jamieproctor.ca

The bell rang.
The crowd surged.
The voice called.
And against all odds and historical evidence, the children actually paid attention.
The tour of the fire exhibit had begun.

“Come on, come on,” said the museum guide.
“Come on, come on,” said the teacher, out of educational camaraderie and the desire not to be left out.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the guide.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the teacher, really getting into the spirit of things now. Then he realized that he was falling behind and ran after the group, pants flapping.
“Shh!” the guide told the teacher and his pants.
“Shh!” the children told the teacher, delighting in the turning of tables.
“Shh!” the guide told the children, and they growled and raised their hackles at him, but not too sharply. The first exhibit was at hand.

It was a little building in a little box, made of little things – smears of clay, matchstick twigs, slivers of stone. It had a red roof and a blue door.
“Whose house does this look like?” asked the guide.
“Mine!” said one child.
“Hers!” said another child.
“Theirs!” volunteered a third.
“Wrong!” said the guide. “It looks like the first house built in this city that wasn’t a shack or a cabin or a hovel or a lean-to or a shanty. It looks like the grand manor of Mayor Brickabrack.
Does anyone here know about Mayor Brickabrack?”
A hand shot up at the back of the pack, lonely in the crowd.
“Yes. You. Speak.”
“hewasthefirstmayorofthetownandhebuiltthedamandthequarryandthemainroadandthenhebuilthishouseand”
“That will do,” said the guide with the kind and welcoming air of a corpse. “Yes. He built all those things that still stand today, and then he built this house. Now, why do you think they still stand and this house doesn’t?”
“FIRE!” concluded the entire class at the top of its lungs.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Now, look at the building. See the cross-section? See all that dry hay in the walls to act as insulation? See all those candleholders in the hall? See that staircase set too close, and see how it was (against all sense and reason) insulated as well? See what happens when you press this button?”
It wasn’t a big button, and it wasn’t a big fire. But then again, it wasn’t a big building.
It went ‘fwooMP.’
The children cheered.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher, hungry for validation.
“Shh!” said the children. And the teacher hungered for his belt and the harsh days of his forefathers, but he knew they were behind him and he had no recourse.

The next exhibit was much larger – the glass case it was sealed away in could have housed a motorboat of respectable size. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely small trees, all of them very cunningly faked with cotton balls, twigs, birchbark, bird’s nests, and other powerful techniques. Scattered through it were mud roads, crude sheds, and tiny specks that could’ve be either people or fleas.
“Now, what is this?” asked the guide.
“Trees!’ hollered a child.
“FOOREST,” insisted another.
“Incorrect” snapped the guide. “Deeply incorrect. This is the Smittely Wood. It was right off the highway heading north. Do any of you know why this place was important?”
There was a deep and abiding stillness and silence, broken only by the wave of a single hand in the crowd. A high-pitched and excited tittering followed its every move.
“Speak.”
“itwasalloldgrowthtimberandcoudlbeusedforship’smastsandlongbeamsandandnandandand”
“Fine,” said the guide. “True enough. Mayor Brickabrack oversaw the building of the sawmills and the carving of the logging roads. Those roads do not exist today, and there is no trace of the mills. Why? What happened here?”
“FIRE!” hollered the class diligently.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Examine the lean of the trees, see the habitual direction of the wind. Look at the lay of the land. Check where the cuts were freshest and the dry timber was stacked. Now, see those men here and think of one of them smoking and tapping out a pipe or stubbing out a cigarette or just dropping a match. Then watch this.”
This button wasn’t any bigger, but the effect was. Incandescent light blistered up in a noise like ‘FWAshhhhhh,’ and then the box was filled with thick, ashy smoke.
“Yay!” said everyone.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh,” whispered the teacher, quietly, to himself. And he looked at his charges and wished for matches.

The third exhibit took up an entire room.
“By eighteen eighty nine Mayor Brickabrack was bent towards civil infrastructure. More bodies were needed to lend the town prosperity, and they needed comforts and staples to tempt them. The fields had been cleared, the orchards planted, and in midsummer the rail line was completed, and was bringing in its first passengers.” With each statement the guide’s finger poked and thrusted and jabbed, spelling out HERE and THERE and THERE.
It was a breathtaking thing. A whole town – a little town maybe, but a town – locked in a single glass case. Someone had spent entirely too much time and effort on it.
“The summer was dry, and the fields were too. The train was an older model, and its smokestack was dirty and improperly cleaned. It caught ablaze, and can anyone tell me what happened next?”
A long dead lull. And then, a hesitant wave and a tremulous giggle.
“Explain yourself,” said the guide.
“theyputthedepottoocloseandthecoalcaughtalightandthewindtookitandspreaditintothefieldsanditallwentupin”
“Flames, yes, yes, YES,” said the guide. “Like so.”
The button went click. There was a long dead moment of nothing until the students realized that the fire was already there, burning eternally in the mouth of the little toy train.
Then it slid out – gently buoyed on some invisible jet of air – and alit on some buildings, which exploded.
It went very quickly after that.
“Hooray!” said the class.
“Shh!’ hissed the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher alongside him, regaining his nerve. He was ignored, and this both pleased and irritated him.
“Come,” said the guide. And they followed him from the rooms and down the halls and into the stairways and passages that turned.

When they stopped turning, it was in a very small room. Its walls were blackened, not black.
And in its center was a thing that wasn’t quite a furnace.
“This was nearly the turn of the century,” said the guide. “The town was choked on its own ashes, and Mayor Brickabrack had leadership of almost nobody and little life let in any of his body. Gangrenous slough had consumed three of his limbs and black veins were coursing towards his heart. He had made many mistakes.”
“Fire!” shouted a student.
“Fwoosh!” enunciated another.
“Crispy!” giggled a third.
“Silence!” said the guide.
“Silence!” agreed the teacher.
The guide turned to him and gave him a smile that froze his heart in his chest even in the swelter of the little basement, then spoke to the class.
“Now. Here is the important question. What did Mayor Brickabrack do to save this town? Your town. My town. His town.”
The students rustled and murmured. One or two almost waved their arms, but held them low at the last minute.
And then that little giggle started again, hesitantly.
“Speak,” said the guide.
“ohnoi’mnotsure”
“Speak,” said the guide. “Now.”
“oooooohokayheknewthatitwasallhisfaultandsohedecidedto”
“Yes,” said the guide. And he smiled so wonderfully that the class was in awe. “Yes. He saw that he had never given fire the respect it deserved. So he explained this to the town, and they held one last vote, and into this very iron kettle went Mayor Brickabrack.”
The guide pulled the door of the chamber open. It was very well-oiled, and made no noise whatsoever.
Then he left it open.
Then he turned to the class and said one word.
“Choose.”
“Choose,” said the teacher, a little too loudly. And then he realized what he’d just said and went pale as a sheet as three dozen glittering little eyes devoid of pity or remorse turned upon him and studied his face with great care. His legs skittered inside his pants like anxious beetles, and he almost fell over.
They laughed at him. And one of the laughs was a high-pitched little titter, and every one of their faces turned towards it.
Grinning.
“ohnonononono,” said the student with the hasty hand. And they might’ve said more, but it was lost in the cheers.

They just made the last bus out of the museum. The teacher was first on, elbowing his students left and right to make it to his seat, and whatever he said to the bus driver was enough to make him scream out of the parking lot on a strip of rubber thick enough to make a new tire.
The guide watched them go, smiling mirthlessly. Then he sighed, and took off his name tag and took out his matches.
“My term is complete,” he said to anyone who might be listening, which was no one.
And then the mayor descended into the depths of the ghostly, char-bricked museum, to press a particularly well-worn button.

Nobody heard what happened next.
But it sounded like ‘fwooosh.’

Once upon a time (exactly once, this never happened again, and you will learn why) there was a fishing village. This was not unique, but one of its inhabitants was so, and his name was Tuckett. Old Man Tuckett. He was called that so as not to confuse him with Big Douglas Tuckett the miller’s son, or Little Tommy Tuckett who cried the Sunday papers up at Noonan Hill.
Old Man Tuckett was distinct in at least two other major ways besides his name.
First, he was tremendously fat. Spherical be damned, he was ellipsoid. He was the fattest person in the village – even fatter than Granny Maggs. It was impossible to grow used to it; at close range your eyes would be tugged across his gut, dragged by gravity. This was very embarrassing, and so was never commented on.
Second, he had five wives, all nearly as fat as he himself. People found this very unusual in those parts, but none of them did, so they largely ignored it.
Oh, and there was one more little thing, just a tiny little thing, a little thing that didn’t matter at all: it was how he never joined the Big Haul every year.
In fact, he never fished at all.
And that was the most important thing about Old Man Tuckett.

He’d stand at the brink of the surf, he’d watch the boats go by. He’d wave his pipe at his wives as they pushed the boat out. He’d cheer and applaud and ballyhoo until the sun came dim and the tide came back – with a lot of nets with a lot of fish – but he’d never
ever
ever take toe off the beach.

This would annoy people less (‘man’s probably too fat to fish,’ was a common theory) if Old Man Tuckett did anything at home, either. Many folk had asked Granny Magg about him, and after heroically calling upon the casual gossip of a lifetime, she had told them everything that Old Man Tuckett did.
“Well, he sells that paper up by Noonan Hill.”
“Granny, that’s Little Tommy Tuckett.”
“Oh. That’s my ear again. Try my other ear.”
“OLD MAN Tuckett.”
She shrugged. “Oh, him. He eats and farts and sits on his beach and shouts.”

It would’ve been less annoying if he shouted helpful things. Sixteen years before there had been Gerry Wickerham, who sat his last decade-and-change on the shore in a rocking chair yelling people to stay off the shoals. That was good, it saved time and effort putting buoys up. But Old Man Tuckett yelled other things, and none of them were very helpful.
They were things like.
“CLEAR OFF!”
And
“DON’T YOU COME ANY CLOSER!”
or
“I SAW YOU LOOKING, NOW YOU KEEP MOVING!”
and frequently
“MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE.”
It was a constant rumour for thirty years or more among the town’s children that he’d once bitten off the foot of a careless youth that put a toe onto his beach. Every six years the imagined toll mounted, and before long it would’ve been removed at the hip.
But if Old Man Tuckett’s endless obsession over ‘his’ beach had been infuriating most times, it grew to full vexation in the Big Haul, when the sea was running silver and everyone brought in the biggest nets to be judged the heaviest of all.
As the boats went out, and just as they’d come back, they’d find Old Man Tuckett there before them, and furious. He ran up and down the beach – actual running, his feet not touching the sands for whole yards at a time – and bellowed like a speared whale, waving his floppy little arms and puffing himself up even fatter than usual. Not even words could escape him at those times – not swears, not slurs, not threats, not even snarls. Just a long four-hour roar, and one more for the evening. It made things wearisome, and took a fearful toll on the fishermen’s nerves.

One of those fisherman in particular (his name doesn’t matter at all, but it was Julian) had nerves to spare, which you’d think would help but didn’t. His face grew thin and haunted every morning, and he started wearing earmuffs that were bigger than any cold warranted, particularly in midsummer. He also took to spending most of his launches with his back to the shore and whistling a lot, while twitching. This was not wise behaviour, and one day when the waves were particularly surly he bent over, stumbled, straightened up, put his skull directly in the path of a swinging boom, and was thoroughly clobbered.
Six months he sat ashore, insensible, tended to carefully if clumsily by his small and bored children. Six months his wife took his seat on the boat. And after six months he woke up and said “garellifump. Twiddle. Chalk,” and then died.
It was a most trying thing for a young family. And it made his wife (whose name didn’t matter much, but it was Stacy) exceptionally cross every morning, to look out and see and hear Old Man Tuckett howl on his beach.

So she went and talked to Granny Maggs, and she asked her about Old Man Tuckett and got pretty much the same gist of him everyone already knew. And she went and talked to Old Man Tuckett’s five wives, and she got nothing at all because they didn’t talk much beyond shrugs and burps. And finally she got fed up with all of that and went and rapped and banged on Old Man Tuckett’s door herself, and when he opened it up she gave him a little gift – some pickled perch – and told him how sad it must be, to never get to be the one to go out on the water.
“Whur?” said Old Man Tuckett, who was halfway through the jar of perch.
“Well, that’s where we get the good catch.”
“Hah!” said Old Man Tuckett, spraying fishbones and moustache sauce from underneath his extraordinarily honking great nose. “We? You mean my wives!” And this was true, because they were the best damned hands with a line and net in town.
“Oh, yes. All of us, and especially them. But the real good stuff usually gets downed before we come back, y’see. It’s so hungry out there, and we’ve got to keep up our strength. I tell you, you’ve never had a fish ‘till you’ve had a fresh one from the far reaches. Like swimming sunshine.”
Old Man Tuckett harrumphed over this and closed the door without thankyous.
But his bellows got a little hoarser, and (especially in the evening) a little sparser. His eyes darted and hunted for something he wasn’t sure was there, and he spoke to his wives – whenever he did bother to – with shorter and meaner grunts.

This got worse for a month, and then it came to the Big Haul, where it ended.

The Big Haul came in on a good day. It did de facto; it was the first good clear morn of the season. The fish seemed to wait for it as much as the fisherfolk.
Down by the docks they coiled ropes and adjusted rigging and checked motors and kissed and hugged, but Old Man Tuckett’s boat, down by the shore, sat aside. His five wives were scrubbing it out, busy as anything. It was all very normal, until you looked at Old Man Tuckett himself. He hadn’t said a word.
The bell rang, one by one the boats took leave of shore. And Old Man Tuckett watched, but for once he watched with longing. The most miserable expression was on his face: slack-cheeked and damp-eyed, pipe clutched in a hand too slack to light it, let alone smoke.
Stacy was last off the dock, and as she kicked off the pier, she spun around and to the whole watching town and to the beach and to him in particular, she said this:
“Hey! Old Man! I bet you a broken old hook from Julian’s grandpa that you won’t ever see the biggest catch from today, and that’s even if you get off your ass and come looking!”
It was a hell of a thing to say. Well, it was something everyone in town had thought for years, but there’s a world of difference between thinking and saying, particularly the way the former’s less likely to get your teeth knocked out. It made everyone in earshot – and it was a pretty wide earshot at that volume – flinch and wait for a scream.
Old Man Tuckett stood there, poleaxed. And then he did something much worse than snarling.
He grinned.
He grinned ear to ear and back to the other ear again, and if there was ever a more fearsome thing to see than that, not one of them knew it.
Old Man Tuckett’s teeth were four in number, and all fishhooks. Sharp, shiny, curved and barbed fishhooks the size of bananas. It was a wonder his pipe had a stem left.
“Bet’s on,” he said. And he spat out his pipe, stamped on it once, and slid into his boat like he was greased, shoving all five of his wives out willy-nilly without even a by-your-leave.
“I’ll be back!” he shouted. “And you’ll eat those words and more besides!”
Then Old Man Tuckett unstepped his mast, broke it over his knee, jammed it in the water, and began to row, heaving his fat arms with a fury that made them look large.

The wind was against him.
He cut directly into the current.
At one point he rocketed directly over the Poker, a quiet and murderous shoal that had eaten a dozen or more hulls in recent memory.
But somehow, when the other boats came to the shoals, Old Man Tuckett was already there.
Fishing.
With his teeth.

It was a hell of a sight, everyone agreed afterwards. Whatever else, it was a hell of a sight.
The nets went overboard clumsy, as if he’d never used them.
The knots were tied sloppy, as if he’d barely got fingers (he barely did, truth be told).
But then just as the whole mess touched water Old Man Tuckett went in after it, snorting and roaring like a foghorn, and then there’d be bubbles and splashes and up he’d come again, weighed down by a wriggling net filled with desperate flesh, dragging it up not with his hands but with his shining, murderous mouth.
Over and over, in and again, into the water that was cold enough to snip your fingers. Hour in, hour out, Old Man Tuckett fished the way he lived: teeth-first.

It was a good day for the Big Haul. Everyone took their time. But Stacy was first back in to town, and she tied up there after unloading and just waited. Chuckling.
Then came in the rest. One by one by two three four five six up until all, all of them home but one.
There it was, floundering, churning, flummoxing through the waves. The oars moved like the limbs on an upturned turtle, the thing wallowed like a depressed hippo.
It was Old Man Tuckett. But when he stepped out of that boat onto his beach, everyone had to check three or nine times. He was as thin as a rake, and shaking like a leaf.
“Not bad!” he croaked. “Not bad! Not…so bad. Still better than you! Still better than you all, and it’s my beach now, y’hear, and”
“No,” said Old Man Tuckett’s first wife, right in his face with uncommon clarity and force.
“Skinny,” said Old Man Tuckett’s second wife, shoving him in the chest and sending him staggering.
“Blaggard,” said Old Man Tuckett’s third wife, running a hand over their semidemolished boat.
“Wimp,” said Old Man Tuckett’s fourth wife, with a roll of her eyes at his catch.
“Divorce,” concluded Old Man Tuckett’s fifth wife. And she grabbed his moustache and pulled and pulled and threw it in the water with the skin attached.
And they all walked off on him, leaving the most shrunken, impotent, and downright bewildered elephant seal in all the world alone on his beach.

Old Man Tuckett tried vanishing forever after that, but couldn’t take the solitude. He showed up again four years later – still smaller, but a lot meeker, more respectful, and willing to spend more time helping people with nets.
He also walked pretty fast whenever Stacy’s eye landed on him.

Old Man Tuckett’s five ex-wives didn’t even go as far as that. They waddled up the road, knocked on Granny Magg’s door, and informed her that as the newly fattest person in town they were now marrying her. Granny said that’s fine as long as she got the good stuff for her pickles, so everyone seemed happy.

The beach is still empty. And a lot quieter.

The human ambassador was pale in the face, but had restrained herself from disgorging.
Two of her entirely ceremonial and useless guards had failed to do so. Not helpful behaviour.
“This concludes the examination,” I told them. “Do you have any further inquiries of We?”
“No,” said the ambassador. “Wait. Maybe. Yes.”
So indecisive. I’d gotten used to that.
“Are they…volunteers? All of them?”
“Please describe this word,” I asked.
“They requested this. Of their own will.”
I looked down into the recycling plant floor, where the vats ran slick and clear with hemolymph and the hoppers were piled high with flesh.
“Of course,” I said. “We would accept nothing less.”

I was assigned to reciprocate diplomacy after the fledgling human embassy of Ours was established. We reasoned that I had some small personal experience with their psychology that might prove useful.
Every little bit helped. If We could’ve afford another war, We would’ve had it.
They had been very shocked when We ceased fire. As if they had expected worse.

Earth bobbed beneath our feet. I was the first of We to see it with the naked eye, and so was immediately struck by the incongruity of it.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” inquired the human as the lift began to descend.
“Surprising, yes,” I acknowledged. “I was under the impression that we halted our advance before any bombardment was conducted, yet the surface appears heavily scarred.”
“Pardon?”
“There, there and there,” I said, pointing. “This appears to be recent defoliation married with heavy erosion, highly rapid and not yet concluded. Has your climate-shaping run awry, or did our war distract you from conducting an ecopurge? Your technology appears to be sufficient to accomplish global domestication.”
“Those are pre-contact damages,” he admitted. “The mistakes of youth. Work on repairing our planet’s ecosystem is ongoing. Ideally, as much of the original will be restored as is possible.”
I nodded. Sentimental, but also practical. Sometimes you could learn even more putting something back together than you could in taking it apart.

On exiting the elevator I was forced to deny both forms of learning; the former to the loud and aggressive crowds and the latter to the embassy doctors.
“It’s a mere scratch,” I explained. “Clotting will fix it within the hour.”
“Please, ambassador,” said the human. “Please. Earth micro-organisms could cause a fatal reaction.”
“Unlikely,” I replied. “I received a full autoimmune treatment before debarking, using banked earth samples.”
The human’s face did that little jump it did when he was upset. “May I ask where you obtained these…samples?”
“Probes, mostly” I said.
He laughed.
“I apologize, but I do not understand your humour.”
“Sorry, sorry. Old earth cultural touchstone. You’re serious?”
“Yes. And I find your lack of information odd. Several thousand probes were launched through this planet’s atmosphere to gather information, and you destroyed two hundred and sixteen of them. Three you even managed to capture intact.”
I almost said more, but was arrested most thoroughly by the expression of utter confusion in the human’s face.
“The crowds,” I mentioned. “They object to the peace?””
“Uh, yes.”
“Sentiment, I presume?”
“They believe we should have pushed for harsher terms.”
“Terms?”
“When you agreed to our demand for a cease fire.”
I could have corrected him.
I could have explained that we voluntarily ceased hostilities of our own accord, absent of any request from his species. That there was no worthwhile gain to be had from their eradication.
I could have pointed out that there had been no terms decided upon, and that these were only now being considered in scope and scale as we performed an embassy exchange.
But I didn’t do any of those things, because I knew that all of those facts were common, open, freely-available knowledge and for some reason he didn’t seem to understand any of them. This was worth exploring, but perhaps without his informed assistance.
I brushed aside the thought and the last specks of hemolymph from my skull. “Clotting will fix it within the hour,” I repeated, as if to reset our conversation to its beginning. “Nutrient would assist in this.”
“There will be lunch,” he said. And there was.

Lunch was a soup based in a beef broth, followed by sesame-encrusted tuna steak (with a small cranberry and walnut salad dressed with blue cheese) and finished with a berry sorbet.
It was the most sumptuous meal I’d ever tasted, the first that had not come from a rendering vat – beyond anything I’d ever imagined food could be.
And with every mouthful, I thought of the drying brown surface of the globe, and of the human’s earnest, entirely assured statement that they were doing their best to fix their mess.
I stared at the ambassador as I chewed, with my proximal eyes. He was busy chasing some dried cranberries with his fork, and his expression as he did this – faintly concentrating, slightly frowning, mind earnestly bent – was as frank and open as it had been since the beginning.
This was not a creature made for lying. I was beginning to suspect him of something far more dreadful.
“That was tremendously satisfying, and highly educational,” I said to him. And I meant every word. “Where to next?”
“Some people.”

They were some people, all right.
I was impressed despite myself. The human embassy I had overseen on Ours had largely been granted access to the most immediate and practical arms of government, the blunt, brutal executors of policy and the database attendants.
Here, I spoke with the makers and takers of policy. The minds that aimed the hands of billions of bodies.
In this corner, the overlord of energy. They still relied heavily upon fossil fuels, yet he swore they were already devoting too much time and energy to carbon trapping, that it was hokum.
In this other corner, a master of agriculture, who explained to me why it was biologically necessary to devote so much land to monocultured maize rather than mixed genetically-tailored crops to reduce soil wear.
Here, in the center of the chamber, I exchanged words with a mighty voice in social structuring, who explained to me the great problems his domain faced with ‘worthless’ humans that lived without housing. Curiously, when I suggested reprocessing them (if they were as functionless as he described) he insisted that their labour would be useful if they ever applied themselves and that the problem lay in their own hands.
“I thank you, sir,” I told the human. “I had not expected to be placed so quickly and so closely to the top ranks of your government.”
The human looked at me with as much shock as he had when the protester’s stone had cracked my face. “Ambassador, you are gravely mistaken, and I caution you to avoid speaking in such a manner – you could cause great offense with those words. These men and women are merely advisors and specialists, not rulers. They do not craft policy.”
I looked at the human again, this time not even trying to hide my strutiny. Primary, secondary, and tertiary eyes, across all spectrums. I looked at every muscle twitch, at every drop of perspiration, at the movements of his pupils, at the heat from his brow.
He was entirely, wholly, achingly, agonizingly sincere.
They all were.
None of them really were lying to me, not one bit, not to my face.
But they were lying much harder to someone else behind their own.

Afterwards, we had dinner. It was twice as enjoyable as lunch, and it was what gave me the last push towards the final decision of my life when I sat in my bedroom full of spyware and luxury, at the desk, clutching the very pretty and important and entirely decorative computer I had brought with me.
I placed all my hands and my tongue in the specific places they should go and hummed at the right pitch and the terminal disgorged itself, its battery splitting apart and vomiting out a very small and dangerous machine, simple in design and in purpose.
On use, it would produce a small, meaningless signal without coding or intent that would, on being received by the masters of We, produce immediate and full-scale war.
It would not be a beneficial war. It would not be a tidy war. There was a chance – a very slim chance, a very small chance, but an almost-unacceptable-on-its-face chance nonetheless – that it might be a war that We might lose.
But the odds were much better than anything, anything, anything at all that might happen from attempting to live alongside these lunatics.
The transmitter clicked, clucked, and melted into a puddle of ashes, which I threw out the window.
In forty minutes the war would start.
In forty-five minutes they would likely come for me.
If I was very good, I might string them along for hours and hours before they would begin irreparably damaging me out of frustration and spite.
They would never do so deliberately, of course.  Never in a million years would they imagine themselves doing so.
But they would. They most assuredly would.

It was a good sandwich.
Turkey, on rye, with a hint of something else. Cranberries in there, with their jelly. Some sort of mustard.
Sam wasn’t a chef, but he knew what he liked. He knew he liked this sandwich. He knew he liked its taste, he knew he liked that it was at the place half a block from his work, and he DEFINITELY knew he liked that it was under five bucks.
Which is what puzzled him so very much the next day, the next lunch, when he walked up to the menu and saw that the sandwich that he knew he liked wasn’t there.
“Turkey,” Sam asked the cashier.
“Chicken?” he cautiously replied.
“Turkey,” clarified Sam.
“Chicken?” questioned the cashier, pointing at the menu.
“Turkey!” insisted Sam, waving his arm at the menu.
“Chicken,” reiterated the cashier, indicating the line which showed there was only one type of fowl available.
All reasonable discourse exhausted, Sam threw up his hands to the sky. “Chicken,” he admitted in abject defeat.
And it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the same. He knew what he liked, and this wasn’t quite it. Not quite.

Sam experimented with lunch.
He tried lunch a little earlier, he tried lunch a little later. A little faster, a little slower. A littler higher, a little lower.
He never found anything he liked as much. He never found his sandwich.
But he did find out something interesting, on the fourteenth day of his stake-out.
At one oh one, he came in and ordered a small salad. At one oh nine, he left. And on the firmly blackbackboard-backed-white-chalkings of the menu, a faintish wisp of something smeared.
Something had been erased. Quickly. Desperately.
And right in the exact spot, down to the millimetre, where once he had read the words ‘turkey on rye.’

Sam came in at twelve thirty the next day. He laughed, chatted, ordered a casual soup, took an egregiously appropriate amount of time consuming it, then left at an extremely casual and normal pace.
After that he circled around the block, picked up the drop package he’d secreted overnight inside a nearby storm drain, and hid in the bushes opposite the shop with a camo jacket, high powered binoculars, and a stopwatch.
At one oh one, his gaze became intense.
At one oh three, a pigeon shat in front of the shop’s window, and Sam nearly jumped out of his shoes.
At one oh six, a man with particularly interesting shoes wandered out of the kitchen, exchanged a casual wave with the cashier, and strolled by the menu. As he did so, his hand flicked through a quick little scribble against the blackboard.
Sam erupted from the bushes like Venus from the waves, launched himself across the street, tripped over the curb, saw lots of pretty colours, staggered to his feet and lurched inside.
“TurkOWy sandjesuswhich pleasefuck,” he said to the cashier.
The cashier looked confused. “Chicken?” he inquired tentatively.
Sam pointed at the menu after three tries.
There was nothing there but a quiet smudge…. And the rapidly retreating back of the man with particularly interesting shoes.
“Nevermindouchdamnit,” said Sam, and heaved himself after the shoes, which he cornered outside the men’s washroom and slammed against the wall.
“Turkey!” he shouted into the man’s face.
The man opened his mouth and got as far as “chi-“ before seeing the especially descriptive glint in Sam’s eyes and giving up. “Oh fine. Yes, there’s turkey. For thirty-three seconds on the third minute of one o’clock.”
“What? Why?”
“Same answer to both of those,” said the man with particularly interesting shoes. “But there’s a question you’ve got to answer first: you want in?”
“For that sandwich?” asked Sam. “Yes.”
The man with particularly interesting shoes nodded.
Sam nodded.
The man with particularly interesting shoes nodded again, somewhat more pointedly, and Sam realized he was holding him three inches off the floor and dropped him, embarrassed and sore-armed.
“Thank you. Now, this way.”

This way was past the kitchen, behind the sinks, down the stair, into the basement, through the grate, and terminated in a ragged chamber scraped out of raw earth, where there were seven people in baggy bathrobes and a single aimlessly confused turkey and a very shiny-and-well-polished-but-impractical knife.
“He wanted in,” explained the man with particularly interesting shoes to one of the other people, who Sam realized was the mayor.
“Fair enough,” said the mayor. “Okay, you’ve got to take the knife and-”
“This is a cult, isn’t it,” said Sam.
The mayor looked a little hurt. “Not really. It’s-”
“I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like, and cults aren’t it. You’re wearing robes and asking me to sacrifice a turkey,” said Sam, filled with leaden exhaustion and also still aching in the skull. “You know what? I’m very disappointed. I thought this was just an unusually secret menu – I’ve tracked down four of those before – but you’ve gone and brought religion into it. Food is personal enough without that sort of attitude. I’m going home and microwaving a corn dog.”
Which he did. He slammed the grate on his way out, too.

Alone in the preparatory chamber, the mayor, the man with the particularly interesting shoes, and everyone else shook their heads and went back to doing the turkey’s cuticles. The new mascot had to look perfect by the time they launched the autumn menu.

The ground trembled. The skies quaked. Forty-one calves were born with three heads and no legs. Whispers floated on the wind.
Gurg was coming.
Puddles reflected leaves on other trees from stranger places. Rabbits attacked wolves. The salmon swam upstream, then downstream, then slid into the riverbed and sank into the bedrock.
The great and powerful Gurg was there.
The clouds cracked, the dogs went silent, and a hundred cities were no more. Lands roiled and turned and boiled and died, and the world was a stranger.
The great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse had arrived some time ago.
But nobody seemed to notice.

***

At seven in the morning everyone woke up, got dressed, ate a thing, got in their cars.
At eight in the morning they were stuck in traffic.
At eight fifteen, the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse strode overhead, legs a league long, nine mouths screaming, ten nostrils flaring, and its endless eyes drowning in many flames. Four condos were drawn into its body to sate its bottomless urges; fourteen billion dollars in property damage done in its wake, and the foul stench that billowed at its heels drove thousands to the emergency room, or the early grave.
“It’s been a lousy morning,” admitted the mayor. “But we’ve put it behind us. We can adapt to this, and we’re tough people here.”

***

At noon, the beachfront was calm.
As everyone finished lunch, the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse strode into the sea and turned it to churning death. Boats sank, gulls cried, the world became a hellscape of water and tortured wind.
“There are allegations,” announced the second-wisest news channel host, “that this event could be connected to the alleged giant ravenous monster, Gurg, which reports claim is also known as the ‘blasphemous apocalypse.”
The wisest news channel host furrowed their brow at this and considered it with deep insight.
“No,” they said. “What if that wasn’t actually a thing?”
“Hmm,” said the second-wisest news channel host. “That’s a good point. I guess we need to consider that as well. After all, there’s a lot of different sides to this debate.”

At two-thirty the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse uprooted the entire news station and shoved it into its most fearsome orifice, shredding it instantly. The third-and-fourth-wisest news channel hosts maintained an attitude of cautious yet healthy skepticism, and warned against the dangers of alarmism.

***

By that evening, people in search of informed facts had trawled the entire internet. Much of what they had found was, according to standards, useless, but there was a sizeable slew of interesting photos and videos from Micronesia several weeks ago, where many citizens had recorded the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse annihilating the homes and businesses of their friends and relatives. In fact, several alleged that the monster had been steadily awakening there for over thirty years in an increasingly obvious state of agitation, its limbs gathering speed and strength as it clawed its way out from under the seafloor and into a waking nightmare of reality. The past six months were particularly dense with these allegations, which appeared to be growing increasingly annoyed that nobody was paying any attention to them.
“This seems like it could be true, or possibly bad, someday, if it were to happen to us,” pondered a few people, here and there. But their friends and neighbours weren’t so sure, and some of their in-laws were positive it was nonsense, so in the end everyone agreed to disagree.

***

By the following morning everyone had remembered that they probably had someone who could do something about anything that might happen or maybe not, and so word was dispatched to the presidential golf course to see if he knew anyone who could help.
“Help with what?” asked the President.
The President was informed that the great and powerful Gurg, also titled the Blasphemous Apocalypse, could very well be growing in strength at this moment in time, unless it wasn’t.
“I don’t know,” said the President. “That doesn’t seem real to me. I think you’re making this up.”
On the far side of the presidential golf course the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse leaned down and violently shat out six tornadoes from its primary anus, eradicating all greenery within forty miles for all time.
“Bit breezy out here today,” said the President. “Go away.”

***

By week’s end, some people were, against their own will, common sense, and apathy, becoming slightly perturbed. The great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse, if it actually existed – which it might not, after all – was acting like a real nuisance. The fields lay fallow and full of live infant mice; the factories were a riot of burning ectoplasm; the lakes were a-boil and the cities were a-buzz and there was a very real and present danger that some of the things that were happening might actually matter and/or exist. This was troubling, particularly to the younger people who had envisioned a whole life of doing something or other that wasn’t being squashed and eaten or transported into horrifying beings of flesh and pine.
“Best not to dwell on it,” was the general advice. “It can’t help and will only trouble you. Ignore Gurg the Blasphmeous Apocalypse – who may take decades to get around to impacting you – and focus on being happy.”
It wasn’t the advice anyone would have chosen, but it was the advice they’d got, and so it was taken and followed with diligence, and prudence, and indolence, and a hint – just the tiniest, the most ephemeral smidge – of existential fear.

***

A relatively short while later, the great and powerful Gurg, the Blasphemous Apocalypse, having swollen all out of insanity, eradicated the notion of notions, forcing all creatures on the planet to make prolonged and uncomfortable eye contact with it and thereby instantly destroying half of humanity utterly. Very little changed.

I’m average.
My teachers say that. My friends say that. I think I heard my mom say that once, and my dad didn’t really disagree.
It’s like ‘normal’ but less judge-y.
It’s okay. I don’t mind being average. I like being me.
Except for one thing, one big thing about being average and normal. I’m scared of the good people in my closet.

They come in just as I’m drifting off to sleep, every night, no matter how long it takes. I always mistake the first sounds as my imagination.
Clip clop clip clop clip clop.
Horses, usually. A few donkeys or maybe mules – I can’t tell the difference. Ponies mixed in whenever. And once it was a bunch of centaurs.
The people riding them are a lot more mixed up. Tall bearded people, short bearded people, skinny people with skinny ears and glowing eyes, scared kids, and a talking cat. But they’re all the same on the inside. Clean and gentle and right and kind and wanting only the very best for me, and the very best for me is to follow them into the closet to see the Good Place.
I don’t want to follow them into my closet. In the daytime there’s nothing in there but clothes and I’m worried about what they put in there when I’m not looking, at night.
Doesn’t stop them from trying. They never force, but they always push, push push like dad trying to get me to go to grandpa’s house.
The Good Place is imperiled, they warn me. The Bad People from Somewhere Else – the ugly people, the wrong people, the incorrect and vile people who aren’t even real like me and them – are going to hurt it, they’re going to burn it, they’re going to drown it and swamp it. Only through my actions will the Good Place be saved. And I need to do this for me too, because it is only through the experiencing of the Good Place that I will be saved and fixed and matured.
I tell them that I’m happy here, that I like my life and I’m not old enough to understand some of the things they ask me to do. Isn’t there someone else, older and better at it?
But they say it over again, over and over and over and over and always: it has to be you, it has to be you, it has to be you. All the people in the Good Place are already completed; already whole and wise and kind and correct. Nobody else will do, nobody else is average enough.

I’ve asked my mom and dad about this. They say it’s a phase everyone goes through, and I just have to live with it. They told me some people even like this.
I think it must have been different when they were little. Or they were. Who would find this fun?
The good people won’t go away. They keep checking in on me, polling me. ‘Would you like to have fun?’ they ask. ‘Are you developing valuable insights into your character?’ ‘Would you like a best friend, the very best friend, one who always takes your side and devotes themselves to your existence? Would you like a love interest? They’ll be feisty, but sweet, and never leave you.’
Every night.

The gifts, too. Always with the gifts. They keep telling me to take things.
First it was a sword, a plain sword with a shiny blade. Mom told me to be careful with sharp things and I almost lost a finger a year back with her Swiss army knife, so I said no.
Then they brought in a wand – a stick with a little magic inside. I thought I could see it breathing when they held it out to me, so I said no.
They keep trying. Runes, cups, rings – every time they come for me they come with a gift, and they all look hungry. They tell me that the things are part of me, that they’re special, and that they’re looking for me, that I was missing them all along. It scares me.
One time it was a crown and it bit me.

The good people warn me, too. ‘This won’t last forever,’ they say. ‘You’re almost too old.’ ‘The danger is nearly upon us.’ ‘The time is nigh.’
But they’re always wise when they say it, not scared. And they’re concerned, not cross.
I don’t think they believe me when I tell them that I don’t want to go. They just sigh and shake their heads and tell me they’ll ask again tomorrow night. They smile at me in a patient way, like a teacher, and they stare at me as I turn over and put my back to the closet as they leave.

That isn’t what scares me, though – not the smiles, not the stares, not the promises or the begging or the invitations.
What scares me is I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to say no.

Hello.
As you’re aware, the project has run into some unusual difficulties. Since you’ve – repeatedly – stressed since the day you hired me your status as an absolute layman, I thought I’d run you up a little case-by-case guide to what we’ve been doing, to dispel any confusion or frustration you might be experiencing as to the project’s pace and/or cost.

-Porch removal
As you recall, we decided early on that the porch was a lost cause due to severe termite damages, total loss of structural integrity, presence of pests, etc. And we did, in fact, prioritize this. Unfortunately one of the pests in question was a large raccoon – we asked in a vet and his estimate was ~200 pounds – who laughs like an old woman, and every time we approach the porch it laughs at us, everything goes grey, and, according to witnesses, we march down to the pond and try to kill ourselves with our own power tools. It’s not hard to stop with a buddy system, but it’s very difficult to avoid outright, and so we’ve had to do all the rest of the reno work by coming in through the back door. This is less than ideal, and has also exacerbated the problems with the moths.

-Garden clearing
The garden remains a distinct challenge, and as of yet the hedge maze resists removal. I mean this quite literally: it is in a constant state of active resistance, and we’ve had three guys hospitalized by creepers, vines, and in one case an angry, eyeless bear that spat highly venomous blood from its nostrils. We got the wildlife people in to tranquilize it, but its fur seems to be made of wrought iron, so they billed us for a few hundred darts and that’s definitely going to go on the budget.

-Attic insulation
The attic is now fully insulated and the draft problem besetting the second floor should be completely abated. We have, however, received reports from the disposal site that the old insulation we stripped out congealed into a large blob that is currently brooding a large clutch of eggs in the heart of the dump. This has not only resulted in significant legal fees, but has resulted in all disposal operations having to go to an out-of-state landfill under assumed names, which is not only ethically problematic but fiscally damaging. Again, this will be on the budget.

-Living room, study, and kitchen wallpapering
Absolutely no problems here.

-Parlour refurbishment
The parlour is coming along fine, but the moths strongly resent us coming through their living space and have continued to litigate. I don’t know where they got the money but that’s one high-powered lawyer they’ve found and frankly, our legal team is in over their heads. This is precisely the sort of undisclosed information that creates trust issues, and I confess to some disappointment in you for leaving it unmentioned.

-Underservatory renovation
The underservatory itself is complete, but we lost six workers in rapid succession to the euphoric fumes bubbling up through the cracks in its containment sphere – the lining was damaged far beyond original estimates, and to make matters worse the stuff appears to act based on eye contact rather than inhalation or even skin exposure. Also my site manager looked into the eyepiece, had a conversation with something he refuses to describe, and quit. He won’t return my calls either, so the paperwork’s turning into a real hassle.

-Resuscitating my own eviscerated, sacrificed corpse
As you’re doubtlessly aware, a little less than six hours ago I was kidnapped from my bed, dragged into the house through several secret doors of whose existence I was previously ignorant, tied to an altar, chanted at, and sacrificed with a large steak knife. I say ‘doubtlessly aware’ because the lead cultist was unmistakably yourself – yes, you were hooded and cloaked, but I’d recognize the way you scratch at your chin anywhere. This is, I feel, something of a betrayal in the client-contractor relationship, particularly as I had to spend the entire night desperately clawing a way back into my own corpse, which is now only semifunctional at best due to missing all or nearly all of its vital organs and some of the comfort ones. I’m very disappointed and also filled with a murderous undying rage, and so I am compelled to remind you in the strongest terms that this breach of contract will be recompensed through the most aggressive legal means available to me.

Regards,
Erin Nostwell, Morley Renovations.

PS: Also I have already killed and eaten the rest of your family.

I’m not sure what to say. I’m not sure how to feel. And I really don’t know what I’m going to say when everyone else comes running.
Uncle Ellis is dead. But it’s not how I thought it would happen.

He’d been so full of night last night, all cheers and chortles. Beer frothing from under his moustache and red veins throbbing in his eyes.
“More,” he was saying, mostly, probably. It was his favourite word. “More, more more.” More food, more drink, more admiration, more respect, more praise. More more more more.
All of us handing him it, nodding at him, smiling at him, and wondering when it would be enough. And which one of us would do it.
Would it be kindly cousin Harvester, with his twinkly eyes and frizzy beard, who’d put too much money into too many of Uncle Ellis’s sure-fire investments?
Would it be miserable old Uncle Paul, who’d never stopped complaining since his little, little, tiny sister had up and married?
Would it be ferocious little Laurie, the most ignored niece in the history of family, who saw her brothers and sisters lavished with praise and expensive uselessness while she got pats on the head and tousled curls?
Or maybe it would just go to Borgia, the dog who lived as a footstool. Lord knows I’d have snapped years ago, but the thing was fifteen and counting and had yet to bark, snap, or even whine under the weight of those pudgy feet.
More, more, more. Uncle Ellis always wanted more. And he never shared what he was owed for it, not one morsel.
Not alive.
More was never enough, but he took a break then, eventually, seven courses in. Pulled out his pipe, sucked it down to a cinder, threw the ashes on the table and said “look!”
In came Aunt E, so small she didn’t get a name, and with her came the journals and the papers and the collection jars.
Here were all the astounding articles on the exotic wildlife that Uncle Ellis had told his servants to write.
There were all the vibrant sketches of magnificent wilderness that Uncle Ellis had described to someone with artistic talent.
And in sealed jars and displays cases, pinned and pickled and glassy-eyed, were the creatures Uncle Ellis’s employees and staff had snatched from their burrows, dens, webs, nests, and branches. Some of them had scales, some of them had feathers, some of them had fur and some were just bald and clammy. Many of them were segmented and crunchy.
And one of them was in a big, smooth glass tank that wasn’t filled with formaldehyde but plain, nourishing air.
We couldn’t see it, and said as much.
Uncle Ellis laughed at that, then picked up his pipe and gave the glass a good whack.
Something small and alarmed darted across the tank’s gravel and slipped underneath the big dead branch that had been, until that second, the only thing inside it we could see.
“Ribbon snake,” he said. “Leptogracilis fragillimus, as I’ve called it. See its spine? So tall and thin. Prickly too! Funny thing. Took a keen eye to spot it, which I did.”
We all smiled and agreed that the incredibly thin snake – almost as narrow face-on as a page of paper – was indeed a lovely creature, worthy of intense praise. Truly he was astounding, a genius, a true noble, a worthy soul.
Then we all retired to our rooms, waited, and wondered who’d go first.

Maybe Grimbly. He was a good friend of Uncle Ellis’s son, Hubert. Hubert who’d been bright, who’d been curious, who’d been disinherited for asking questions that made his father feel foolish. Not that it had taken much to do that.
Maybe Edith? She’d been a maid for a long time, she’d cleaned a lot of floors, she’d carried a lot of laundry, she’d put up with a lot of shouting, and she could use a little cut of a promised inheritance if she’d just put a foot in and speed it all up a bit. Accidentally confuse the rat poison with the salt shaker, maybe.
Speaking of meals, what about poor trembling Joshua? Best friends for forty years, ever since the day Uncle Ellis knocked him down and broke his leg and laughed at him. Through thick and thin, like the time Uncle Ellis drove away his fiancée by starting a fist fight with her father. Comrades ‘till the end. Which frankly, he might appreciate being sooner rather than later.
Or of course, me. No particular motives there beyond annoyance with blowhards and a fondness for money, but I counted those as honest commonalities with the folks seated around me at dinner that evening.

So. Who first?

Creak, crack, crunch. The floorboards are whispering and whining, shaking and twisting in their old wooden beds, trying to get comfortable underfoot.
Who’s taking a stroll? Who’s visiting the privy? Who’s just getting some fresh air?
Better wait it out, better not go just yet. If they’re innocent, they’ll ask questions. If they’re guilty, why interrupt them?

It had been well past midnight before the real dead of night hit over Uncle Ellis’s manor, before I really felt comfortable moving. Soft slippers, a careful tread, and not even a candle to wander by. I had felt my way along the halls like a drunken spider, waving limb by careful limb and squinting in the odd patch of starlight a window leaked in.
I had a plan, a very simple plan. I would creep up to Uncle Ellis’s bedchamber and smother him with his own pillow. No muss, no fuss, no wounds, no blemishes. A nice softy mushy pillow. He’d have at least three of those.
Of course, this was assuming someone else hadn’t reached him first. Like Burroughs, his assistant, who had illustrated, composed, and edited so many of those papers he claimed as his own. Or Taft the batman, who had lost a leg to sepsis after saving him from a crocodile, and had found his pay cut by half as recompense for his new tardiness.
I supposed I would raise a fuss, once I was sure the coast was clear. Maybe faint away, so nobody thought to accuse me. So long as uncle was dead, fair enough, but there’s a special kind of unfairness in being blamed for a murder you didn’t even get to do.
The floor was dusty here, bar the center. Feet had shuffled, fingers had groped. Uncle Ellis’s private chambers had to be close by, near at hand.
Near at foot, however, was a corpse. I almost fell flat-out, but caught myself on a giant and hideous door handle that was probably the entrance to the study.
The body, I determined by feel and smell, belonged to my cousin Janice, who had many of my own qualms about the likelihood and magnitude of her inheritance. She seemed extremely dead, with little trace save for some froth along her lips.
This puzzled me as much as it alarmed me, and it was with this in mind that I put paid to notions of true darkness and filched a candle from the wall, which I lit.
Illuminated (faintly) Janice became slightly more edifying – there was a faint red swelling on her palm. I considered this, then considered the door whose handle I had grasped.
It was festooned with ornate images of sea shells from Uncle Ellis’s voyage of a decade and more ago. Beautiful, colourful, coiled.
I looked closer.
One of the sea shells – a cone snail I believe – had a small dart protruding from its tip. Something cloudy glistened off it in the candlelight.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t shriek, didn’t gasp, didn’t mutter ‘hmm!’
But I DID reconsider how easy this might be. Clearly Uncle Ellis was less unaware of his popularity than I’d presumed.
Carefully, gingerly, daintily, I opened the door with a single finger and slid inside without so much as a creak.

The study was in some disorder, and I decided to put some time into taking stock.
Dark-paneled wood, with thick black curtains drawn firmly around what must be quite high and sweeping windows. A desk that could anchor a ship of the line, built right into the floor. Several chairs so overstuffed they sighed to themselves in the draft of the opened door. Rugs so plush that my feet nearly vanished in them. And a big sturdy door, with the key still in the lock.
After I was through with that, I began to catalogue the causes of death.
Laurie had stepped on the wrong floorboards, judging by the large and ferociously bladed beartraps that were latched around her ankles.
Grimbly had paused to check the desk for something – perhaps the key? – and appeared to have instead found an exotic and large spider, whom I hurriedly shut back into its drawer, where it hissed angrily.
And finally the door appeared to have been opened by Cousin Harvester, because when I stepped through it and found myself in a stairwell it was his bobbing body that I found, suspended rather alarmingly from a leg-trap that had misjudged and caught his neck instead. Rest assured, I was very careful to check the stairs as I went.

The staircase was clear, as far as I could tell – though I did leap the last five steps, and so can’t verify their safety. The hallway was similarly safe, although my careful and suspicious proddings at the closed and silent doors did lead to my discovery of Uncle Ellis’s bathroom, where Joshua had stepped onto a bathmat – hunting for a weapon in the medicine cabinet, perhaps? – and into a twelve-foot tiger-pit that must’ve eventually emptied into the furnace, by the smell.
The master bedroom was surprisingly simple to locate – Uncle Paul had gotten halfway through the door before a pair of decorative axes had collapsed on him. The other half remained in the halfway, leaking.
I had stepped gingerly over him, into marvels and horrors.
Heaps of papers, all crisply unruffled by any prying eyes or greedy fingers – Uncle Ellis did not like to read.
Great mounds of fine clothing and luxurious canes – Uncle Ellis did not like to dress up.
Opulent furniture crafted from the heaviest and most indestructible timber, gilded in pearls and gold, with dirty plates sitting atop them – Uncle Ellis left that sort of things for maids.
Edith, the maid herself, face down and ghastly pale on the floor, where she’d slipped and cracked something vital – Uncle Ellis appeared to have left his slippers in the most peculiar place.
And finally, quiet and deadly vast as a mountain, heavier than the roots of the world, the bedframe and sheets and covers and mounded pillows. Because Uncle Ellis always wanted more.
I picked a sizeable pillow, whipped back the blankets, aimed for the face, and smacked down, hard. And it wasn’t for a good minute that I risked to raise it for curiosity at the ease of it all, and found the thing soaked to its eiderdown in blood.

Such a thin little cut across his throat, like a papercut. And when I looked around for explanation, for excuses, all I could find was the little glass tank with its one dead branch and a perfect missing circle of glass. Like somebody had taken a little blade to it.

Good lord, I’m still thinking on that. Good lord.
What kind of snake SLITS someone to death? Can’t it just bite them?

There’s shouting and gasping and running feet. Someone – Taft? Burroughs? Loyal for their salaries, unless they were paid off to tuck themselves to bed early – must’ve come looking for him when he didn’t call for breakfast. I should be running, jumping, screaming with the rest, fixing my alibi and making my excuses.
But all I can do is sit here, like a stone on a riverbed, and let the current rush around me. Thinking about that ribbon snake, and where it might’ve gone.

A long time ago, there was a man, and this man made the most important, necessary, life-giving, in-all-senses-of-the-term VITAL substance known to us all.
No, not water. That’s harder to manufacture.
He was a baker. And he baked bread.
He baked the BEST bread.

The problem with making the best bread is you grow concerned with all the people wanting a slice of the action. Everyone in his village, in the city, in (as far as he knew, he didn’t travel much) the WORLD lusted for the merest crumbs of his labours.
So he hired some of them, as guards, to keep the bread safe and secure.
Then he hired guards to watch the guards. Who, themselves, needed guards, and guards for those guards, and well I’m sure you can see where this is going don’t you.
Anyways, it came to pass that so many of the guards were tied up in watching guards that were watching guards that were watching guards that were, in turn, distracted and nervous due to being watched, that nobody had been watching the baker. Or where he’d been putting the bread.
There was a great interest in finding those two things at that moment – principally for purposes of payment – but as the efforts bore no fruit or bread or anything much people soon gave up and wandered away, disappointed and breadless. But the legends remained.
And somewhere, too, did the bread.

This was all a very long time ago, when people didn’t know any better. Everybody in the rest of this story had no damned excuse.
Especially Edd. Edd with her old worn bag over her shoulder, walking so carefully through the gates of the old city. Edd with her furtive looks and darting eyes. Edd so obviously getting away with something that four separate merchant guards almost detained her on principal, saved only by the obvious and odious emptiness of her old worn bag. A proper thief would have standards, or at least one standard.
But Edd made her way in, like a salmon wandering upstream, and at last she stumbled into the old city’s marketplace, held her old worn bag above her head, and yelled the following.
“I have come and I will bring the bread!”
Which got the same reaction as ‘I know where Jack buried the spare beans’ or ‘I’m going to go and catch the end of the rainbow.’ A couple people threw (stale) bread at her, and someone took her hat off her head and dropped a few coins in it and put it back on.
“Thanks,” said Edd, “but I was looking for more.
The hat was removed again and more metal was added to it.
“No, like, in terms of support. I’m not looking for money, I’m looking for bread. And I will find it. And everyone will love it. It’s going to be amazing.”
“That sounds interesting,” said the hat thief, whose name was Mun. “I will accompany you on this pointless endeavour if you let me keep this hat.”
“Fine,” said Edd. “But give me back the money first.”

So they walked together down the long surly alleys of the old city, which had emerged where buildings argued over who was going to stop first, and they stopped for lunch.
Mun had bread. Edd had bread.
“This bread is pretty garbage,” said Edd. “When I find us the good bread, we’re going to be set for good. Everyone will remember and love us forever and ever.”
“Damn that’s good,” said Mun. “What’s so great about this bread in particular?”
“It’s extremely tasty.”
“Oh.”

After five or six near-robberies, an exciting chase sequence, a dance number, and a soliloquy, they stood at the heart of the old city. You know, just slightly farther left of center than most people think it is.
“Now I must use the secrets that my great-aunt told me,” said Edd.
“Sounds great,” said Mun. “And I’ll hit the secret switch.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The secret switch. About a hundred years back this wall over here was getting rebuilt and they found a big secret switch inside it. It used to open up a big trapdoor in this plaza, but it was rusted shut. They fixed it up too and I think the guy over here was using it as a cellar, but then he died and it might be empty now.”
“Fine,” said Edd. “Please hit the stupid secret switch. Thank you. Let’s go.”
It was actually full of casks of oil, but nobody was around, so they passed unchallenged.

Past the oil cellar and through the side-tunnel and under the old bridge and beyond the farthest dregheaps there was a maze of twisty little passages, none of which looked quite like another.
“This is what my great-grandfather told me about,” said Edd.
“Wow,” said Mun. “Did he say if it was up the fork or down the warren or through the hen’s teeth?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Loads of kids play down here. My auntie showed me a lot of these tunnels. Is your path up the hen’s teeth? I hope it’s the hen’s teeth. See, when I was really little I’d hang around there a lot and once I swear I saw a giant lizard, and hey wait up.”
It was through the fork. Mun complained loudly until Edd told her to shut up.

They stopped outside a deep pit. Bones crunched underfoot, rot swept into nostril. The air felt inquisitive in the least friendly way.
“What?” asked Mun.
“Go on,” said Edd.
“What?”
“Go on and tell me how your cousin’s friend’s so-and-so’s told you all about this. Go on and tell me how the great and terrible wortalask has been dead for fifty years and all the cool kids had a tooth they pulled out of its rotten old skull. Go on!”
“What? I’ve never been this far. No-one’s ever been this far. There’s bones and stuff. Nobody was dumb enough to try.”
The pit belched and heaved and the wortalask crawled out, broadside-first. Six big legs like an elephant’s opposing three little legs like a stork’s. It peered around its own ass in a surly, myopic way and hissed.
It still extremely had all its teeth, which had grown significantly.
“Woah,” said Mun.
Edd strode forwards with determination in every vein of her body. She held up her worn old bag and rubbed it on the wortalask’s face, slapped its rump three times, gave it a skritch behind each of its five ears, and gave its face a good tussle. It collapsed, burping happily.
“Did your great-grandmother tell you that trick?” asked Mun.
“No,” said Edd. “But she said you just had to make it look good.”

Down under the pit.
Under the shaft
Under the crawlspace
Under the big rusty grate
Under the big stone circle
And just beside the enormous combination lock
There was a door.
Edd and Mun looked at the combination lock and then at the door.
“Now what?” asked Mun. It seemed to be a fair question since there were eighty keys on the lock, none of which were numbers or letters.
“Now,” said Edd, “I use what’s in the bag.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“I told you during the soliloquy,” said Edd, who felt she had a right to be irritated. “Weren’t you listening?”
“I got embarrassed and stopped. It was pretty loud and people were trying to sleep.”
Edd sighed and opened the bag and opened the box and opened the jar and opened the tin.
“That’s overkill.”
“That’s prudence. Anyone could’ve stolen my wealth from me.”
“Your wealth smells funny. What is it?”
“The perfect dipping mix for the perfect bread. Passed down to me, after so many years.”
Edd held the sauce next to the lock and squinted a lot until the blobs and shapes within it congealed into something that looked familiar, then punched them in.
And with a groan, the door slid open under weight of years.
And with a sigh, the two women peered inside.
And with a creak, the gentle gust of fresh air made the dessicated, emaciated, mummified corpse of the long-lost baker fall over precisely on his face, which broke with a blunt ‘crunch.’

“Wow,” said Mun.
She poked at a loaf, stale as dead sea air. “Wow,” she said again, looking up at the colossal, endless ruin surrounding her. “Wow.”

“Huh,” Mun concluded. She looked at Edd, who was looking at the bread, which was beyond looking at, and shrugged. “You want to get a pizza instead?”

The pizza was pretty good.