by Ken Brosky
“I do hope you’ll relax,” Sam said once Briar and I were both seated across from him inside the spacious limo. I had one hand in the pocket of my jeans, the tips of my fingers clutching the fountain pen.
“Please enjoy a canned beverage,” he added in his most cordial voice, waving a hand toward the small fridge that sat below the TV. On the TV, financial numbers from the stock market were rolling quickly across the screen. The numbers were green if the stock’s value was up, and red if the stock’s value was down. There were a lot of greens.
“We don’t need your hospitality,” I said.
There was the unmistakable sound of a soda can being opened. I turned and saw Briar bring a can of cola to his mouth.
He shrugged. “I was thirsty. But I’ll have you know I shan’t thank him for it!”
Sam smiled. It seemed forced, unnatural on his hardened face. He was wearing a gray suit coat—like always—and a dark red tie.
“So what do you want?” I asked, unwilling to sit back in the comfortable seat. Beside me, Briar sipped his soda, clutching the can with both paws.
Sam crossed his legs. Between us was a small circular table cluttered with documents. He sighed, tapping on the documents a few times. “Away with the pleasantries, then. I have a tip for you.”
“A tip?” I glanced at Briar. His long ears perked up, bumping into the ceiling of the limo and folding over.
Sam nodded. “There is a … property that I have an intense desire to own. A mansion located downtown.”
“I thought you had Edward’s mansion.”
“No, young lady.” He rolled his dark eyes. “I sold that mansion as soon as I removed the skeletons. That money is sitting in my bank where it belongs. I want this new mansion to live in. But as of right now, it’s officially an orphanage.”
“Oh, so you just want me to kick some orphans out on the street,” I grumbled. “Great. That sounds like a ton of fun, Mr. Grayle. When I’m done, are there any puppies you’d like me to kill?”
He sighed. “This particular mansion is the very reason I moved Grayle Incorporated to Milwaukee in the first place. I’ve had my eye on it for nearly two decades, but its owner is a fickle one. To put it bluntly, she’s a wrinkled old prune. A dangerous one at that.”
Briar smacked his lips together. “Rather rude of you not to offer us something to eat.”
Sam waved a hand to the little pullout wooden drawer under our seat. Briar reached in, grabbing a handful of expensive-looking individually wrapped crackers with the product name written in glossy silver letters. A pile of crumbs quickly gathered in his lap.
“As I was saying,” the Corrupted dwarf continued, “I’ve been spending a good portion of my free time digging into the personal life of the old hag who runs the orphanage. It would be political suicide to publicly go after such a well-intentioned institution, so I thought perhaps a little blackmail would work better.”
“Classic Corrupted,” Briar scoffed. A mouthful of crumbs exited his mouth in the process.
Sam ignored him. “But I found little, if anything, on the woman’s history. I realized then and there that I was searching for the wrong information.” He reached out and grabbed one of the pieces of paper sitting on the table. He handed it to me.
“The Juniper-Tree,” I read. The next words were familiar enough: “By the Brothers Grimm.”
“I take it you can check your copy and see if any of the characters in this particular story have already been … ah, eliminated, so to speak.” He saw the surprised look on my face and frowned. “Oh come now. Of course I know about the book with the names crossed out. Do you think me a fool?”
“No,” I grumbled. I stared at the piece of paper. It was just one page of the story, but it was familiar enough: a horrible stepmother kills her husband’s first son, and of course chaos ensues. “Who do you think it is from this story?”
“No doubt the stepmother,” Sam said. “From what I know about the head of the orphanage,” he checked another piece of paper on the table, “Ms. Gwyneth York bears a striking resemblance to the stepmothers of the Grimms’ fairy tales: stern, cold, authoritative.”
I smiled. “So you could potentially be one as well?”
Briar coughed out bits of cracker, chuckling.
Sam Grayle’s face darkened. “Laugh it up, furball.”
I looked down at the paper again. “But the stepmother dies at the end. She’s crushed by a stone.”
“Ah, not quite,” Sam said with a raised finger. “She disappears, but she doesn’t die. I know this for a fact because I happened upon her in the year 1845. Back then, I was still mining for gold anywhere I could. The stepmother, who’d taken the name Fran Merkel, was hiring miners to dig into a pit.”
“Curious,” Briar said, narrowing one eye. “Why a pit?”
Sam shook his head. “It was never specified. But she was clearly looking for something. And when she didn’t find it, she moved west and started the process all over again. I don’t believe she knew I was a Corrupted, but I could smell it on her well enough. She had the nasty tendency to let her miners die rather than spend the extra money reinforcing the mine walls.” He smiled. “It would have been admirable had I not found myself on the wrong end of it so many times.”
I tapped the piece of paper, thinking. “The dreams I’ve had … it was in a big house. A mansion. I heard kids. This has to be the same house in my dreams.”
“Good,” said the dwarf. He leaned back. “Then I can trust you to complete this task in a reasonable amount of time.”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. But first, I need to go up to Minneapolis.”
The limo stopped. I glanced out the window: we were parked outside my house. Sam was staring at me. Glaring at me.
“Why, exactly, do you need to go to Minneapolis?”
“Because there’s a crazy Corrupted fiddler making people dance until they pass out and then sucking weird blue smoke from them.”
The dwarf didn’t say anything at first, probably expecting me to add a “Just kidding!” Finally, a low growl escaped his throat. “Very well. But I expect this to be completed soon. That was our agreement, Alice.”
“I’ll live up to it,” I said. “You’ll get your mansion, and you’ll get it soon.”
Sam said nothing at first, then leaned over and reached into his pocket. Briar immediately clutched my arm, spilling the last few unopened packages of crackers to the floor. I pulled out the fountain pen, ready to strike.
Sam raised an eyebrow, then withdrew a twenty-dollar bill. He held it out.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The dwarf smiled. “Gas money.”
“Well!” Briar said once the limo had driven off. “We certainly could have done without that. Such a gloomy end to a perfect day.”
“I guess.” I walked up the driveway with him, spinning the fountain pen around in my palm. “Still, that twenty bucks could have come in handy. Me and my scruples.”
“Scruples?” the rabbit asked, his whiskers twitching.
“Yeah. It means ethics or principles. I didn’t want to take the money because I didn’t want to … well, I just didn’t want to take money from someone like him.”
“Ah. Perfectly understandable. Um …” He tapped me on the shoulder before I could open the front door. “If you could, just check first to see if the coast is clear? The soda has made me feel out of sorts, and I fear I might accidentally turn visible.”
I went inside first to make sure the coast was clear, then shooed Briar upstairs.
“Alice?” my mom called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah, Mom.” I hung my purse on the coat rack beside the front door. My mom had done us all the favor of getting our autumn jackets from the basement in preparation for the cool weather to come. They were hanging from big (my dad’s dark leather jacket) to small (my violet windbreaker).
“We’re eating dinner in one hour. Can you please clean your room?”
“What do
you mean?” I asked. Totally a teenager kind of question, I know! But sometimes I liked giving her a tough time.
“I mean pick up your bras and your undies,” Mom called out.
Even in the empty living room, my face reddened. “Geez, OK. Where’s Dad?”
“He’ll be home in half an hour.”
I went upstairs. Briar was already at the computer, checking his email. Yup, the rabbit had email now. And he had quite a few unread messages, too.
“Who are all those from?” I asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“Professors, historians and the like,” he answered. His paw waved me away. “If you don’t mind, I’m trying to get some work done.”
“You sound like my dad from when I was a kid,” I said, picking up all of the clothes littering my floor. I tossed them in the hamper in my closet. “Put on …”
“The Thinking playlist?” Briar suggested.
“Yes. Definitely. Let’s do some thinking.”
Pearl Jam played through the speakers. Next up would be Death Cab for Cutie and then Dessa and then some good old-fashioned Neil Young. It was the first mix Briar and I had compiled together. We’d titled it Thinking because we liked to believe it got our minds going. Music has that power, you know?
“We need to find more information about this orphanage,” Briar said. “We need to know what we’re up against.”
“We know already.” I tossed another armload of clothes into the hamper. “Mean stepmother who killed her husband’s kid. Totally evil. Probably killing the orphans or something else equally awful.” I groaned. “And then there’s the fiddler in Minneapolis who’s doing who-knows-what to his audiences.”
“Double dreams are incredibly rare,” said the rabbit, very casually updating his Facebook status to “Reading.” As if I wouldn’t notice.
I sat down on my bed, scrolling through the list of text messages. Three of them were from Trish, reminding me about my date. One was from Seth, reminding me about a monster movie playing on Channel 42 tonight.
“We will have to choose whom to confront first,” said Briar. “With any luck, your dream tonight will make things clearer. We …” He let out a cute little bunny groan. His paw went to his stomach. “Oh dear. I do believe that dastardly dwarf has poisoned me.”
“Are you OK?” I leaned forward, resting a hand on his furry forehead. “You don’t have a fever … I don’t think so, at least. I have no idea how to tell if you’re sick or not! What do I do? Should I call a vet?”
“Ung …” He groaned again, leaning back in my chair. “He’s poisoned me. I’m done for! This is how the story of Br’er Rabbit finally ends! A can of poisoned drink and now I’ll be pushing up daisies before dawn! I … I …”
His eyes crossed. His mouth opened. A loud burp escaped.
We both looked at each other. His ears raised a bit.
“I feel much better now.”
I shook my head. “You’re gassy. Geez, you had me worried, you big doofus. I’ll get you some milk after I eat. Until then, lie down.” The rabbit did was he was told. I smiled. “Good boy.”
Chapter 4
I woke the next morning drenched in sweat. Last night’s dream hadn’t been entirely clear, but I’d seen enough to have me more than a little frightened. It had been dark and I was outside of a bar called The Triangle. The street was wet and filled with big cracks and potholes, empty except for a few rusty old cars parked along the curb.
Then I saw it: a dark, hulking shadow that seemed at first to be painted to the brick wall of the old two-story building that housed The Triangle. But then the bar’s sign, hanging from a post above the door, began to swing back and forth. The shadow moved closer to me, no longer a shadow at all but something real, something three dimensional: a creature made of black smoke. It seemed to glide over the sidewalk, moving closer to me. It had eyes, and both eyes had that familiar golden Corrupted glow.
Arms appeared from the smoky cloud, then claws that reached down and clutched the concrete, tearing it like paper. It stalked closer. It made no sound and the street was silent. All I could hear was the hiss of tires on wet roads somewhere on the next block.
Above us, the streetlight flickered out. The smoke creature seemed to grow larger, moving closer toward me.
“He can’t see me, he can’t see me,” I kept whispering.
I floated backward, crossing to the other side of the street and under the comforting glow of the next streetlight. The creature crossed slowly, clawing at the ground and pulling up chunks of concrete in the process.
When it reached the curb, it stopped. The smoke seemed to lower, hugging the ground. I heard the sound of footsteps and slowly turned. The footsteps grew louder as a young woman wearing big white headphones turned the corner, heading straight for me. She looked ahead, humming some song to herself.
She walked closer. The black smoke warped into little finger-like curls, slinking along the curb, slipping along the concrete. As it passed over the grass of the boulevard, each blade wrinkled up, its color draining.
“I got to hide from you, baby,” the girl sang, walking closer. She had her hands in the pockets of her ripped jeans, her little mini-mp3 player hanging onto the collar of her tight yellow t-shirt.
The smoke slipped closer. I tried to follow it, but I had no control. I tried again, willing myself to run. Maybe I could reach her and somehow push her out of the way.
But it was too late. The smoke slipped up the girl’s legs, wrapping itself tightly around her torso and squeezing. Her eyes widened. She gasped, her headphones falling off her head. The smoke squeezed tighter, and when the girl opened her mouth a strange blue cloud escaped, rolling down her chin like drool and disappearing inside the smoke.
It pulled away, slinking along the curb. The girl blinked a few times, looked around, then picked up her headphones. I could hear the music playing through the speakers. The girl listened for a moment, then pulled them off again and tossed her mp3 player onto the ground before walking past me.
“I’m telling you, that was it,” I told Seth on the ride to school. Trish was already out sick on the very first Friday of the school year, so it was just us in his mom’s car.
“The Triangle,” Seth said thoughtfully, turning left at the next set of traffic lights. “What does the rabbit have to say about it?”
“Oh, he’s always ‘certain doom’ this and ‘certain doom’ that. He doesn’t know what it is.”
“Well, I can tell you what the lyrics are from.”
I turned to him. “Huh?”
“The lyrics that the girl was singing. They’re from a band called The Peasants. Good band. Hardly ever play live.” He shrugged. “Haven’t heard much from them lately. The music scene in Minneapolis seems like it just died this year.”
“Died …” I thought back to the girl. She hadn’t died. But after the little puff of smoke escaped her mouth, it had seemed as if the music had made her visibly annoyed.
“Yeah, I swear it’s like, a bunch of bands just stopped playing or something. It’s really weird. I always check out the concert venues up in Minneapolis and, like, nothing is selling out. Not even the big acts.”
“Hmmmm.” I glanced out the window, thinking. There had to be a connection to the fiddler. But why was the smoke creature stealing music? And why couldn’t anyone remember it happening?
During fencing, I got paired up with two more boys, both of whom refused to go easy on me.
“These boys are killers,” Mr. Whitmann announced, and the other boys growled ferociously. Even Chase, who sat in his wheelchair at the end of the row of folding chairs, made a bemused little growling noise.
I got closer this time, focusing on keeping myself inbounds as I danced back and forth on the mat. But once again, I found myself defeated at the end of class. Sweating. Angry. Frustrated.
“You want some free advice?”
I turned to Chase, who was wheeling himself around the soft floor mats. The space was tight, and for
a moment his right wheel got caught on the corner of one of the bench press machines. He sighed, shaking his head. One of the other boys—Scott—moved to help but Chase waved him away, rolling the chair back a few inches and then pushing the wheels forward again. He still had his hair styled like Elvis from the 50’s, combed to the side as if he was a troublemaker from a black-and-white movie. And he was wearing a simple red t-shirt and dark jeans, too—no baseball jersey.
“Fine,” I said. “Let me have it. But just so you know, I’m in a bad mood. And I’m holding a sword.”
He smiled. “You’re letting your stance open up whenever you attack. It’s making you more vulnerable to counter-attacks.”
My mind reeled. Was he right? Was I screwing up my stance?
“I have another piece of advice, too.”
“Fine,” I said hurriedly. “Out with it.”
He shook his head. “How about a deal? You help me with my English paper and I’ll help you with your fencing.”
“English?” I frowned. “Is this a trick? Last English class I had with you, you spent two weeks laughing at a crude joke from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
He looked down at his legs, then up at me with a “what are you talking about” kind of expression. “My baseball career is on hold, if you haven’t noticed. Rehab could take a year or more. I need to finish senior year with good grades so I have all my options open.”
“Oh. Well, I guess I could help you … what’s your paper on?”
“I picked a book,” he said, wheeling beside me as we made our way out of the gym. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Now I have to write about it.”