveled form wrapped in that greasy borrowed coat, and said, “He smells like the ocean’s own turd.” There was no alarm in her voice. It was a calm statement of fact. Madi laughed, and Arabella asked if we’d like a touch of libation. I was hoping for more than a touch.

  I looked around the room: Arabella, Madi, Mavis, and I quaffed our tumblers of whiskey, Mavis alternating her swigs with deep pulls on a cigarette. The captain, out cold on the couch, did not imbibe. Arabella asked, “How long do you think it will be before they find us?”

  I shook my head and Madi shrugged.

  “A week if you’re lucky,” said Mavis.

  “We’ll have a few days to get Gabriel clear of the opium’s hold, and then we’ll have to be able to move him,” said Arabella. “We need to be ready to leave in an instant.”

  Not a thought I wanted to dwell upon at the moment.

  Madi said, “This isn’t getting me any closer to finding Malbaster.”

  “Why chase him?” said Arabella. “He’s coming to us.”

  “With the captain back in form, we’ll be more of a force to be reckoned with,” I said.

  “When he’s not playing nursemaid to his errant son,” said Madi. “The boy’s an albatross around his neck and now we have him around ours.”

  There was no disputing what he’d said. Arabella and I nodded. Mavis closed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.

  “I enjoy your company, Miss Dromen, but I’ll be moving on tomorrow,” said Madi.

  “Wait,” she said. “please hear me out. We’re more effective when we work together. Our strength is in our number and in our ingenuity, which is unencumbered by smoke. We are set against an infernal machine powered by magic and hate, and at its center is Malbaster. It’s not going to stop until we eliminate him. We’ve accomplished the first part of our mission, we’ve rescued Ahab and extricated his son. Now we must kill the Pale King Toad and thus destroy his evil engine.”

  “But I can’t sit and wait for him to find us here,” said Madi. “He may merely send the Host to overrun the place some night with orders to tear us apart.”

  “We need to draw him out, and if possible, draw him away from here. Do you gentlemen remember what I told you about Astor’s store of opium somewhere on the Hudson side of Manhattan? I suggest that you two find it.”

  “Say we find it,” I said. “Then what?”

  “Then set fire to it and wait in ambush till Malbaster makes an appearance,” she said.

  Madi nodded. “That’s as sound an idea as I’ve heard or had myself.”

  “How do we go about discovering the hoard?” I asked.

  “I know it’s on the West Side, somewhere near or along the river. You need to go there and wait surreptitiously for the Jolly Host to show itself—some act of malfeasance, bigotry, vandalism that appears in the local newspaper or that you catch wind of in a conversation. Then follow them. Eventually they’ll be drawn to the source of their addiction. I doubt Malbaster puts himself in danger by frequenting the storehouse of tar. But he’ll come out if his control is threatened.” Arabella sat back in her chair and shut her eyes.

  In moments, she was asleep and breathing steadily, her lovely chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. So taken was I by the sight of Arabella at rest, I hadn’t noticed that Mavis had gotten up and crossed the room. She tapped me on the shoulder, which broke my trance. “Harrow,” she said. “I’ll meet you here tomorrow night. I’ll want my money and by then you’ll need to have an article finished for Garrick.”

  “Certainly. How much do I owe you?” I asked, not looking away from the sleeping beauty.

  “Seventy dollars.”

  “Good Lord, you don’t come cheap,” I said.

  “You never think about that when I’m saving your life, do you?”

  I laughed as did she. “Very well, seventy it is. I’ll get Garrick to reimburse me somehow, I swear.”

  When she’d left the room, Madi said, “She’s fierce.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone in this life whose word I trust more. I do business with her regularly, but she always keeps her distance.”

  “No doubt she fears your penchant for the irrational,” he said.

  “Me? George Harrow, irrational? I’m the worst kind of realist.”

  “I mean your articles.”

  “Oh, well, yes. Madi, you’ll be staying here till morning, will you not?”

  “Yes,” he said. Now his eyes were closed and he’d clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in the deep velour chair.

  “Good. I’ve got to return to my place and check to see that Misha is all right and to grab my writing equipment. I’m taking your horse. I’ll be back by late morning.”

  “Very well,” he said, but never truly woke.

  I felt as though I were in a personal grudge match with gravity as I tried to pull myself out of the seat. The night’s hugger-mugger had wasted me. I did sleep some part of each journey in the coach, which was all that made it possible for me to tear myself from the comfort of Arabella Dromen’s parlor.

  Out on the street, my satchel over my shoulder and collar pulled up high, the snow was nearly to my thighs. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I guessed it to be perhaps 3 or 4 a.m. The icy chill of the night burned my nose and throat with each inhalation. From the front porch, I groped my way down the steps and headed for that side of the house where the coach was stored. I guessed I’d find a stable there, and eventually I did. Madi’s horse wasn’t budging after the flat-out run from the utmost north of Manhattan. I chose one of the heavier coach horses, a big white brute, and saddled him up by the light of a candle I found mounted on the wall near his stall.

  The poor beast was as interested in a jaunt as his brethren, but I managed to coax him out onto the street, and we waddled along slow as molasses. I didn’t require he trot. All I asked was that he keep me up out of the snow. I had learned how to ride when I was a boy on my uncle’s farm in New Jersey, but it had been quite a while and so the attenuated pace was perfect for me. I’d seen enough excitement that night to last me till Judgment Day.

  My only worry was being spotted by some member of the Jolly Host. Nothing moved in the streets and it was far too early for pedestrians. Even the riffraff stayed hidden inside wherever they could find shelter from the weather. I stuck to the sidewalk, but once we hit Chatham Street I took the mount into the middle of the road for easier passage. As we went along, the cold wind slapped me about, and I was good and awake after a few minutes. I began to consider what I might write for Garrick once I reached home.

  As vehemently as the boss had said, “No more Ahab,” I wondered how anyone could forgo a tale of skullduggery in and about the Indian Caves. I’d have bet fellow citizens would love to hear of that remote spot on the great Manhattoes, and there would be action galore. Granted, Ahab would be mucking around in the middle of the tale, bringing his unique brand of mawkishness, but at least he wasn’t tied to a chair. I decided I would take the chance and slip Garrick one more final adventure with the lunatic Nantucketer.

  It took me twenty minutes to reach my house. I tied up the horse in the backyard toolshed and let myself into the kitchen by the back door. The place was eerily still. I felt something was wrong, and when I passed from the kitchen into the hallway leading to my study, I encountered a frigid current of air coming from the front door, which I could now see was open. Reaching into my satchel for the fid, I clutched it tightly. As I passed the entrance to my office, the open front door, still three yards off, slammed shut of its own volition. I was startled into stillness. From within the room to my right came a vibrating voice—“Harrow, come and sit.”

  The thought of who might be there in the dark left me slack. Still, I obeyed and entered the room. There, in my desk chair, sat a man’s body topped by a pale planet of a head. On his small scrunched face was an insipid smile, and his eyes squint
ed as if he was straining to see me. I thought of running, but Malbaster’s magic drained me of energy. Or was that my own fear?

  He was dressed in pin-striped trousers and a morning coat. His hand leaned on the silver dog head of a black walking stick. With the stick, he pointed to the chair across the room where Ishmael had sat during our last meeting. Although the dark engulfed us, Malbaster’s head gave off an aura of luminescence by which I could see his tiny eyes shifting their gaze. A subtle bubbling noise came from deep within him, and we sat and listened to that subterranean turmoil for whole minutes.

  Suddenly smoke issued from the Pale King Toad’s mouth and nostrils, thin streams squeezed out from the corners of his eyes, billowed from his ears, and the glowing clouds filled the room. I was dazed by the time he next addressed me.

  “George Harrow, you’re a magician with words. I read your articles assiduously. Very entertaining.” His voice was somehow resonant, as if he were calling to me from an empty, echoing cavern. “You scatter gapeseed like the Lord does blessings.”

  I wanted him to leave. As bleary and confused as I was, I kept my resolve to say nothing. “I’m afraid you and I have competing realities,” he said. “And you and your coven of tramps—a madwoman, a murderous girl, a buffoonish sea captain, and—tsk, tsk, Harrow—a Negro. You’ve drastically lowered my estimation of you. You and these ruffians. I’m going to be forced to take measures.” He stopped speaking and seemed to be waiting for me to respond.

  I stayed quiet.

  “You have stolen one of my young men. The fellow Gabriel. That requires retribution. Of course, eventually I’m going to kill you all. But for now, we’ll start with this.” He snapped his fingers.

  I looked up, waiting to see what might happen next, when I heard in the distance the squeal of Misha’s door hinges. A smile grew on his face as I heard her footsteps in the hallway. She was treading slowly. My mind was groping for a plan of action, something to say that might give us even a fleeting window of escape.