A Peculiar Peril, page 53
“Hold down the fort, Charlie Mange,” Crowley said.
“Mmmmph,” Charlie Mange replied, sinking to his knees under the weight of the soft wings of hundreds of moths.
* * *
The farmhouse of his friend Mediocre lay a bit closer to Prague than made Crowley comfortable, but still deep in the forest. He had retained a fondness for this patch of woods, with its mighty oaks, lichen, moss, and muffled areas of open meadow with wildflowers. He felt a thrill of excitement as he approached—after all, what if it hadn’t been there, here on Aurora? But it was, and this link to his past warmed his heart.
He couldn’t greet his farmer friend as “Mediocre,” of course—that had just been his father’s nickname for the farmer. Or, farmer-philosopher, as Crowley remembered from age twelve. The farmer had had a huge library of books on the occult and had dabbled in spells himself. His wife Belladimma (father’s name for her) had been a self-proclaimed witch who healed the locals’ ills with mushrooms, magic, and otherwise, along with ointments from crushed roots and leaves.
Once, Crowley had been playing with Mediocre’s daughter Shrill-bane (again, his father’s moniker) and rolled into some poisonous vine. Mediocre had taken him to Belladimma and she had stripped him half-naked and lathered him up with one of her lotions, which had spread a special glow across his body and perked him right up after several sessions.
The farmhouse with its huge troughs for the pigs, which roamed half-wild beyond the clearing, was just as he remembered it. And out front was Mediocre himself, chopping wood with an old rusty ax! Although he saw no sign of Belladimma—and Shrill would be all grown-up by now.
“Friend!” Crowley shouted out to Mediocre as he stepped out of the tree cover. “Well met!”
Mediocre stopped chopping wood, looked Crowley up and down, spit to the side, resumed chopping wood.
“Surely you remember me? Young Crowley? Aleister Crowley?” Mediocre had called him, alternatively, “Fresh Meat” or “Buttlehead,” for some reason. Shrill had called him “Pork Face.” Belladimma had called him “Hither.” But none of these seemed appropriate ways to remind the farmer.
Mediocre sighed, laid down his ax, put his hands on his hips, looked at Crowley, and said, “Naw, sir. I don’t recall.” Was it English with a thick Germanic accent or a kind of debased German? Hard for Crowley to tell.
“Summers? Staying here? With my father? Tall man. Brought you books on the occult. Swore a lot. Didn’t like mosquitoes. Hated small talk.” Was recently torn asunder so he wouldn’t thwart my plans.
“Can’t say it rangs a proverb ball, sir,” Mediocre said.
Crowley almost said “What?” but decided to move on.
“What about Shrill-bane?”
“Shrill? Bane?”
“Your daughter.”
“Never ’ad a daughter, sir. Had a pig named Shrill once. Let ’er eat from the dinner table, didn’t I? But then ’ad to kill an’ eat ’er.”
“That wouldn’t be the one.”
“Well, sir, imp pass.”
“What?”
“Imp pass. Means somethin’ you can’t cross. Ironic-like.”
“I know what impasse means!”
“And call off yer wart beasties there. If they a’come tramplin’ my clearin’ upsetting the chickens an’ they don’ lay, I lose breakfast.”
“Wart beasties?”
“The beasties you use to wage wart, ain’t they?”
“Oh, those,” Crowley said.
It was true. Although he’d wanted to go off on his own, the demi-mages had protested, and rather than directly face his wrath at their disobedience in not letting him be alone, they had sent five or six war crocodiles behind him at a respectful distance, with Emissaries and demi-mages at their sides. And it was true they’d not only made a dreadful racket, but had ruined quite a bit of forest.
Crowley looked back at them and waved them off. “Farther back, damn you! Farther back!”
They stayed where they were, but came no nearer. The mecha-crocodiles had expressions like sorrowful befanged dogs. They were perhaps the most loyal, being stuffed full at this point, of pieces of deceased demi-mages, having run out of animals. But that fact made them no less off-putting to Mediocre.
Muttering to himself, Mediocre had stepped away from the ax and the firewood and moved closer to the farmhouse, sitting on a stool next to the troughs and using a huge pestle to crush some substance into a pail. Beside him at the troughs stood a ruminating cow and next to the cow, hidden at first by its bulk, a man in a cow suit.
“Hallo,” said the man in the cow suit.
“Hello,” said Crowley, flummoxed. “Who are you?”
“Tourist from Prague. Farm life, you know!”
“Go away or I shall feed you to my mecha-crocs,” waving behind him. Out of consideration for Mediocre, or he would’ve just killed him with a spell.
The man stood and fled into the forest. For some time, Crowley could see the bipedal white cow moving back and forth into the distance as he threaded his way between the trees. The suit seemed too big, as if at one point there had been two people inhabiting it. The cow man fell often, got up, fell again. Became a white dot.
“Why’d yew go an’ do that?” Mediocre asked, staring after the cow man. “Payin’ guest. Good milker, too. Milked good.” He continued with his pestle and pail.
“Making saltpeter for experiments?” Crowley asked hopefully, and to change the subject.
“Naw—shit from crops.”
“You’re making … shit … for crops?”
“Fert’lizer. Myself.”
“Ah,” Crowley said, and moved a little away from the farmer.
At which point a number of satanic-looking potatoes popped out of the ground, the expressions on their faces enraged, and attacked Crowley. They were everywhere, like cockroaches, except they were potatoes.
He cast a small fire smell and crisped them alive, their tiny shrieks soon fading and their forms writhing and then still on the ground they had popped out of. Potatoes hated him, and he had no idea why.
Mediocre the farmer had risen from his seat and was staring in alarm at Crowley.
“Oi! Yer upsettin’ me crop. Crop I’m makin’ the shit for!”
“I’m dreadfully sorry, Mediocre,” Crowley said, and he was. This reunion wasn’t at all what he’d hoped for. It was, in fact, becoming more stressful by the moment.
“What did ye call me?”
“Nothing,” Crowley said quickly, sadly. “Nothing at all.”
The farmer stared at him a moment, tossed the mortar into the bucket, scowled, and said, “Now, ye listen here to me, strange for-iner. Ahv no recollect of yew. Ahv no recollect at-awl. And yew’ve not got the right top half or mayhap the wrong bottom half. I’ve no dear, no wont no dear. Did yew scramble with ’nother gent bottom of yonder hill? Mayhap yew shewd go hence, collect up yer right parts? For yer mind is cut loose.”
Crowley was spared a response to whatever Mediocre had said by the heaving of mighty wings, and Wretch plummeted to his side, in a concentrated hawklike form black as night, with but a single huge eye and mighty talons. The sudden physicality of it, that weight at his shoulder, made Crowley recoil and shriek. The smell was the worst thing: seafood chowder gone bad, drowned in castor oil and then set aflame with petrol.
But the farmer was made of sterner stuff, or, at least, must have seen many odd things in the forest.
“What matter of infernal bat be ye?” Mediocre asked, indignant, as if this were the last straw and he needed every bit of hay for the winter.
Wretch opened a mouth that kept growing, roared at the man, “Not the forgiving kind!”
It was clear he meant to swallow Mediocre whole, as the man fell to the ground from the onslaught, and began gibbering and sidling crablike back toward the safety of the farmhouse.
“No, Wretch, no! Don’t! He’s … he’s just a … badger … isn’t that right, Mediocre?” Concentrating all the power of his gaze upon the frightened man. “You’re a badger. No threat at all. Badger badger badger.”
A new light and certainty entered Mediocre’s eyes, and he stopped sidling like a crab. Instead, he began digging. Just like a badger. Pathetic. How had his father ever counted this man as his friend?
Then the cow exploded at the trough, covering Crowley and the farmer-badger in offal. Icky, small, rough bits.
When he’d regained his feet, he saw Ruth Less at the trough, which was full of rather disorganized cow parts. The smell would have been life-altering, if Crowley’s life hadn’t been so altered already.
Ruth Less had slaughtered the cow in a very idiosyncratic way, via explosion, so quickly it had hardly had a chance to moo, the better to eat it, and now was gorging on the body, mouth-parts filthy with blood. Slobber and drool ruined the schoolmarm illusion, as did the opening up of the head to reveal the mouth-parts, tentacles gathering up cow pieces and shoveling them in.
Worst still, Wretch, back to his normal size, joined Ruth Less at the trough-buffet, head over the side, chewing, while behind Crowley heard the unwieldly tread of the mecha-crocodiles approaching.
What a mess.
“Did she have to kill the cow?” Crowley asked the air.
Wretch looked up from his feast long enough to say, “Ruth Less needs to keep up her strength. She almost captured the Golden Sphere. Really, we are so very close. Now she has their scent!”
Wretch, after being almost gloomy the past week, had a kind of maniacal, bright gleam in his eye. Almost gleeful.
“Wot trees ’av come ta dark wood, then yew shall be undone by ’uge monster an’ mystery howz.” Mediocre muttering at Crowley, looking at him like he was a war criminal. Muttering prophecies?
“There are trees here now, Mediocre.”
“Axley m’point.”
Wretch nodded at Mediocre. “Did you get the nostalgia over and done with?”
“He doesn’t really know me.”
“Ahm standin’ right ’ere.”
“Of course he didn’t,” Wretch said. “Only I know you. Do you understand now?”
“Understand what?”
Wretch laughed cruelly. “You can’t go home again. No one can. No one really wants to.”
Ruth Less was sniffing the air with violence, spreading red gore-snot everywhere.
“Sensing something, Ruth Less?” Wretch said in an elevated tone, as if talking to a dog who wanted to play fetch. “Go get it, Ruth Less! Go get it!”
“Jonathan. Danny. Rack.”
“Yes, Ruth Less! Good girl! Go go go!”
Crowley had never seen Wretch so maniacally happy. He was even tittering and giggling a bit, which was odd.
Ruth Less went bounding off into the mist.
As if the mist required an equal and opposite reaction to Ruth Less’s vast mass smashing into it, the mist disgorged in that moment twelve or fourteen onrushing bears. Along with an odd horse and cart, and a number of other random dangers. Monsters galore. Nothing Crowley hadn’t seen before in his mind’s eye of a Sunday.
Which was Crowley’s sign, spur of the moment, that he wasn’t yet done with his wandering, and used the resulting confusion to flee into the mist again, euphoric to escape Wretch’s wretched euphoria.
If only for a little while.
Chapter Sixty-Five-ish
I LAUGH WHEN I CRY AND I CRIESH WHENS I LAUGHSH
Such a relief, to escape the Aurora underground, to go through a door that performed as advertised—in this case, deposit them in the forests adjacent to Prague. A clean-smelling, cheery forest full of fox squirrels and squirrel foxes and rabbits and birds unfamiliar to Jonathan, many threading through the canopy, accompanied by song. Even the little abandoned ruin of a castle they came out of, the quaint stone entranceway that was the magical door, appealed to Jonathan.
So when black bears appeared as they walked through a meadow clearing and Danny had to discharge the bear gun, which only created more bears, and they’d all had to run and gotten more than slightly lost and off course, it still felt different from the claustrophobic darkness, the weight of everything down there.
By the time Jonathan and the others had stopped running, the bears had entered into some kind of growling melee. Jonathan didn’t speak enough bear to figure it out; all he knew was they reached some kind of agreement and had forgotten their human prey. Soon enough, Jonathan couldn’t even hear the least bit of growl or any other of the ninety-three possible bear sounds. For which, still a bit out of breath, he was immensely grateful.
Danny threw the bear gun to the ground as the rest of them leaned over, breathing hard from the brisk run. “It’s out of bears!”
Jonathan stood, leaned over, wheezed, “No—keep it. We’ll find some way to reload it later.” Honestly, though, he just wanted to be safe somewhere, in a place where a bear gun wasn’t necessary.
“Reload it?” Danny echoed. “With what? Where are we going to find more bears?”
“Oh, of course, Danny,” Rack said. “That’s the real problem. If we can only find more bears, we can reload it. As long as they’re okay with being stuffed into that tiny musket muzzle.”
“I think Prague is still that way,” Mamoud said, pointing to where a much-disused loamy trail led into what looked like ever-darker forest.
“We’re definitely near Prague,” Jonathan said, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with where Mamoud was pointing.
“How do you know? How do either of you know?”
“I only have a feeling,” Jonathan admitted. A feeling that they needed to get to their destination soon.
“I’ve been here before,” Mamoud said. “Those birds and bees are humming what I believe is the Czech national anthem.”
Danny nodded. “Jonathan’s right. Mamoud’s right. We’re close—and it is that way.”
“And how do you know?” Rack said, but it was a feeble protest.
Danny shrugged. “I just know.”
“Into the deep, dark forest it is!” Jonathan said with emphasis. He liked a deep, dark forest. Everyone knew that, and something about his enthusiasm turned Rack jovial again and Mamoud more relaxed.
Perhaps he felt so good because he knew he had been deminiaturized. Something about being big again was good for the circulatory system. Or the internal organs. Which was only a guess.
He was still trying to find the right time to tell them about the miniaturization … to tell them about, well, everything.
Before they got to the safety of Prague did not seem like the right time.
* * *
But, then, as the forest showed no sign of ending, or revealing a sudden city of Prague, Jonathan found himself in an argument with Mamoud that he hadn’t intended, his mood souring. It didn’t much seem as if anything about Alice’s plotting or Mamoud’s role in things had been resolved. And it might be unreasonable, but once he went down that path, he couldn’t stop, had to ask Mamoud about Alice, about how they’d come to work together.
“What does it matter, right now? You can ask the Order when we reach Prague—about all of this. Alice, the doors, your haunted mansion. Besides, we have been through a lot together, haven’t we?”
Mamoud, trying to take the edge off, and Jonathan acutely aware of that and not having any of it. Thinking of Dr. Lambshead’s advice and Crikey going on about intrigues he couldn’t see.
But, mostly, perhaps, he didn’t like how the Voice had disappeared again despite him asking the Voice to wake up. Nor did he like how despite it being midday, the sky was getting dark and wisps of mist had begun to trail along the uneven ground. The smell was like rain but not, moisture in the air, but there would be no downpour, he was sure of it. It would just linger there, raising the humidity.
“Quite a lot, actually. It matters a lot,” Jonathan said. “Because as far as I can tell, the ‘Republic’ is content to sit back and watch Crowley and hope that he self-destructs. Like the Mali magician—you’ve not once mentioned Republic military intervention. I think it’s just you, Mamoud, working with Alice for a time, and maybe a handful of others. And sometimes it helps you to pretend you support the Order, but in the meantime, someone or some thing—maybe Crowley or maybe not—is picking off members of the Order. But not you and not Alice—neither of you are in danger, because neither of you are really part of the Order. Indeed, given Alice seems to work for Her Majesty’s government, you could say you work for her.”
“Alice was a mistake,” Mamoud conceded.
“Clearly,” Rack said, butting in, but butted out again after a stern glance from Danny, for which Jonathan was grateful.
“Is it the Republic that has the same goals as the Order, or just you?”
Mamoud sighed. “I never trusted Alice completely, if I’m honest. But the idea I had, as both a member of the Order and a citizen of the Republic, was to feed information to her and see where it ended up.”
“Disinformation, you mean,” Jonathan said.
“Yes. And to keep her close because, of all of us, I could see her motivations least of all. Something troubled her. She was not herself on our expedition. Not the person I knew.”
“Was she supposed to lead me to you?”
Mamoud laughed. “No—I was most surprised when you showed up for tea in the turret.”
Jonathan believed him. Felt oddly vindicated, that his own initiative had tossed him into the frying pan, not some intricate deception.
“And where did her information end up?”
“Not determined yet. And now too late. But it was used by … the other side. Sometimes. Other times … not used at all.”
“Is there anything else you’re not telling us, Mamoud?” Jonathan asked. “Because I’m at my limit trying to keep up with Aurora and tangled webs and cryptic clues.”
Mamoud almost spat out a reply, but, Jonathan thought, with a grudging respect for his resolve mixed in.
“You’ve only been in Aurora for what? A week? A little more. What do you really know about this place? Do you think it is all idyllic meadows with quaint talking marmots from fairy tales? Did you even know that there is no ‘United States’ here? That the Europeans never conquered the Americas?”
