“Hot rat tails! Hot rat tails!” calls a young man, using a pair of tongs to nudge the sizzling appendages around in a drum of heated oil. Hungry children cluster around him, angling for a pity scrap. Swanny thinks back on her breakfast of smoked boar chorizo with mingled gratitude and astonishment. What a tolerable life Sharkey’s made, here in this abyss.
Swanny’s been to the nearest saucemart just once before, on an evening’s investigation, right when it was closing. It bustles now, the fabled distillery a science experiment of funnels and fractionating columns and reflux towers dripping and gurgling behind the dispensary window of bulletproof glass. There, another shopgirl frantically computes change, more pressed for time with her equations than Swanny ever hopes to be. The establishment, housed in a former pawnshop, bears no sign; it doesn’t need one. The line of customers is out the door. Swanny counts the razor blades in her purse and wonders if they’ll be enough. She understands enough about the local economy to know that prices here rise simultaneous with demand. Two cocottes in cling-wrap dresses depart with their newly purchased jars, and the line shuffles forward an inch.
“Let’s go.” Sharkey’s hand is on her elbow before she notices him arrive, his callused fingers a vise. He isn’t wearing his hat, not even his zoot jacket; his undershirt is still stained with poison, the rust-hued blood of whatever monster he’s been invigorating down in that laboratory of drugs.
“Howie, honestly, it’s the least I can do. I don’t approve of your drinking this concoction, but we all have our vices, I suppose.”
“I need you back in the shop.” Sharkey’s keeping his voice low, but other people in the line are glancing back at them, murmuring amongst themselves. A pair of sparkers cut out, headed for the street without completing their purchase. A lady bouncer follows, moving fast.
“I’ll be waited upon momentarily—look, the line’s shorter already. And back home, Keelhaul’s attending to the register, I didn’t close up.”
“I need you. Now.”
“Please loosen your grip, you’re actually hurting—ow!”
Back out on the sidewalk: “I refuse to be manhandled like this, in a public place, no less. You owe me an apology.” Saucemart patrons are spilling out of the storefront behind them in droves, empty-handed.
“I don’t owe you zilch. Shut up and walk.”
Swanny gapes at Sharkey, who doesn’t return her gaze; his jaw muscles clench and unclench as he continues to steer her down the street. A path clears for them effortlessly through the foot traffic. “What’s come over you? I may be your employee, but that gives you no right to speak to me that way.”
“Don’t leave your post. I’m warning you once.”
“I was running an errand for you.” Swanny’s eyes smart with unspilled tears; his words sting like a scrawled C– at the top of an exam. “Keelhaul’s right, you are in an atrocious mood.”
They’re turning off of Harbinger Place, back onto Scullery Lane, when behind them the saucemart explodes. Swanny doesn’t even see the yellow dragon’s shadow before the fire pours down; the reptile is hocking death spitballs from way up in the stratosphere, but this one hits a bull’s-eye nevertheless. Swanny hears screams mixed with thundercrack alcoholic detonations; passersby stampede from the scene. Sharkey doesn’t slow down, look back, or drop her arm.
“My God!” Swanny flashes back to her last close call at the library. “I was just inside!”
“It’s all right,” Sharkey says. He pulls her closer, his voice lowering to a tender growl: “I got ya.”
They continue down the block, arm in arm, toward the shop. Sharkey’s a stump of a man, a living gargoyle, yet his body gives off such heat: the warmth of a hearthstone, the warmth of home. Swanny’s mind overloads, her nervous system jolts and tingles with competing impulses. She finally pulls away, and Sharkey grudgingly relinquishes her. By the time they reach the stoop she’s processed the unthinkable into words.
“It’s true,” she says. “You know where the fires will be.”
Sharkey, halfway up the steps already, turns back. He looks at her with tired eyes.
“Who told you that?”
“I’m not a fool.”
“So what if I do?”
“You…Keelhaul, he said that you…you asked him to go…”
“Keelhaul hasn’t been doing his job.”
“What job is that, precisely?”
“Running errands. Today’s a case in point. I give him an order, he ignores it.” The rest is a boyish, embarrassed mumble: “Anyhow, he was bothering me.”
“I thought—” But what did Swanny think, just moments ago? She must have amnesia, like someone in a plot twist. She struggles to recall the bare bones: “I thought you were…kind.”
“I saved you, didn’t I?”
Yes, Sharkey cares for her, protects her, provides for her in the manner to which she has become accustomed. And no one else left in this world does. She chooses her phrasing with care: “Be that as it may, you mustn’t—you mustn’t take out your emotions on the help. However passionate you may feel.”
Sharkey spits, as if daring her to scold him. As if asking her to. But Swanny just stares at him, struck by his strangeness as if for the first time: a knot of human gristle and striving, malformed and stubbly, a parasitic twin who struck out to make it on his own. Then something collapses in his expression, and she recognizes him again: his vulnerability, his resignation. His loneliness. She’s not the only one in this conversation who’s down to her last friend. “This place can really take it out of you.”
“Howie?” Her voice is soft.
“Yeah?”
“How do you know? About the fires?”
“You don’t chew, so you wouldn’t understand.” He scratches at his five-o’clock shadow with rough knuckles. “The chaw, if you do enough—it brings you very close to death. Works different for different people, but I used to see ghosts from the past. Used to. Maybe it’s ’cause I’ve been chewing longer than anybody else, but it got flipped somehow. Now whenever I see something, it’s coming from the future.”
* * *
Dear Diary,
The nightmares are getting worse—the nightmares and the memories, which are really one and the same, because what is the past but a recurrent dream, steeped in terrible meaning, which one is powerless in waking life to alter in the slightest? Each night I journey to Wonland County upon the wings of screeching bats flushed by fires from the rafters of Torchtown into the inky sky. I haunt the chambers of my childhood home like the ghost I am soon to become, write my name in the mantelpiece dust, rap out coded messages upon the table in the Great Hall, though no one is there to hear. Then, come dawn, I return to Torchtown with the foolish birds, the pigeons who light upon the ledges of this place only to be snared in the hungry nets of children, destined to roast half-plucked over the garbage can fires.
This is not the life I was reared for, and so my travails here have constituted another education of sorts, though lessons learned after a sentence of death like mine lie hopelessly in the shadow of other appalling facts. Tomorrow I will be two weeks in this place—two weeks closer to the day when, like that rabbit from my past, I will lie split and lifeless upon a slab, a ripened pod of teeth, with no room left inside me for an immortal soul. Yet in these two weeks I’ve come no closer to discovering the identity of Mother’s killers, much less to taking my revenge. What will I say for myself when I face her in the afterlife, in the cold light of some metaphysical solarium, my sins inscribed upon a chalkboard from which they’ll never be erased?
From my interviews with the natives here, I have thus far gleaned only that a single, shadowy figure authors these raids, his henchmen sneaking beneath the city like so many rats. But despite the status my work in the Chaw Shop affords me, I have yet to meet a single soul who will offer so much as a clue to locating this man (or woman) in the flesh. I am beginning to suspect a fearful conspiracy, a consortium of government agents, perhaps, subcontracting th
eir malevolence to the untorched. How else to explain such secrecy in a place where nothing is forbidden and everything has its price?
Dear Howie is the least capable detective, I am afraid. He sequesters himself from the others here, plagued by the demons of his unparalleled talent and most sinister knowledge. He walks among these natives as an immortal, cursed and shunned, though through no real fault of his own. Who could blame him for preferring to speak of the world Outside, my world, the realm of books and art and connoisseurship, that fallen empire forever nostalgic for itself? But although I find his fascination with it, and by extension, with me, comforting in the extreme—a lone oasis of familiarity in the wasteland of the now—it is less than useful to me on my current quest.
More forthcoming, oddly, are Grub and Morsel, the elfin twins who heat the bathwater for my morning ablutions and beg at the Chaw Shop kitchen window for cold cuts and sugar cubes. I am, I must confess, susceptible to their charms. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they bring out the maternal in me, but they do make me sorry that I’ve never had a pet. Through their cheerful nonsense and silly songs, I am coming to understand the logic of this place, the way it looks to those who since birth have lived under its most peculiar laws. I feel it is not pejorative to refer to them as “kindlings,” since that’s what Howie calls them, and he was presumably one himself, in the olden days.
In Torchtown, the etiquette of fire is an essential fact of life: simply put, one must either help out, or walk on by. Only the youngest children are excused from the social prohibition against gawking at a burning building. One sees them, night after night, clustered around old dormitories or storefront sanctuaries, sucking their thumbs or clutching their raggedy blankets, hypnotized by the playful liquid gold of destruction, even while the inhabitants scream and fling their possessions from the upper floors. Sometimes the children boo when passersby empty buckets on the flames. Sometimes they cry. They love it best when a building lights that hasn’t burned too badly before, one still packed with nourishment for the fire to consume, though of course that sight becomes rarer all the time.
Grub and Morsel are getting too old for this diversion, but they can’t bear to give it up, not yet. I happened by them on the street the other night after some fruitless sleuthing at yet another dour saloon. As hordes of natives jostled past us on the sidewalk, I asked what comfort they could possibly find in this daily vision of annihilation. They tried to explain as best they could, never removing their gaze from the blazing tenement that popped and crackled just across the lane.
“It’s pretty,” said Grub.
“It’s dancing,” said Morsel.
Someone shoved an incinerating gas tank (stockpiled in advance of the coming frost) out the third-floor window, and both boys oohed as it burst in the alley below. I stood with them for a minute more, perplexed and troubled, then reboarded the limo and had Duluth drive me home.
I have since concluded that, in a life so filled with the aftermath of disaster—the blistered lungs of siblings, the comforts reduced to ash—disaster itself serves as a welcome distraction. It is the kindlings’ Toob, their lullaby, their imaginary friend. Perhaps as helpless children, we have no choice but to love what wields power over us, no matter how cruel or unfair it may prove itself to be.
Grub and Morsel told me on another occasion that one day soon, Duluth will take them to touch a dragon—it seems this is a coming-of-age ritual in this savage locale. At a certain age, boys climb the water tank upon the roof of the Wedge, the tallest building in Torchtown, to skim their hand along the underside of a sky lizard when one passes just above. The scales feel like giant fingernails, living plastic, featherbones; no two stories quite agree. Sometimes it takes many nights for a dragon to swoop down close enough. Sometimes one comes too close, or its breath does, and manhood is over before it can begin.
“What do the girls do here, to prove they’re grown?” I asked.
“Make a baby,” both twins chirped in unison. Funny to think that by Torchtown standards, Mother was a child until she was over fifty-five, and I’ll be one all my life. It bothers me that the Dahlberg name will die with me, though I suppose it can’t be helped. My heirs would have all been Ripples anyway, and the world certainly doesn’t need any more of those.
Perhaps I’ll give birth to an infant made of teeth.
Two weeks—two weeks since Mother died, two weeks since I fled the Ripple mansion, never to return. Two weeks married. Two weeks of living with the knowledge that I am condemned to an early death.
At least tomorrow, I’ll finally receive some recompense for my troubles. Tomorrow is my first payday as Chaw Shopgirl, the day that Howie has promised to give me a pistol. I will be armed, and two more weeks hence, when he gives me the ammunition for it, I will become dangerous too. But dangerous to whom? Right now the only enemy I can recognize for certain has already sunk its roots into the very core of me.
Yet for the moment I remain, against all odds,
Your dutiful correspondent,
The Baroness Swan Lenore
* * *
Two weeks into her employment at the Chaw Shop, Sharkey invites Swanny to his bedroom to take her pick of the guns. He’s kept his door locked till now, so despite her best efforts at snooping, she has no idea what to expect. His room has only one dim barred window, facing the airshaft, half-veiled in dusty drapes. Sharkey lights the lamps.
“I hooked up a generator to power downstairs, but up here”—he blows out the match—“I never saw the need.”
The space is unprepossessing, even dingy: the one piece of furniture is a brown leather fold-out couch, loved almost to death, its cushions worn as soft as gloves by Sharkey’s sleeping form. His zoot suits hang on a sagging string of piano wire in the corner; a spittoon, not recently emptied, emits a subtle odor of stale indulgence. An unswept fireplace displays its latest cremation. But none of these draw Swanny’s attention like the books.
Sharkey has an infestation of books. The swarm is voracious and undiscriminating. Bestselling hardcovers, mass market paperbacks, comics, periodicals, instruction manuals, all dog-eared and singed on the page edges: it’s nothing like Osmond’s library (curated and extensive) or even her mother’s (adequate and edifying). The built-in shelves are overrun. The floor is a breeding ground for words. The books teeter atop one another in promiscuous towers; they scuttle across the carpet when Sharkey kicks them, making his way across the room.
Swanny browses for a moment, then kneels on the floor beside the sofa and sifts through a stack of travel guides, their pages glossy with photographic illustrations. The sun setting over a distant sea, amid the Volcanic Isles. A glacier town, bathed in Northern Lights. The Great Crater out west. A meadow sky empty but for spirals of glittering constellations. And, in a volume titled Lifestyles of the Ostentatious, shot after shot of what could well be the Dahlberg estate and surrounding environs in more prosperous times: gardens, woodlands, bird-watching. Verandas and gazebos, stables and tennis courts. Frog ponds and wells.
“I never knew you were such a nature buff,” she says, apropos of the pile.
Sharkey shrugs, taking off today’s zoot jacket to hang with the others on the piano wire. “Sometimes looking at the pictures helps me sleep.”
“Once I bring Mother’s killers to justice, we should organize a trip. We could take your limo to my country home—it’s hardly a day’s drive. You could meet my housekeeper, Corona. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had wine from a cellar.”
He settles in on the couch, discreetly deposits the contents of his mouth into the spittoon. “Who’d take care of the shop while we’re gone?”
“Duluth, or anyone really.” Swanny runs her finger over a photograph of a limpid blue swimming pool, its owner poised at the end of a diving board like a man walking the plank. “If you liked, we could travel on from there. See the world. We might not ever return.”
Sharkey regards her, faintly amused. “Stay Outside, you mean? On the loose?”
/> “Well, yes, I suppose.” His term strikes her as odd; she tries it out. “On the loose.”
“You’re forgetting. I’m a ‘torchy.’ They round us up and drag us back.”
“I’m not certain the local law enforcement is all it used to be. Besides, I would explain that you were my guest.”
“Too late for me now, anyways. Not much use for an old chawmonger in the great outdoors.”
“That’s an awful shame.”
“Eh, I’ve been.” Sharkey lazes back on the cushions. “One time I made it all the way out to your neck of the woods, actually.”
“Wonland County? Really?”
“It was a real funny place. All those trees, too close together. Got so dark at night. No fires.”
“Black forest,” Swanny murmurs.
“Yeah. So quiet, I thought I’d disappeared.”
Swanny thinks of her vision the afternoon that Sharkey brought her to Torchtown: the branches reaching like fingers toward the car windows, the ground opening up below. The sense of not just being lost, but of losing oneself to a place. What does it mean that her home makes him feel the same way?
“C’mere,” he says, laying his arm across the back of the sofa.
They’ve been alone together before, dozens of times, and yet only now does she feel that seclusion bodily, in the peculiar vibration of his voice. Swanny blushes. “I thought you were going to show me the weapons.”
The Sky Is Yours Page 30