The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (24 page)

Archer refilled his pipe and smoked again. The house blend influenced his thinking, leading him down a back alley of rumination concerning Elise's spirits. One was a fat old man, Grisby, with a long white beard and a ruddy face like Santa Claus, and the other a small, wasted child, a girl, Quill, with wide eyes and a pale, alabaster face. These two wraiths were always present, reminding Elise of anything that could possibly go wrong. She had told Archer that they spread their messages of gloom with such jolly sarcasm—the possibilities of injury to her daughter, death for her husband, and war and famine and chaos for the world they lived in—like some cosmic joke. At the same time, they protected her from injury, for, as they admitted, without her they would not exist.

Mathematics slipped out from beneath Maggie's feet and came over to sit next to his master. Archer leaned back in the chair and stroked the whippet's smooth scalp. He closed his eyes and saw the fat old man and the child laughing uproariously. Those peals of mirth, at first cacophonous, soon began to flow like music and then like water, gushing down and all around as the fat man held his stomach as if to keep it from bursting and the poor girl pinched her nose with her fingers to hold her breath against the rising tide. Before he knew it, Archer was quite literally at sea. He lost his weak grip on the chair and was floundering, kicking his good leg and flapping his arms in an attempt to stay afloat.

A giant wave took him under, and he sank like a stone down into the depth of the ocean. “I'll drown,” he said aloud and his words came as a torrent of bubbles. He did drown but was still somehow miraculously alive. After falling through sleep and miles of jade-green ocean, his feet touched the edge of an undersea mountain. When he kicked off with his good leg in a vain attempt to rise back to the surface, only his spirit ascended in the phantasmal form of his old body, which he left behind to rot on the craggy rock of the sunken precipice.

Then he was Beetle, scurrying along the deck of
The Mare
, heading for the prow at the insistence of Farso, who pointed into the clear sky. The rest of the crew, the Fongs and Captain Karst, silent Hustermann, Kekmi and Collo, all gathered behind the tattooed man and looked up to where his finger pointed.

“I see it,” said Beetle.

“It's a girl,” said the captain.

And so it was, a girl falling out of the sky.

Farso pulled off his shirt, leaped up onto the prow and then, taking two quick steps along the wooden horse's head and muzzle, dove into the sea. His muscled arms, one bearing the likeness of Saint Michael, one the visage of Beelzebub, cut the water as he swam with all his might to the spot where the falling girl hit the waves and sank like a cannonball. When he reached the vicinity, he dove.

“I hope she is all right,” said Archer in the guise of Beetle. He was the boy, but still strangely aware of the old man he had been. Of two minds at once, he wondered at the odd happenstance of a girl falling from the sky and then at the oddness of being a boy filled with wonder.

The Fongs whistled shrilly and Hustermann brought a hand up to cover his roast beef of a face, one eye peeking through splayed fingers. “Get the medical bag, Beetle,” said Captain Karst. “Treatment might be in order.”

Beetle ran back across the deck and then down the short flight to the captain's cabin. Archer worried that he might not be able to find the bag, but the boy spotted it sitting next to the globe and knew it immediately. By the time he had rejoined the others, Farso had the girl gripped in his left arm and was swimming on his back toward the ship. Hustermann climbed out over the side and hung down by a rope in order to take the girl from her savior.

She lay on the deck, eyes closed, water glistening on her in the sunlight as if she were a newborn baby. She wore a pair of powder-blue pajamas and her hair was twisted and fastened in the back into pigtails. Captain Karst called for the bag and removed its only contents—a bottle of rum. His knees creaked as he knelt beside the girl and tilted the now-open bottle to her lips. A droplet or two of rum trickled into her, and then they waited. When, after a few moments, she did not begin to breathe, Kekmi, the man of the north, gently pushed Karst out of the way and took his place beside the girl. He leaned down over her and put his open mouth on hers. Collo, hanging by his tail from the rigging, looked down upon the group and clapped excitedly.

Nothing happened for close to a minute, and then Kekmi reared back and spat something small, black, and tentacled out onto the deck. Whatever it was tried to scuttle away, but the better looking of the Fong twins stomped on it, crushing it to a pulp. The girl opened her eyes and coughed. The northerner lifted her and placed her in the captain's arms; he took her below decks, removed her wet clothing and wrapped her in a warm blanket. He and Beetle sat with her, feeding her hot soup, and listened to her explain how the dog she was flying on had turned into a string of numbers, mostly zeros, which were nothing. Then all that was left was a thin
one
, and she eventually lost her grip on it and fell.

Beetle told her she was safe and with friends. She smiled and asked where she was.

“On a ship in the Sea of Dolphins,” said the captain. “You'll stay with us until we return to port and then we will find your mother for you.”

“My mother?” asked the girl.

“Of course,” said the captain. “Until then,
The Mare
will be your mother, and we will all be your father, except Beetle, here. He can be your brother. Come to think of it, Collo can be your doll, if you like.”

“I don't play with dolls,” said Maggie.

“Just as well,” said Karst. “I don't think the monkey would have liked it.”

The waves, the sky, the tropical breezes, and the dolphins always leaping, arcing up out of the sea that carried their name and plunging back to cut the water, marked the passage of time beneath the saffron colored sails, appearing for all the world like the curtains in Archer's sunroom. Like some montage out of
The Marble Lark
—there was Maggie, riding Hustermann's shoulders to the crow's nest as if he was a plough horse with a penchant for climbing; listening intently and learning in a single day the whistle code of the Fongs; taking cutlass instruction on the poop deck from Farso, who smiled, with three gold teeth, at his pupil's ingenuity; and watching Kekmi carve a dolphin out of whale bone.

Beetle lazed in the moonlight, twined in the rigging, thinking with his Archer-half about how much of the night remained back at the observatory in the forest. Off the starboard side, he saw a ghostly longboat pass, holding a miasmatic old man, fat as a barrel, with a white beard, and a wan, iridescent, young girl. They were laughing without mirth, in a sinister tone. The sight of the spirits frightened him and he closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them, it was morning, and off in the distance he spotted an island. “Land ho!” he called in his Beetle voice, with his Beetle-half, and below, on deck, the crew crowded to the side of the ship to view the palm-lined shores and volcanic crest of Taramora.

“The home of Neptune's Daughter,” said Karst.

“He has a daughter?” asked Farso.

“Does Neptune even exist?” asked Karst. “I believe he is merely an ancient myth. You see, if you were to take the ocean and pour it into the shape of man … No, I am referring to the
creature
they call Neptune's Daughter. It supposedly haunts the sea caves of this island.”

“Is it pretty?” asked Maggie.

“More horrible, I believe,” said Karst. “With seaweed for hair and a blue and green mottled body. Slippery like a dolphin, but stalking around on huge webbed feet.”

“Claws,” said Kekmi.

“My friend is right,” said Karst. “It cracks one's head like a walnut, with fangs as thick and sturdy as marlin spikes. Then it scoops out the brains and … you get the picture,” said the captain, glancing down at Maggie and then back to the men.

“How do they know it's a girl?” she asked.

“They don't. Men named it,” said Kekmi.

Collo, sitting on the captain's shoulder, batted his eyelashes and placed the back of his hand lightly against his forehead.

As
The Mare
approached the island, there was much commotion on deck, for the men were hauling out of the hold, with block and tackle, the large crate that contained the perfect hunter Chromonis. One of the indistinct crew, of the dozen or so whose faces and characters had yet to become clear, utilized a crowbar to pry open the front panel of the container. Its nails released their hold with a screech and the wooden wall fell forward onto the deck. From within the darkness of the crate stepped a man, glistening silver, made all of metal.

The sun's bright reflection off the strange figure shot a beam into Maggie's eyes. This blinding light, combined with the frantic whistling of the Fongs, formed a whirl of flame inside the girl's mind. In the leaping patterns of that fire, she saw, played out, a tableau of her mother in the arms of her father. They were dancing to music performed on the keys of a tiny piano, each snowflake note like the sound of a crystal pin tapping a crystal goblet. She realized eventually that what she had mistaken for a fire was the flicker of a motion-picture projector and that her father was really the actor, Randolph Mondrian. And then Mondrian was, in fact, Collo, hair perfectly combed, pretending to be that leading man with the reputation for romancing starlets. They danced on and on, in tight circles, through light and dark until finally disappearing into a thick fog redolent of perfume and crushed pearls.

That night, after Maggie had retired to her hammock, the men passed around the bottle from the medical bag and listened, by torch light, to Chromonis recite the times tables in honor of the morrow's hunting. He stood tall and straight like an ambitious young student declaiming Horace. The reflection of the flames played upon his metallic skin, and his eyes, like rivets of light, never blinked. His copper lips did not pronounce words, but merely opened and closed like trapdoors, allowing words to escape, holding them back, straining some to make them squirm through as a means of emphasis. The numbers came and went, and one by one the crew fell into a trance.

Amidst the incantatory rhythm of arithmetic intoned with mechanical accuracy, like a molten rain upon the senses, Farso had a vague recollection of walking the plank in shark-infested seas off Zanzibar. Kekmi fell from the prow toward the gaping maw of a sperm whale. Karst recalled a monstrous typhoon on his tail in the Far Tortuga, but forgot if he ever escaped it. Hustermann felt his neck where the rope had once burned, and the Fongs did not whistle about the incurable fever they had contracted back in the Year of the Rat. Even Beetle had the tiniest whisper of a notion of a bullet to his leg, a cutlass across the face.

Through the fog-shrouded swamps of Taramora they slogged. Chromonis led the way, hand-in-hand with Collo. The moss-hung trees twisted in silent agony. The dark unseemly waters that swirled at their feet, the hunting calls of giant crows, and the death wails of diminutive green cats the size of one's fist that scurried along the branches, made Hustermann take Maggie upon his shoulders for protection. Like some pasha from her elephant castle, she scanned the shadowy landscape for a sign of Neptune's Daughter. In her hand she held a pistol, issued by Karst, that fired narcotic darts to tranquilize but not kill the creature. Farso walked beside her mount, whispering instructions to aim for the heart. Around them traipsed the other members of the crew, carrying rifles loaded with the same nonlethal ammunition. Beetle brought up the rear, hauling a rolled up fishing net over his shoulder.

Tall Chromonis, sleek and proportioned as a statue from antiquity, stopped in his tracks, turned to face the others, and sniffed at the fog. His metal nose somehow twitched, his shining brow wrinkled, and he spoke mechanized words whose sound was not without its own gear-born beauty. “I smell a monster,” he said.

Captain Karst looked over his shoulder, and then back to their guide. “Could you be more specific, sir?” he said.

“Very close,” said Chromonis.

“Where?” whispered Karst.

The water at their feet exploded, and up from the mire came an enormous form, a head taller than Hustermann. It shook the mud from itself, the long strands of seaweed hair flinging wet globs of it in the faces of the hunting party. A green-blue form, slick with wet earth, as if the Earth itself had come to life, leaped upon Chromonis and, with one deft swing of its muscled arm, knocked the perfect hunter's head off in a graceful arc to land spluttering in a puddle. Gear work and springs, party-colored wires and sparks, sprayed from his chrome neck. Maggie was the first to shoot, but her trembling aim succeeded only in wounding both Karst and Collo. As Neptune's Daughter lunged into the pack of sailors, moving with the grace and speed of a dolphin through deep water, more rifles were fired, more errant shots finding human targets, until all save the girl and Beetle had been hit.

Collo curled into a ball of sleep. Farso halfheartedly reached for his cutlass, but was unconscious before he hit the damp earth. Kekmi twitched once and slumped down. The Fongs' whistling turned to snoring as they locked in an embrace and remained upright, a twinly dozing triangle. Hustermann pirouetted three times, already dreaming of home and the dance lessons he had been forced to take as a child. When his huge body succumbed to the drug, he fell over like a sack of potatoes. Maggie screamed as he fell, but the creature grabbed her off his shoulders. Beetle watched from his hiding place behind a tree as Neptune's Daughter carried the girl away into the terrifying shadows of the swamp.

The boy wiped his eyes and came out of hiding. He threw down his net and whistled once, twice, not to the dreaming Fongs but for his friend. Mathematics flew down through the trees as if on a wire in a stage play, his left front leg curled for the descent, and landed next to his master. The dog sat and waited while the boy strained and, with much internal fortitude and a good deal of grunting, transformed himself into the elderly Archer. He knew full well that in this form he would be crippled again and that his cane would be of little help in the swamp, but with a grim determination he stuck its end down into the shallow water and set off in search of his niece, the dog following at his heels.