#How to Reach Avenue East

[dr-spencer-reids-queen]

Haunted: Part One

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~1.7k

Summary: This is Hotch's first case back since being stabbed by Foyet. As much as he says he's fine, he's not and he's letting his emotions affect the case in a negative way.

Warnings: canon violence, canon language, canon talk of death, methods of kill

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Criminal Minds. All credit goes to their respective owners. If there are any warnings that exceed the normal death/kills from the show, I will list them.

x

"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not to be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place." - Emily Dickinson

Spencer isn't used to not being able to do things on his own so helping him get ready for work is a challenge.

"Will you stay still?" you say and grab his pants. 

"I can do it. Give it to me."

"Spencer Walter Reid. Stop moving and let me help you."

He freezes at the mention of his middle name. No one knows it but you, apparently.

"How did you...?"

"I've seen your driver's license. Now sit down and give me your leg."

Spencer sits on the edge of the bed and stretches his bad leg out to you so you can pull his pants on. It's been a month of recovering from both Hotch and Spencer. This is going to be his first day back since getting out of the hospital, and you're not sure how this is gonna go. It could either go horribly wrong and he'll need to take more time off or he'll be back on his feet. Emily wanted to pick Hotch up and drive him to the airport even though he'd been cleared to drive on his own.

With no unit chief in the office, you have a few minutes to yourself so you and Spencer head to Penelope's office to hang with her until Hotch comes in. Spencer hobbles into her office and she pulls up a chair for him.

"Thank you."

"Does it hurt?"

"It really only hurts when I think about it, which is pretty much all the time."

You place your hands on his shoulders from behind and massage his muscles gently.

"Don't worry, I've been very good at distracting him." Penelope laughs as Spencer looks at you with a smile on his face. You lean down and kiss him Spiderman-style. It's becoming one of your favorite positions to kiss him. When you pull away, you rake your fingers through his hair. "When are you gonna let me braid your hair?"

"Never," he says playfully and pushes you off him. Penelope has a box of cookies on the table, and he reaches to grab one but she slaps his hand away and slaps the lid on it. "Hey!"

"These are for Hotch," she says and puts a bucket of lollipops on top of them.

"I get shot in the leg and I don't get any cookies? You know he's gonna hate the attention," Spencer says and grabs a lollipop.

"It's cookies, not cake."

"He's probably gonna pretend like nothing happened," you state.

"Well, it doesn't mean we have to."

"I think maybe we should."

"I don't roll that way."

"I've been thinking about the entire time I've known Hotch, I don't think I've ever seen him blink," Spencer says.

"I know. It's weird."

"It's classic alpha male behavior."

"Do you think he stared down Foyet?" Penelope asks fearfully.

"Yes. I saw it. He didn't go down without a fight, that's for sure."

"Do you think he stared the whole time, like with each stab?"

"Yes."

"Is he okay?"

"I wouldn't be, but I'm a blinker," Spencer says, and you kiss the top of his head.

The door opens and JJ walks in with files in her hands.

"Spence, Y/N, there you two are. Grab your go bag."

"What's going on?"

"Turn on the news."

Penelope turns on one of the news channels that's talking about the most recent crime your team is going to investigate.

"Just after eight this morning, forty-year-old Darrin Call, a lifelong resident of Louisville, assaulted customers at the pharmacy on the corner of Main and Truxton Avenue. Eyewitnesses saw him walking east on Main Street minutes after the attack. He has not been seen since then. He was wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and a light-gray jacket. Within the hour, the Governor has called in all sources for a manhunt. Despite these statewide efforts, the suspect has eluded law enforcement. The body count is rising. Three are confirmed dead including an armed bank guard whose gun was used in the attack. Another two remain in critical condition. The assailant is still out there. We are going back to Eric Jennings who's been talking to residents of Louisville residents."

"We're going to Louisville."

"Alright. Bye, Pen."

You get up and escort Spencer out of her office over to his desk. You grab both yours and his bag since he can't carry his own and use his crutches, and you two head out with the team to the airplane. Spencer takes the couch to rest his leg while you take one of the chairs surrounding the small table.

"Our point person in Louisville is Lieutenant Kevin Mitchell," JJ says.

Just then, Hotch and Emily walk onto the plane, and you immediately feel anger coming off Hotch in waves. He has a stoic look on his face like always but the anger is stewing deep down inside him. It's a calm anger and it's all for Foyet.

"Good morning," Hotch greets.

"You look well, sir," Penelope says over video chat.

"Thank you. How long do you have that?" Hotch asks Spencer about his crutches.

"I'm not really sure. Welcome back."

"Thanks. Any other attacks?"

"No, not yet. Call's proven hard to track. He's never had a driver's license, so he's most likely still on foot or public transportation."

"No, he's not gonna take the bus. His face is everywhere," you shake your head.

"Has anyone found a stressor?"

"He just lost his job," Penelope explains. "He's worked at a factory since 1990 making appliances and not a single promotion."

"That's a long time to be bitter."

"Yeah, he's of the hermit variety. As far as I can tell, he's got no one. No wife, no kids, and no parents."

"Nothing to live for. Why hasn't he killed himself yet? Sprees usually end in suicide. If he's got nothing to live for, why hasn't he ended it?"

"He's not finished yet," Spencer answers Hotch. "We know he has displaced anger. He took it out on the first victim."

"The stock boy represents someone. We need to know who. Is he military?"

"No."

"He's lashing out for a reason. This guy's got anger, endless targets, and a gun. He's just getting started."

When the plane lands, you go off with Derek and Hotch to the crime scene at the pharmacy while Spencer and JJ head to the police station to get set up. Lieutenant Kevin Mitchell is waiting for them as soon as they walk in, and he's eager to get started. Before your team landed in Louisville, he created checkpoints on the state's lines at both the I-64 and I-65 and within a twenty-mile radius downtown. They think he's still on foot.

Take into consideration the average walking speed of two and a half miles per hour, and it's been just under three hours, then that adds up to an approximate eight-mile radius. First responders started a hard-target search of businesses and residences within that eight miles, and you're going to join them.

The lieutenant dug up all he could on Darrin Call but didn't find much. Me and Rossi are at his apartment so they might be able to find something the police couldn't. The strategy in all of this is to determine where he's headed next in order to stop him. Most spree killers are outwardly aggressive, and Darrin isn't that. He's defensive even if the video doesn't immediately show it.

You watch the video of Darrin over and over again until you see it. Darrin isn't aggressive until someone touches him. That's what set him off. It happens before he stabs someone. He hates being touched which is a trigger for him. 

He never meant to hurt these people, and he never went in there with a weapon. JJ is working with the media to inform them as soon as she possibly can. Darrin's apartment is a five-minute walking distance from the pharmacy but there is no sign at his apartment that he came back to wash off the blood, which means he's still bloody and walking around town like that.

Penelope says he doesn't have any family, so where is he going to go looking like that? He might be messy in the head and in his everyday life, but his apartment is really neat or maybe he's military or hospitalized which means he has the same routine every day.

However, today is different. He killed three people. Why did it change?

The energy left at the pharmacy is astounding. The energy is breaking off into different streams as if it's panicking. Darrin isn't right in the head and he is definitely going to hurt himself sooner rather than later. He's going to piss off the wrong person and get hurt.

"Hotch, he's losing his mind. His mind is tearing itself into pieces. This energy is being pulled apart." Hotch stares straight ahead without giving you any indication that he heard you. "Hotch, did you hear me?"

"Yeah," he nods and walks off.

Hotch isn't okay. Who would be after what he went through?

"Mr. Call was always so quiet. He's been coming here for years," a woman talking to Derek says.

She is the pharmacist responsible for giving out medications to people.

"Has he ever had a run-in with the stock boy?"

"I can't see why he would. John was new here. I waved him over. I didn't know what else to do. No one else was helping."

"He didn't turn violent until you gave him his prescription?" you ask.

"It wasn't his. It was somebody else's. I just wanted him to calm down."

"JJ's press conference is in five minutes," Hotch says when he joins the group.

"Hotch, we might have something else here. Why didn't you give him his own medication?" Derek asks the woman.

"He didn't have any refills left."

"For what?"

"Alprazolam, but he used to be on Thiothixene."

"He was on an antipsychotic?" Hotch asks.

"That's why I wanted him to calm down. He's been off his medications for about a month now."

"When were you gonna tell us this? He's armed and delusional. Who's his doctor?" Hotch asks angrily.

"I don't remember. My computer..."

You turn to see her computer had been damaged in the fight.

"Great," Hotch scoffs and walks off.

"I'm sorry."

You and Derek look at each other because Hotch is completely out of line for this.

"He's not listening to us. I've seen this kind of behavior before. He's not going to want to listen. Not until he catches Foyet." You two walk over to Hotch. "Hotch."

"Call JJ and tell her about the meds."

"This is not her fault and you know it."

"Morgan, he's in a psychotic break. It changes everything."

"Do you want to talk about this?"

"No! I want to find him!" Hotch sighs in frustration and pulls out his phone to call Penelope. "Garcia, he's been off his antipsychotic for a month. What else did you miss?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't get his medical records yet, so--"

"Find them. Find everything."

"Yes, sir."

x

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[pickl-o]

Oop, forgot to put my signature. Anyway, CHAPTER 1

Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely– having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs–commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?–Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster– tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand–miles of them–leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,– north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies–what is the one charm wanting?– Water there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick– grow quarrelsome–don’t sleep of nights–do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;–no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,–though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board–yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;–though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about–however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way– either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,– what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way– he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.” “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces– though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it–would they let me–since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

CHAPTER 2

The Carpet-Bag

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original– the Tyre of this Carthage;–the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones–so goes the story– to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,–So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south–wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Harpoons”–but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,–rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and the “The Sword-Fish?”–this, then must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath–“The Spouter Inn:–Peter Coffin.”

Coffin?–Spouter?–Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.

It was a queer sort of place–a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer–of whose works I possess the only copy extant–“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind–old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper–(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.

CHAPTER 3

The Spouter-Inn

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.– It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.–It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.–It’s a blasted heath.– It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.–It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon–so like a corkscrew now–was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way– cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round–you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den–the bar–a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without–within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass– the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full– not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.

“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?–you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.”

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland– no fire at all–the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind–not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.

“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”

“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”

“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t– he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”

“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”

“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.

Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.

Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.”

A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth– the bar–when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.

The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.

I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.

It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight– how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?

“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.– I shan’t sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”

“Just as you please; I’m sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”–feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane there in the bar–wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit–the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study.

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one– so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march on him–bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!

Still looking around me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all–there’s no telling.

But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.

“Landlord! said I, “what sort of a chap is he–does he always keep such late hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.

The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s an early bird–airley to bed and airley to rise–yea, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”

“Can’t sell his head?–What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”

“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”

“With what?” shouted I.

“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”

“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me–I’m not green.”

“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”

“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.

“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.

“Broke,” said I–“broke, do you mean?”

“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”

“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snowstorm–“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow–a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”

“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me– but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”

“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes–it’s a nice bed: Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. After that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give ye a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday–you won’t see that harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor somewhere–come along then; do come; won’t ye come?”

I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.

“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable now; and good night to ye.” I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.

But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer’s not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.

Whether that mattress was stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round–when, good heavens; what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man–a whaleman too– who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head–a ghastly thing enough– and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat– a new beaver hat–when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head–none to speak of at least– nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this headpeddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face, his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too–perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine–heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime–to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.

“Who-e debel you?”–he at last said–“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.

“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!”

“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a hair of your head.”

“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”

“I thought ye know’d it;–didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads around town?–but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here–you sabbee me, I sabbee–you this man sleepe you–you sabbee?”

“Me sabbee plenty”–grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.

“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself–the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into bed–rolling over to one side as much as to say– I won’t touch a leg of ye.”

“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”

I turned in, and never slept better in my life.

CHAPTER 4

The Counterpane

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade– owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times– this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other– I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,– my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse– at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour: anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it–half steeped in dreams–I opened my eyes, and the before sunlit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm– unlock his bridegroom clasp–yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him–“Queequeg!”–but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!–in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.

He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then–still minus his trowsers– he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself– boots in hand, and hat on–under the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state– neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones– probably not made to order either–rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal’s baton.

CHAPTER 5

Breakfast

I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.

You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.

“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s performances– this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.

These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas–entire strangers to them– and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table–all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes–looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

But as for Queequeg–why, Queequeg sat there among them– at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.

CHAPTER 6

The Street

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one–I mean a downright bumpkin dandy–a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples– long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

CHAPTER 7

The Chapel

In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

OF

JOHN TALBOT,

Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836.

THIS TABLET

Is erected to his Memory

BY HIS SISTER.

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

OF

ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG,

Forming one of the boats’ crews OF

THE SHIP ELIZA

Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the

PACIFIC,

December 31st, 1839.

THIS MARBLE

Is here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

OF

The late

CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,

Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833.

THIS TABLET

Is erected to his Memory

BY

HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say–here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands! how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

CHAPTER 8

The Pulpit

I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom– the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.

I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold–a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.

But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s face; and this bright face shed a distant spot of radiance upon the ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off– serenest azure is at hand.”

Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.

What could be more full of meaning?–for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

CHAPTER 9

The Sermon

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. “Star board gangway, there! side away to larboard–larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog– in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy–

The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom,

While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.

I saw the opening maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell– Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints– No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne;

Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.

My song for ever shall record

That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God,

His all the mercy and the power.

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah–‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'”

“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters– four yarns–is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God– never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed– which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do–remember that– and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,–no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other–“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles. and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.

“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs–‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’–‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’–he says,–‘the passage money how much is that?– I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.

“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.” “Thou look’st like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ wards.

“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, “straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’

“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship– a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.

“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they all-outward to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.

“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries–and then–‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,– when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.

“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.”

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:

“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet–‘out of the belly of hell’–when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten–his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean– Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,–“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him–a far, far upward, and inward delight– who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,–top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath–O Father!– chiefly known to me by Thy rod–mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

CHAPTER 10

A Bosom Friend

Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.

But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page– as I fancied–stopping for a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face–at least to my taste– his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems as Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is– which was the only way he could get there–thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman,

-🍒🚬

....

mods jfk his ass

[modern-day-bard]

Other Duties As Assigned: A Joel Miller Fanfiction

Content Warning: 18+ This story includes mature themes such as drinking, stalking, violence, and explicit smut. Minors, do not interact.

Chapter 4: Exit Points

Joel

I know exactly what this woman is doing.

I see the way she treats other people, especially the staff at her father’s house. She may be tough, but she’s not this nasty to anyone else. She also isn’t this scantily clad around anyone else, either.

It started with whatever that gazelle walk was to her bathroom. I was putting away my clothes into the dresser across from the bed, but I could see enough to know what was going on. I averted my gaze immediately. For over an entire week now, Guinevere only seems to address me if she is half-naked. Otherwise, I'm almost completely ignored. It’s made me watch her less at home and at the gym, and I get the sense that she knew that. It was no secret she didn’t want me here, and her body seems to be her first line of defense. I’ve grown to believe that’s part of the reason she’s draping herself on her couch in very short, silk nightgowns when no one else is around.

When she is wearing clothing appropriate for autumn on the East Coast, she’s still choosing shorter skirts or low-cut tops. She’ll usually wear a jacket over the ensemble before removing it when we get where we’re going. Naturally, I look away. My instinct is to give a woman her privacy. But it doesn’t take long for me to remember that watching her is half of the reason why I’m here, the other half being to watch those around her. So when I do need to check on her, I usually settle for looking her in her eyes.

And she is usually already glaring back at me.

Guinevere always makes sure to turn that scowl back into a pleasant smile when speaking to anyone that isn’t either a) trying to protect her, or b) currently working in some corporate capacity for her father. Like the sales people who are fawning over her now.

I would have preferred if Guinevere could have told me ahead of time that we would be venturing into one of the most high traffic streets in the country, but that would make it too easy on me. If she wasn’t so active online, she could probably move about New York with little to no recognition. Thanks to her online presence however, many people looked her way as we walked from store to store on Fifth Avenue. She muttered something about the last stop as we entered Bergdorf Goodman. And the sales staff here descended on her like a swarm of bees.

Over an hour later, they must have taken us through the entire store. It’s hard to tell if the staff actually likes her, or just her money. But from where I stand, her smile seems genuine. She jokes with them like they are old friends. Though now, the three that had been showing her item after item give her some space as she approaches a jewelry counter. They look as if they’re collectively holding their breath.

My cell buzzes in my pocket, and I answer it on my earpiece.

“Miller,” I say.

“Mr. Miller, hello,” a cheery male voice sounds over the speaker, “My name is Ezra Garcia, Mr. Russell’s first assistant.”

“Hello, Ezra.” I hadn’t spoken to him, but I already had his photo on file back at the apartment. “Everything alright?”

“Of course. I was calling to confirm that Miss Russell will be attending her father’s dinner this evening. She doesn’t use an assistant, and it seems she has been unable to reply to her father or myself.”

I glance up at Gwen, who currently has her phone in her hand to take a photo of whatever is in that jewelry case. Unable to reply is a nice way to put it.

“I’m sorry for reaching out to her through you, sir. Mr. Russell hasn’t had one of his dinner’s for some time. It’s recommended that Miss Russell attend.”

I know that by recommended, he means mandatory. “Absolutely. I will remind her.”

“Wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Miller. Good to meet you.”

I open my mouth to reply, but Ezra has already hung up.

I walk over to Gwen, noticing how two of the sales people eye me as I do so.

“These are pretty,” I say quietly, leaning to look into the glass case.

Gwen glowers up at me, but she doesn’t speak. I keep my voice low, “You have dinner at your father’s tonight, his assistant just called.”

She turns her attention back to one of the rings she was trying on. “I’m aware. Ezra’s already texted me several times.”

“You didn’t think you should text back so he knew where you were?” I don’t mean it to be accusatory, I just don’t understand what the point is for avoiding these people like the plague.

“They know I’m coming, Mr. Miller. I don’t have a choice.”

“Ezra wasn’t so sure.”

One of the sales associates, a perky brunette with a ponytail, approaches us from behind the counter.

“I think you’re right, Daisy. The emerald will just suit her so much better.” I don’t even recognize that calm, polite tone from Gwen.

The associate perks up even further, “Excellent. Would you like me to wrap it up for you?”

“Yes, please.”

Daisy takes the whopping jewel away from Gwen with a smile.

“Who is the ring for?” I fold my hands on the countertop, which seems to disgust her.

“Why? In case they copy my fingerprints off of it with a piece of tape?”

I huff, “Hadn’t actually thought of that one. I was just curious.”

Gwen ponders that for a moment before replying, her blue eyes narrowing with speculation. “My friend, Harper. It’s her birthday soon. We’re having a party for her on Friday. So I guess that means you’ll be attending the party, too.” She sighs to herself.

Now wouldn’t be a good time to explain that I already know who Harper is, what she looks like, what school she attended, and how long the two of them have known each other. What I didn’t know about, was the party.

“I’ll need the details about that party, Miss Russell.”

“And you’ll get them, Mr. Miller. Just be patient.”

I interlock my fingers on the countertop, lightly cracking them. “It’s Wednesday.”

“Correct. And Wednesday isn’t the same day as Friday, now, is it? I promise I’ll give you the details tomorrow. That should be more than enough time to plan where you're going to stand and do nothing all night.” She pats one of her soft, manicured hands on top of mine as if to physically stamp her condescending tone. She then turns her attention back to the jewelry. I squeeze my fingers together until my knuckles go white.

I learn shortly afterwards that part of my duties include carrying tens of thousands of dollars in shopping bags. On the bright side, when Rodney drops us off at her apartment, Gwen actually begins to get ready for dinner. When she starts to shimmy out of her skirt in the middle of the living room though, I think it best to wait in my room. With the door closed this time. I think about giving Tommy a call to update him on everything, but I don’t trust Gwen not to leave without me. Thankfully, the walls are decently thin. I can always tell when she’s walking down the hall, or talking on the phone, even if I can’t hear exactly what she’s saying. Still, I don’t want to get distracted.

Her shoes tonight make it even easier for me to hear when she’s finished getting ready forty minutes later. The click-clacking reverberates down the hall as she makes her way to the living room. I stand from my spot at the end of the bed, cracking my neck and looking myself over in the full-length mirror in the corner. I button up one extra button and smooth back my hair with my hands. No one ever discussed a wardrobe requirement with me, and I hadn’t given it much thought. Most of this past week has been split between chasing Gwen whenever ‘spontaneous’ plans come up, and scheduling the best reps I know to install the new security system. But to wait outside or stand at the edge of a room, I feel like this should be fine.

That is, until I walk into the living room and feel my breath get caught in my throat. Gwen’s waves have been pulled up off of her neck with a few pieces left loose to frame her face. A face that now had pinker cheeks and glossier lips. For the first time, focusing my attention on her face didn’t seem like a good idea. At least what she had on now was more coverage than she’s had since the first day I met her. A clean, black strapless dress. It may be incredibly short, but she finally put tights on. When she leans over to adjust the strap on her heels though, I need to look away regardless.

“I’ll text Rodney that we’re ready to leave,” I say to the sofa.

I can feel her disapproving frown on me anyway. “He already knows.”

Inhaling deeply, I say, “Again, Miss Russell, we need to work out some logistics together,” I risk a glance at her, “But I am glad he knows.”

She doesn’t give me anything besides a huff and a look at my button-down. At least I know if there is a dress code, she’ll be the first one to tell me that I missed the mark.

Rodney meets us in the underground garage, which I count as a win. I have taken to sitting in the front seat instead, trying to abide by her request for space as much as possible. The ride to her father’s house takes less than twenty minutes, and when we get there, she actually allows me to get out and get her door for her first. For this, I’m thankful, especially because her father’s brownstone has no rear or alternative entrance. I make a note to research later if this is standard for oldschool brownstones, if they’re protected by some historical society, or if we can look into changing things.

Even calling this place a brownstone feels wrong. It’s the castle of brownstones. You could probably fit three, multimillion-dollar brownstones inside of this one. I’m glad Gwen doesn't live here as it’s so much more ground to cover. That, and the fact that she’s impossibly uptight and unsettled as we walk inside. Her shoulders are tighter than normal, and she shakes her head a little before walking through the doors. Maybe one would think that it was to get those few little locks out of her eyes, but I disagree. To me, it looks like a boxer rolling out their shoulders before stepping into the ring.

“Miss Russell!” A smiling, younger man of moderate build brightens as we walk through the doors.

“Ezra, how are you?” Gwen’s returning smile is kind as she unbuttons her jacket. Instinctively, I move to take it from her. She gives me a quick, speculative look, before turning her attention back to Ezra.

Ezra, who is now looking at me. I fold Gwen’s jacket over my arm and extend my hand to him. “Joel Miller, we spoke on the phone.”

Understanding washes over his face. “Ah, Mr. Miller. Good to meet you in person. Most of the guests are already in the dining room,” He nods toward the back of the wide foyer. I’ve memorized this floor plan top to bottom, and Gwen and I visited a few days ago for a meeting with her stylist, Evelyn. Still, knowing the layout doesn’t take away from its beauty. The home was clearly restored to its original glory, just adding modern finishes. If I were in another situation, I would want a tour. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to look around during the meal when a tall brunette man walks around the corner. The sly set of his smile has my instincts firing off immediately.

“Gwenny! You made it.” Him and his loafers stride up and plant a kiss on Gwen’s cheek. Her entire body stiffens, and I take a step closer to her. The man doesn’t pay any attention to me, placing his hand on her lower back to guide her down the part of the hall he just came from. Gwen straightens her already ridged shoulders.

“Daniel,” She says cooly, grabbing his wrist and placing it next to his side. Where it belongs.

“It’s been a while since we had one of our little family meetings.” His confidence doesn’t seem to be shaken in the slightest.

“It’s not a meeting, it’s dinner. And we’re not family.”

“Well, we’re all a part of the Russell Corp. family.”

Gwen legitimately snorts at this. “Whatever makes you feel less inferior, Daniel.” I’m surprised when she tosses a glance back at me. “Have you met Mr. Miller?”

Daniel turns to face me now that we’re standing outside the double doors of the dining room.

“Nice to meet you,” I extend my hand. He regards me with a mixture of displeasure and boredom.

“Mr. Wilson,” Daniel shakes my hand, “You’re the one who’s been put in charge of Gwenny I see.”

I give him a closed-lipped smile, “In charge of her protection, you mean. Yes.”

His brow lifts slightly. “Yes, of course. Well, pleasure.” He abruptly tramps into the dining room, leaving Gwen to follow after. Unsure of what the protocol is, I hang back. But Gwen only makes it a few steps before looking expectantly at me, and curling one long finger towards her.

When I fall into step beside her, she says, “My father will want to meet you, if you haven’t met already.”

I nod, taking in a room so lavish it looks like it belongs in Buckingham Palace. The group congregating around the long, mahogany table is composed primarily of men, though a few women hover next to them. I notice a smaller group, two men and one woman, practically glaring at Gwen. I move so that I’m standing on her left side, blocking their view. If Gwen notices, she doesn’t show it. The next man I see is her father, William, whom I recognize from the photo Arthur provided. He’s deep in what looks to be a serious conversation as we approach, but he ends it when he sees Gwen.

True to his photograph, William Russell does not crack even a slight smile. He has a similar way about him that Arthur does, only way more intense. Maybe all rich guys have that way about them. It’s an unwritten power dynamic; an entitlement. No matter what you do, they’ll always be just a little displeased. Because you’re not one of them. I find it surprising that this displeasure also applies to his daughter. If anyone were going to carry out that entitlement, I would think it would be the only heir.

“Darling,” William says in a mild, low voice. He gives Gwen a quick kiss on the cheek before pulling more than an arm’s length away. “You look well.”

I wonder if he’s seen her since that charity gala.

“Thanks, Dad.” Gwen’s tone is the opposite of her father’s. It’s far too cheerful. “Being watched twenty-four-seven does wonders.”

“I should think you were sleeping better.” William’s voice turns frosty.

“With a strange man in my home? That’s an interesting conclusion to make.”

I cast my gaze down to the floor. I hadn’t thought she would be afraid of me. I should have. I at least should have told her my background, my experience. Though on second thought, the experience could make her trust me less.

“Guinevere. Are you going to introduce me, or not?” William assesses me.

“Mr. Miller, this is my father, William Russell. He’s the one signing your paychecks.”

I shake his hand, “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Likewise,” his handshake is firm despite his age. “I assume Gwen’s security system is being brought up to its proper standards.”

“Absolutely. Working on it as we speak.”

“Excellent.” William gives me a firm nod, but still no smile.

“Dad, why are Ralph and Murphy here? These dinners are supposed to be for the core group only.”

William lets out a humorless laugh. “I think you know the answer to that, Guinevere.”

“Oh,” Gwen grabs a wine glass off of a waitress’s tray as she passes by, “So being exposed as a pervert actually adds to one’s social calendar now?”

Pervert? I look to my left again, trying to ascertain which one was Ralph, and which was Murphy. I’ll need a broader list of the higher ups to brush up on. I’ll also need to know what those two did.

“Don’t start, Gwen. You made the spill, you’re going to have to scrub the floors.” William nearly hisses the last few words. Gwen only smiles at him, and sips her wine. After a moment of tense silence, she turns to me.

“Clearly I’m in good hands here, Mr. Miller. I’ll see you after dinner.”

I give her a quick nod before addressing William again, “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Russell.”

“Likewise,” William repeats, already walking away from both Gwen and me.

“I won’t be far,” I whisper to her.

“Not that it matters,” She says against the rim of her wine glass. I scoff on my way out. Anyone with eyes can see this isn’t a comfortable get-together. I just want her to know we can leave if she needs to. Maybe I have to be more black-and-white with her. Though I doubt she wouldn’t leave on her own accord regardless of the situation.

I take the opportunity to explore the house as I had hoped. Mostly out of curiosity, somewhat out of concern for their own system. I start upstairs as the only time I’ve been here before, I had to spend most of it in the foyer. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have left Gwen alone, but with it being her father’s house, and the fact that she was going to be in a room, changing dozens of times…The foyer was fine.

I notice now that the security is decently tight. There aren’t any security officers inside the house, but I know from my conversation with Amari that there are usually some stationed outside, weather permitting. In the dead of winter, they’ll be inside with the family. The windows have sensors, and the alarm is state-of-the-art. I don’t take the liberty of entering any of the bedrooms, but since even the bathrooms are included in the system, the bedrooms must be as well. Back downstairs, there is more of a buzz. From the back stairs, I can hear the chef and waitstaff chatting at a low volume. There are also a few maids walking about, and I overhear one of them asking if any of the guests plan on staying the night. I recognize each face I see from the portfolio Arthur put together, and I know from their background checks just how vetted each and every person in this home is.

That is why, when I try to open a door attached to the opulent library, I’m surprised to find that it’s locked. There is an office on the other side of the library, who’s adjoining door is just to my left. Maybe it’s a closet? But why would a closet be locked in a library? For all I know, the closet could hold a safe that housed hundreds of first edition old-english literature, or whatever rich people liked to collect. I run through the blueprints in my mind, yanking one last time on the door—

“If you need to use the restroom, Mr. Miller, you could have just asked.”

I whip my head back to the open door of the library to find Gwen standing there, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

“I was, um—”

“Snooping?” Her glossy lips curl upwards on one side.

I mirror her, crossing my arms as well. “Yeah, actually. It’s sort of my job… to snoop.”

“Just in case there’s a monster in there, waiting to jump out and attack me? That’s my father’s home office. You couldn’t get in there even if a monster was trying to come out.”

I sigh, shaking my head. “It’s good to know the exit points, Miss Russell.”

She nods slowly. “Well, on that account, we can agree. I’m leaving, I thought you’d like to know.”

I glance down at my watch. “It’s only been an hour.”

“An hour too long,” She turns on her heel, strutting down the hallway, and I’m forced to keep up with her. We walk past the dining room, and from what I can hear it still sounds relatively full. Ezra also looks surprised when he sees the two of us back in the foyer, with me handing Gwen her jacket.

“Finished already?” He asks, his tone pitched with nerves.

“Unfortunately, yes.” If I hadn’t heard her a minute ago, I would believe that Gwen was actually disappointed to be leaving. “Thank you for your reminders today, Ezra. I’m sure my dad doesn’t say it enough but I don’t think he could put together even a dinner party without you.”

Ezra’s cheeks redden. “Thank you, Miss Russell. I–I’ll be seeing you next Wednesday, then?”

“See you then,” Her smile falters a little as I get the door for her. I give Ezra a nod as I close the door behind us.

When we’re back in the warmth of Rodney’s car, I glance back at Gwen. “Next Wednesday…is that another dinner?”

“Yes,” she hisses, picking at one of her cuticles, “Apparently these are becoming a weekly ordeal.”

I turn my attention back to the road, keeping my eyes on the street as I ask, “With the same guests every week?”

I can hear the disappointment in her voice, “Most likely.”

The remainder of the drive is quiet, just as both Rodney and Gwen seem to prefer it. When we are riding back up in the elevator, I look down to her. “If there is someone who is making you uncomfortable, if they are threatening you in any way, I could prevent them from attending these dinners.”

Her blue eyes narrow at me, “What?”

The elevator dings, and we step out into her apartment. “Those men you mentioned. The…perverts, I believe. It’s my job to keep my clients safe. If you don’t feel safe with them around, I can make it so they aren’t there.”

Gwen pauses mid-unbuckling her heel. “You think I don’t feel safe around them?” Her tone is full of venom.

“No,” I say softly, “I just think there is a little bit of truth behind every joke. And I’m not sure you were joking to begin with.”

Gwen removes both of her shoes, sizing me up even though she is now almost a foot shorter than me.

I continue, “Despite your reservations, I’m an expert in my field. I could talk to your father, explain that someone could be a security risk for any various reason. Do you want me to do that?”

“No,” She scoffs. Then, a little softer, “You really think you could do that?”

“Of course. That’s part of our arrangement. You set your own boundaries and I help enforce them.”

Gwen looks at me another moment, her gaze far less intense than before. As she unzips her jacket, she says, “There’s usually a coat hanger, or a maid to give this to next time. Just so you’re not…so you don’t have to carry it around for me.”

She drops her jacket on one of the sofas before padding off down the hall without another word. That was probably the nicest thing she’s ever said to me. But I’m not naive enough to think it will last.

Next chapter

Previous chapter

Masterlist

[thedarkestgreys]

I don’t want you to miss me, it’s tearing me apart- fexi

a follow up to this one here! The fact that Lexi even let him cross the threshold of her moms house felt like more than Fezco could even hope for.

He was being completely honest when he told her that he hadn’t meant to disappear for so long. That night, when everything went to shit, they ain’t gotta whole lot of time to prep an exit plan with a dead body is chillin’ on the couch, you know what he’s saying?

They had fully expected the Feds to come knockin’ down their front door, only to be surprised as fuck when it was Laurie and her goon squad. In return for coverin’ the tracks of the misdeeds done at the O’Neill brothers home, they had to work off a favor for their supplier - simple enough. Fez had naively thought he and Ash would leave for two or three weeks - just enough time for everything to settle down - and then slip right back into their lives in East Highland when the work was done.

But nothin’ with Laurie was ever that easy, was it?

“She kept you in New York City for eight months?” Lexi asks incredulously as Fez finishes explainin’ what had gone on since the night he skipped town.

He rubs an anxious hand across his scar. “We was travelin’ up and down the East coast for a while, but yeah, mostly based out of New York City ma.”

Lexi’s fingers grip the edge of her moms sofa as she worries at her bottom lip with her teeth. “What exactly did she have you doing all that time?”

“Had us selling at universities mostly,” he replies, picking anxiously at a rip in his jeans. “All ‘em fancy ass ones you told me about last year? Buncha old money East coast motherfuckers attend those joints Lex, they got money to fuckin’ spare.”

Beside him, Lexi curls in on herself a little, planting her chin on her knees as she hums her acknowledgment.

“So like,” she starts, foot tapping anxiously on the couch cushion. “Why didn’t you try and reach out?”

Fezco heaves a sigh, falling back into the cushion behind him, eyes closed as he thinks about his answer. He has a lot of fuckin’ guilt attached to that one - ‘cause he knows he had avenues to do that exact thing - but the risk here outweighed the reward in his mind. If Laurie had found out he was in touch with Lexi… he don’t even wanna fuckin’ think about it.

“It didn’t feel right baby.” He finally settles on something that’s mostly the truth.

“But letting me think you were dead was fine?” Lexi snaps, the anxiety that had previously been in her voice giving way to anger. “Do you even know… did you even think about what I was fucking going through back here?”

Fez turns his head to face Lexi, her brown eyes brimming with tears. Quietly he reaches out his hand, finding hers where it’s still gripping the edge of the cushion for dear life, and wraps his fingers around hers.

“Course I fuckin’ did,” he responds hoarsly, watchin’ as a couple of tears manage to spill down Lexi’s cheeks. “Thought about you every fuckin’ day Lex, but talkin’ to you would have made it worse.”

“Made what worse?” Lexi cries, tears falling freely down her face now. “I would have been content knowing you were alive goddammit. Fezco, I would have taken missing you over thinking you were dead any day of the fucking week.”

Jesus fuckin’ Christ this conversation is somehow even harder than telling her everything that got them to this point. “Lexi. I had to put my head down and work my fuckin’ debt off to get back here, to get back to you. It woulda been harder to do if I was thinkin’ ‘bout how much I didn’t want you to miss me, but I promise that shit was tearin’ me up the whole damn time.”

Silence engulfs them then, Fezco soothing small circles over Lexi’s knuckles as she wipes furiously at her tears. It’s like a sadder, more heartbroken version of the night they watched Stand By Me. Fez doesn’t try to force a conversation, just allows Lexi to take all the time she needs to collect herself - he’s always been a patient man when it comes to the girl beside him.

Finally she clears her throat and he looks up to her. “Does showing up at my house mean you’re back? You said you didn’t know where else to go, and I have no idea what that means.”

Fez heaves a giant sigh, cause it would be hella nice if things were that fuckin’ easy. When they were told they had their leave to come back to Cali, he thought that was that, you know? Leave it up to fuckin’ Rue to screw things up for him even when she thought he was dead.

Yeah girl, I’m back. But um… things ain’t quite square with our supplier yet. New information got dumped on me while we were drivin’ back. Dropped Ash off at our new place and knew I needed to come talk to you.”

Lexi's eyes go wide and he knows he needs to continue.

“Issa ‘bout Rue.”

[the-trash-eating-llama]

Dear diary,

It’s me, David, and I think it’s about time I told you a story.

Two lands, divided by one river.

The land of the east was prosperous, ruled by farmers who each owned land, tending their plots and helping neighbours during the colder months. But the lands didn’t care for these farmers, as every nine years a beast of bone and cloth would reign havoc across each acre of the east. It would tear open their houses, steal their food and uproot their farms, leaving the lands just as barren as they were before the farmers arrived.

So, they would rebuild, they would replant their futures, they would enjoy their harvests, and be harvested themselves by the malevolent force they couldn’t stop.

It was a simple life in the east, but a degrading one for those who could not bear the suffering of never seeing a full decade of harvest. And for those people, they could only find refuge from their dread by leaving their families, their belongings, and their lives to cross the river.

By all accounts, the river was not more than six feet wide, flowing gently down the side of the ground. Too wide to jump safely, but unassuming in nature.

That was where the accounts diverged.

Some would claim that a troll had built a bridge, but wouldn’t let you cross if it found you smelly. Some sighted a massive cloud that hung over the water at all times, waiting to strike any poor soul who dared cross it. Others told stories of seeing a creature made purely of rock climbing out of the river and attacking would-be crossers if they dared look at the golem.

So now, diary, what if I told you that I’m from that land?

It may strike you as odd, having only seen the prosperous avenues of concrete that dominate the skies of the west, but it’s true.

I crossed the river.

By the time I had grown up, I had become tired of feasting on fields of what could have been, so I left.

I wrote a note telling my family I was done, and left in the night, which in hindsight was my smartest move that day, because it took until day to reach the river alone.

Having no supplies and only the clothes on my back was, I admit, not my best choice, but if I hadn’t been so irrational, I may have missed my fate.

“Hey, lass, what are you doin’ so close to ðe river at ðis time of night?” A voice rang out in the cold silence of the morning.

I whirled around, and there she was. If this was the troll or golem, whomever described her as such was not more than the vilest slanderer.

No, the voice came from a woman, average height, stocky, flowing dark brown hair, and the skin of a setting sun. Her clothes were not much different from mine, overalls, a grey shirt, the only difference really was that she wasn’t wearing shoes.

It was the woman of the river, she was jogging straight towards me.

“Pardon me,” I said, blown away by her beauty. “Do you know how to cross the river?”

She looked at me with a haggard grin, like she was hoping I’d say something different.

“I suppose I would, why? You lookin’ to cross?” She shouted, slowly closing the distance, until we were only five feet apart.

“Yes! Could you show me how?” I asked. It was time, it was finally time! I would be across, and a whole world would be open to me!

“What for?”

That took me by surprise.

“What? Why wouldn’t I? The lands of the east are raided every decade! We can never truly grow! Back there, everyday has been prechewed by those before I was born. I’m tired of living a recycled life!” I yelled, at the edge of madness.

How could she not see it? My pain, my shortcomings, all of it was because of those lands and that damned beast!

“And what of your passions?” She asked, simply.

“What of them? I like to write, but there is nothing to write about when your experiences have already been perfectly articulated by those before you. And my garden? No different than the fifteen acres of people who live the exact same life. I’ve had enough, I want passage.”

“So, you wish to leave your lands of safety… for some fresh air?” She asked, half amused, and half understanding. All it came across as was belittling.

“You wouldn’t understand!” I shouted in desperation.

“Wouldn’t I? I have travelled this river my entire existence, walking, running, sprinting, crawling. This river never ends, you can trust me. I have only ever travelled in this direction, constantly chasing the idea of a bridge across, and what do I get? Thirty of your people each day asking the same inane question!” She shouted, then sitting down to sulk. Whether her cry was to me or not was left unclear, but I didn’t care.

“I could take you with me.”

She jumped up, surprised by my assertion.

“You…I… no one has ever offered.” She mumbled, staring at me like I would disappear if she blinked, like she’d wake up from a dream.

“Would you want me to?” I asked softly, holding out my hand.

“I…I…” She stuttered, trying to understand the prospect.

I kept eye contact, “You don’t have to, but I think a change of pace is what we both want.”

She slowly reached out, then grabbed my hand, like a scared animal. Her skin was soft, like silk, not made to endure. She needed to cross just as much as I did, but our worlds couldn’t be more different.

Both our worlds melted away, they were nothing more than spent breath to us now, as we both looked on, hand in hand, and ran, jumped, and landed.

Wherever we landed, we were to land together, and we did.

So, diary, how’d you like my story?

My children still don’t believe it, they think that the land of the east isn’t any more real than fairies and dragons.

Strange how the past can distort itself in the minds of its children, I hope mine still got the message.

But every journal must end, as you know very well, diary, for this is your last page.

We have known each other for long enough, but your pages still hold enough memories to fill a library.

I hope I’m as helpful as you were to me.

Good night, diary.

Sincerely,

David.

[elizaditton]

Too Small To Be Afraid (Chapter 5)

Links:

Cover / Master Post / Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

- - - - - - - - - -

Maedri's undercity was nicer than Chancelor's. The videos on the skylights were prettier than the ones above me now, the floors weren't as worn as the tile I tread on now, and the storefronts were lit up with bright neon signs very unlike the plain and lifeless ones that Dad and I are passing by. Chancelor's undercity is dull, gray, and worn-down— or, 'well loved' as Dad put it.

"I really have missed it here," Dad says for the hundredth time.

I dismiss his comments and return my attention to my phone screen, which displays a map of Pacific Deskmate High School. I know they're more than likely going to show us around on orientation day of all days, but you can never be too prepared. I might as well study this map while I can. I don't want to show up and have no idea where I'm supposed to go. Now, where am I supposed to go?

As I'm fixating on the map of the school I notice Dad in my peripheral vision, taking a right.

"Wait, where are you going?" I ask.

"To the school, where else?" Dad laughs.

"But it's a straight path to Thorne Avenue, we don't have to turn."

Dad stops for a moment and gazes down the street. He looks up at a sign hanging above us which indicates that East Avenue runs through Seren Avenue.

"Oh," he says. "You're right. This wasn't a through street when I was a kid."

"That's why you have me to study the map before we go anywhere," I say, mentally kicking myself over the time we've just saved getting to the school.

"Right. Now, Kaylin, there's some things I want to make sure you know about having a deskmate," Dad says.

Deskmate?! I was so busy memorizing the layout of the school that I forgot exactly what I've been trying to forget— how I'm going to be someone's deskmate. How I'm going to be thrown into a forced relationship with some stranger. A perthean stranger.

My core tightens as my eyes threaten to glaze over. I clench my fist in a futile attempt to ground myself in reality.

I look up, and in front of me is a wooden balcony. I tiptoe forwards and look to the side. The balcony seems to stretch on forever in this place. I gaze ahead only to be met with an enormous set of five digits reaching straight for me. I stumble backwards in disbelief, and bolt to my right. I think I've made my getaway when a massive wall of flesh blocks my path. I turn and run the other way, but I'm halted when the five digits catch up and surround my entire being. I try to punch, to kick, to do anything to get away, but the hand enclosing me has secured itself tightly around my pathetic body. It tightens, and tightens...!

I let out a gasp, and the world around me returns to the familiar gray of Chancelor's undercity. I look around. No balcony. No enormous hands. A shuddering sigh of relief escapes me.

I look ahead to Dad, who is a bit of a ways away from me now, and I race to catch up with him.

"But anyways," he says, "just make sure to maintain eye contact and speak up. And don't make the same mistake I did by not getting their phone number when you meet." He looks back to me. "Got all that?"

"Mhm," I manage, the shock from that daydream still wearing off.

Dad stops and turns to face one of the buildings. "Here we are," he says, looking up at a faded green sign with the words 'Pacific Deskmate High School' written in a light yellow font. The sign isn't even illuminated. We could have walked right past without even noticing it.

Beneath the sign are some windows that stretch to the floor, with the entrance to the school between them. The two windows to the right of the door reflect the image of Dad and I standing a few yards away. I look at myself in the school's uniform. Wearing this doesn't feel right.

"Well, this it," Dad says. "You're all set and checked in ahead of time."

I blink. Dad? Doing anything ahead of time? Am I sure this isn't a dream or something?

"Um, so... what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?" I ask.

Dad raises an eyebrow. "Weren't you listening to anything I was telling you on the way here?"

Uh-oh. What else could I have missed? I didn't think he was saying anything important. I shake my head.

Dad sighs and reaches into his jacket pocket. He pulls out a crumpled up piece of paper and begins to unfold it. He looks it over for a moment, and then hands it to me.

MEET IN GYMNASIUM 8:00 AM, CARMEN 12TH

H-53

"Head to the gym," he says. "When you get off the elevator, head down the hall, hang a right, and then head left. The gym is on the right. You can't miss it. Sit down and wait for them to call out this code. When they do, go with them and they'll tell you what to do from there."

I stare down at the paper. I still haven't the slightest clue of what I should expect or where I should go. And I hate it.

"Don't worry, you'll do fine. I believe in you," Dad ruffles my hair. "Hey," he says.

I look up at him.

He smiles. "Be brave. I'll see you later."

And with that, he turns and walks away, leaving me by myself in unfamiliar territory and expecting me to interact with pertheans.

'Be brave...'

I take in a deep breath. There's no turning back now.

I reach for the door handle and pull it open. I step inside Pacific Deskmate High School.

The lobby, on first glance, is rather small and empty save for a few visitor seats, some potted ficus, and the front desk, where a man is seated giving directions to the school over the phone. To the right of the desk are four elevators, where some students are gathered waiting for the next available ride. As I walk over to join them, some doors open, and everyone clamors to secure a spot inside the elevator.

Tucking myself away in a corner as the doors close, I can't help but worry about what sort of impression I'm giving off. I'd been with the same crowd of people at school since stage three, so this is my chance for a new start. I don't want to mess this up. I wonder what the people in this elevator think about me. Do they notice my worrying? Will they be able to tell that I have a fear of pertheans?

Looking around at the crowd I'm with, I feel out of place with all the students that must be starting high school this year. I wonder how many others will be going into senior year.

The doors to the elevator open up again, signaling the end of our ride. As we step off, I struggle to remember the map I was looking at and the directions Dad gave me to the gym. Instead of guessing or pulling out the map again, I follow some other students down the hall and around a few corners until we finally arrive at the entrance to the gym.

The doors are propped open, and I follow the lead of everyone else through them and over to the bleachers. The glossy hardwood floor is in stark contrast to the worn tile throughout the rest of the school. The floor is marked for different sports to be played, and there's a scoreboard on the other side of the room for competitive games. Three adults stand in place beneath it, conversing.

I pass a group of students talking about how hard it was to get into this school, and I start to wonder how many strings Dad had to pull to get me in here. He must have really wanted me to be here.

I approach the bleachers and scan the rows for someplace I can sit by myself. After a moment of searching, I make my way over to the top of the bleachers and to the side. I take a seat and wipe my sweaty, shaking hands on my skirt.

A tapping noise to the right catches my attention, and I look over to see a boy around my age. His arms are crossed and his brows are woven together as he bounces one leg. His short black hair and green eyes are familiar to me, and I can't help but wonder if I've seen him somewhere before.

Another sound catches my attention, this time a voice.

"If everyone could please find a seat, we'll be beginning shortly!" says a woman with a gruff voice.

Students begin to fill the remaining empty seats in the bleachers, and to my relief, no one sits beside me. The woman who made the announcement before performs a head count, and confers with the other adults who join her in front of the bleachers. Another woman claps her hands together twice, and the room grows quiet.

"Good morning, everyone! Thank you for arriving on time. Welcome to Pacific Deskmate High School!" the woman says.

A 'whoop whoop' reverberates through the room. I'm guessing that was one of the freshmen.

The woman speaking chuckles, and clears her throat before continuing. "I'm Ms. Clemmons, your human co-principal."

Ms. Clemmons is older and has a petite, bony frame. Her wavy blonde hair is restrained neatly behind her, and she wears a flowing navy blue cardigan. To the left of her is a man with short, curly brown hair wearing a shirt and tie. To her right is a bulkier woman whose black hair is wrapped up in a bun. She has on a gray cardigan.

"This is Mr. Day," Ms. Clemmons motions to the man beside her. "Mr. Day is our human nurse, and Mrs. Wright is our human gym teacher," she says, motioning to the woman on her other side.

"We look forward to assisting you this school year," the trio says, their right arms crossing their chest as they lean forward.

"One hundred thirty-six of you will be joining our program today, and with that, our school is completely full this year. Congratulations on making it in!" Ms. Clemmons says.

I take the paper Dad gave me out of my pocket, with 'H-53' scratched in at the bottom. Could I be the fifty-third student out of one hundred thirty-six? But I suppose that would have to mean Dad actually enrolled me sort of early, and I can't imagine him doing anything on time, much less early.

Ms. Clemmons clasps her hands together. "Now, we're going to get right into pairing you all with your deskmates. If everyone could recall the code you received in your confirmation e-mail, we will have H-01 through H-10 follow Mr. Day to meet their deskmates."

Ten at a time? They're moving so quickly! I watch as several students from around the bleachers stand and follow Mr. Day to the gym entrance. A younger student does what looks to be a secret handshake with another student sitting next to him before he speeds off to catch up with the others. So much enthusiasm, and yet here I sit, agonizing over the long year that's ahead of me.

Another group follows Mrs. Wright, and yet another follows Ms. Clemmons, leaving the rest of us waiting on the bleachers for our turn to meet our perthean partners. If I'm doing the math right, with three groups of ten being paired all at once... when the teachers return, it'll be time for me to be paired with my deskmate.

And so I wait.

And wait.

I have trouble deciding if I want time to speed up or slow down. On the one hand, if time slows down, I have more time to wait, more time in the safety of this human part of the school. But if time were to speed up, I could get this all over with and go home. Either way, I'm sitting here waiting without anyone to talk to and nothing to do.

I can't help but wonder what my deskmate will be like. My fear tells me I'm done for the moment this perthean lays eyes on me, and I know it's not true, but I can't stop myself from worrying. My shaking legs bounce themselves up and down, like the boy sitting across the bleachers. I wonder how my deskmate feels about meeting me. Are they nervous, too? Apathetic? Do they want to meet me?

My insides twist into a knot at the idea of a perthean wanting to meet me.

I look up as five fingers begin to entangle my weak figure. Once my entire body is in this hand's grasp, I feel a constricting pressure as it begins to squeeze.

"I've been waiting for you for quite some time," A voice says. I follow the source upward to a pair of cold, drooping brown eyes.

It's not real! I shake my head back and forth and slap my cheeks. As quickly as it began, my waking nightmare ends and I'm back on the bleachers.

"Fifty-one through sixty, please follow me," says Ms. Clemmons.

Looking around, the bleachers are much emptier than before. I tiptoe down the steps, following the lead of the other students as we make our way over to Ms. Clemmons.

Ms. Clemmons leads us through the gym and back out to the hallway. I nearly trip over my numb legs as we walk in a straight line to the co-principal's office. I'm walking, I realize, towards my deskmate. Every step I take brings me closer to the inevitable. Closer to spending a year stuck as part of some perthean's school supplies.

I can see it now—sitting at my own desk atop theirs, being just about as useful to them as an old, discarded pencil worn down to nothing but a nub. Puny. Undesirable. And not very helpful, at that. I don't see myself as being any help to a perthean, and I don't see any reason that I should require any help from them. What could either of us gain by being forced into a pairing like this?

Before I know it, we've reached the co-principal's office, and I sit myself in a chair beside the door with the other students as Ms. Clemmons disappears with the student given the code H-51. I tuck one leg behind the other to keep it from bouncing, but all it does is cause the other to join in with it.

I wait in agony for my turn. After a minute or so of torment and another student disappearing into the office, Ms. Clemmons reappears from her office with a smile.

"Fifty-three?" She says, her eyes locking with mine.

My heart plummets to the floor. Shaking, I struggle to stand up. I worry whether or not my wobbly legs will be able to hold up the rest of my body.

"Are you excited?" Ms. Clemmons says, opening the door to her office.

"Um, yeah, sure!" I manage to squeak out.

Ms. Clemmons lets me into her office, and closes the door behind us. Her office is rather small, and decorated with succulents and pictures of loved ones. Her desk is pristine and perfectly organized. There's neat stacks of paperwork, and office supplies kept in orderly rows without so much as a pencil out of line. Ms. Clemmons approaches her desk and picks up a folder laying directly atop one of the stacks.

"Would you state your name for me, dear?" She asks, pulling out a pair of reading glasses.

"K-Kaylin," I say, my focus is more on keeping my trembling to a minimum than answering the question.

Ms. Clemmons looks up from the folder in her hands, expectantly.

"Um, Kaylin Finch!" I finish.

"Alright, Ms. Finch," Ms. Clemmons says, "thank you for completing the entrance questionnaire online beforehand, that really helps us speed up the matching process."

"Entrance questionnaire?" I ask.

"Yes, the entrance questionnaire. Your parents might have filled it out for you, that's alright."

Dad doing something early again? He wasn't kidding around about sending me here, was he?

"Anyway," Ms. Clemmons says, "let's get you paired with your deskmate."

My insides twist. My heart rate accelerates. This is it.

Ms. Clemmons approaches a door across from the one we entered and knocks. My deskmate has to be on the other side of that door! My heart threatens to beat right out of my chest as I try to keep my trembling under control.

"Come in!" says a voice from the other side of the door.

Ms. Clemmons opens the door. As much as I want to run, there's no turning back now.

[arealphrooblem]

A Favor for a Favor Part 3

Part 2 here Part one here

CW for the fic overall: kissing/fade to black off screen sex, mentions of non-consensual drugging, non-graphic wound care, off screen murder mention

Synopsis:

When Roxanne -- Agent name Rocket -- is back-stabbed by a friend and given a serum that drains her of her powers and leaves her helpless, she has no choice but to turn to the one person she can't trust: Her nemesis -- a politician and king of the underworld. With her powerless and in the palm of his hand, what he decides to do with her is greatly influenced by their chance meeting as teenagers that neither of them have been able to forget.

The Past

After breakfast, at which he inhaled three bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch  in the time it took her to savor one, the boy crashed on the couch again. He refused to reveal his name or his age or any other personal details. She struggled to get even his clothing sizes so she could raid her father’s closet. The only thing she can tell on her own is that he was of east Asian descent and he was older than her. But not by much. 

Once their truce was finalized, a strange awkwardness settled over them.  In many ways he was a guest and the etiquette rules her mother hardwired into her pressured her to offer him food and drink and entertainment. The first two were accomplished easily enough, but then the rest of the weekend stretched out before her and she had no idea how to entertain someone like him. 

She was deeply grateful for how long he slept so she could figure it out. By the time he stirred again, she had pulled up the TiVo menu and hooked up the Game Cube from her room. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked as he slowly sat up with a wince. 

“Like shit,” he said. She had left a bottle of Tylenol on the table with a bottle of water and he immediately reached for both. 

“Do you play video games?” she asked tentatively. “I have Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat?”

He grimaced. “No. I’ve never played video games.” 

Her jaw dropped. “You’ve never played a video game? Not any? How is that possible?”

The boy threw her a deeply disgusted, judgemental look. “The cost of one game could feed me for almost a month. Don’t even get me started on what the console costs or a TV. Not to mention how easy and popular all three of those things are to steal and resell. Having one in your home is like painting a target on your back.”

Roxanne could feel the hot flush travel from her cheeks to her ears. 

“Right,” she mumbled, wishing she could slap herself. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to -- to upset you.”

The hint of a smirk tugged at his mouth. “You don’t know any poor people, do you?”

“I -- what? You think I’m rich?”

He gestured around the living room. “You live in a brownstone.”

“We inherited it from my grandparents!” she protested, feeling oddly defensive.

“Your parents are conferencing in France. What were their jobs again?”

“A defense attorney and a forensic . . .analyst,” she mumbled, realization dawning on her. 

He barked out that sharp, bitter laugh again. “A lawyer and a scientist. I rest my case.”

“It’s not like I’m in a penthouse suite on 5th avenue,” she said, but the battle was lost. She had no real defense.

“So you’re not obscenely wealthy. That doesn’t make you poor. If I had any money to bet with, you’ve never had to pick between food and electricity. You’ve never had to super glue the soles back on your shoes, and you’ve never taken a cold shower in the dark.”

“ . . .no I haven’t,” she admitted softly. 

Shame squatted in her chest. Her mother represented the poor and desperate more often than not. For every one slimy scum bag she dealt with, there were five people driven to desperate measures and she did the best she could for them. She made sure Roxanne knew how often the system was stacked against people. 

But Roxanne’s parents also kept her away from it. She grew up cocooned in their protection, thinking her life was perfectly average. 

Apparently it was not so average. 

She ended up taking him into her father’s library to teach him chess. Her dad taught her years ago in hopes that she might compete like he did as a kid. But though she didn’t suck at chess, tournaments and their ultra strict rules sucked all the fun out of it. 

The boy, on the other hand, loved it immediately. At first she kept feeling that weird pressure in her head as he pretended to mull over his next move. 

“You’re not trying to cheat, are you?” she had asked sternly. 

He just smirked at her over the chessboard. But the pressure stopped and after a few games he began to beat her -- first by a narrow margin, and then soundly. It was embarrassing. Thank God her dad wasn’t here to witness it. 

“You know, if you won’t tell me your name, I’ll have to make one up for you,” she said on their latest match. 

He ignored her and continued to ponder his opening move. 

“I’m thinking . . Bob?”

Nothing. Not even a twitch. She’d have to try harder.  

“No. That’s too boring. What about . . .Harold?

“If you’re trying to trick me up, it’s not going to work,” he murmured. 

“I would never try to cheat -- unlike some people,” she said primly. “What about Cornelius? It makes you sound like a wizard.”

He moved his rook. “You are not calling me Cornelius.”

“Fun sucker.” Another ridiculous name struck her.  Oh! Jehoshaphat! That’s a name you don't hear very often.”

That superpower glare came back to play. “I change my mind -- I’ll be a wizard.”

She grinned at him as she took his rook. “So what all can you do with your mind, wizard boy?”

He gave her a cautious look. “What can you do, speed demon?”

“I can run a mile in three seconds.” 

She couldn’t help but brag -- it killed her every day to keep this secret, with no one to share it with. His eyebrows shot up and he looked at her with new respect. 

“What is it like? What does the world look like? Is it blurry?”

His hand fell away from the chess board, game forgotten. All his focus narrowed to her.  Even without the pressure of his mind trying to butt against hers, it felt intense. 

“It's like . . . someone pushed pause on a movie. Everything is still except for me. But only when I’m moving. When I stop, the world starts back up again.”

“You could do so much with that.” 

The raw, unfiltered longing in his voice sent a spike of deep discomfort in her. She could only imagine how that ability might look to someone living on the streets, someone preyed upon and powerless. She used it for fun, for silly pranks, because she had nothing to worry about. 

“I’m not very good at it,” she said lamely, as if this could make up for it. “It takes a lot of concentration and I’m shit at that even with my meds. What’s it like for you?” 

“You want me to explain what a person’s mind is like? I’m not sure I can.”

She pouted. “Please? Please? Don’t be boring -- I shared mine!”

He held her stare, completely unmoved, until she sighed and looked away. 

“Fine,” she huffed. “Keep your secrets, Gandalf.”

“Is that another Wizard name you pulled out of your ass?” he asked. 

She gaped at him. “Are you serious? Have you never seen Lord of the Rings?”

His blank stare was all the answer she needed. 

“Do you want to fix that?”

The Present

Home meant pulling into the underground parking garage of a towering stone apartment complex in SoHo. It had a doorman and a private elevator. It had lush carpet and beautiful dark wood paneling and a carved mahogany ceiling. 

It made her parent’s brownstone look like an off-road motel. 

She knew over the years that John had accumulated some serious wealth -- sometimes legitimately, most of the time not. But this was positively obscene. 

The front hall opened up into a spacious living room with cream colored furniture paired with dark wood. Windows lined the entire south wall. He led her to the couch, gesturing for her to sit, before padding over to the nearby kitchen. 

The couch enveloped her like a cloud. The apartment sat on the top floor -- the road noise of the city reduced to almost nothing. In the sudden quiet, it didn’t matter if the sense of security was false. Roxanne’s adrenaline finally ran out. Her entire body began to shake, causing the pain from her earlier injuries to flare back to life. Her head throbbed in time with her roaring heartbeat. 

Roxanne didn’t win every fight. Her powers had limitations just like anyone else. She’d been in a scrape or two over her time. 

But nothing like this. Never before could she not have the option of running away. 

“Roxanne.” 

Her name sounded small and far away. She kept her eyes squeezed tight, trying to sort out her erratic breathing. 

This was a panic attack. 

“Roxanne.” John’s voice came firmer and with a gentle shake of her shoulders. 

She didn’t want to face him yet. 

Roxanne.

His voice whispered in her head, quiet but unavoidable. Un-ignorable. 

Her eyes snapped open. “What?” she demanded, but her voice came out like a little squeak.  

“Take this and drink this.”

He held out a glass of water, two white pills sitting in his other hand. 

She shrank back against the couch. “What is that?”

“Water,” he said with an eye roll. “And Ibuprofen 800s. I’m not going to poison you,” he added. “It seems someone else beat me to it.”

Even if it was poison, it wasn’t like the situation could get any worse. Roxanne took the pills and slowly drained the entire glass. Water sloshed over the sides of her mouth because her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. 

She wiped it off with her sleeve, feeling like a child, before placing her hand back on the couch. Too late she realized she had smeared blood from her bleeding lip onto the pristine cream fabric beneath her. 

“Oh shit,” she said, jumping up and then wincing as pain lanced across her ribs. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

John pushed her back down with firm but gentle hands on her shoulders. 

“It’s alright. You can bleed on this white couch. I’m coming back with a first aid kit. Don’t move.”

If she still had her powers, Roxane would have blurred to his bathroom and stuck his toothbrush in his toilet and swirled it around a good bit before returning to her exact position. Just out of spite. Out of pure stubborn pigheadedness against the thought that he could just order her around. 

Now the thought of moving at all made her feel sick. The desire for spite paled against the comfort of the marshmallow couch. (Maybe if she didn't move, she could pretend she didn’t lose anything.)

John returned shortly after with a steel box and a damp, warm washcloth. He perched himself on the coffee table, the first aid kit next to him, and cradled her face in his hands. With unbearable tenderness, he wiped away the blood from under her nose and lower lip. He found a cut on her scalp and wiped away the blood that dripped onto the shell of her  ear. He cleaned her scraped knuckles. 

The strange intimacy of such a gentle, methodical touch made her stomach swoop dizzingly. She didn’t expect this level of care. Or any care really. She could have done all this herself in the bathroom. 

“I’m feeling a bit of deja vu,” she murmured. 

“I wasn’t cognizant for whatever care you gave me,” he responded, setting the washcloth on the open lid of the kit. “So you will have to inform me of what it entailed.”

“I definitely wasn’t this calm. Or gentle.”

“I imagine you were moments away from completely freaking out. Like you are now.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

“You can’t stop shaking.” He held up her trembling hand as proof. 

She glared at him.

You can’t hide from me any longer, Roxanne his voice breathed in her mind. She shivered. It felt like the deepest intimacy, having his presence in her own head. Being naked wouldn’t make her feel this exposed.

“Speaking of being naked,” he said with a hint of a smirk, “I’m going to draw you a bath. Take as long as you like; the water stays heated. When you are finished, I will bandage what I can and give you one of the spare bedrooms.”

“You’re very bossy,” she said, fighting the flush spreading on her cheeks. She’s going to have to start filtering her thoughts. 

“Of course I am. You’re in my territory now.”

The Past

Roxanne fielded the nightly check in call from her parents right after dinner, hiding in her own room just in case Cornelius made any random unexplained noises. He inhaled two cartons of sesame chicken by himself. 

Like he hadn’t eaten in a while. 

That night he had slept in the spare bedroom across the hall. She heard the click of the lock the moment he shut the door. It was a little insulting -- did he think she was going to mess with him in his sleep? But then she reminded herself that this was a stranger’s house to him. 

And boy did he have some major trust issues. 

She did not sleep well that night, listening to every creak and groan and faint siren from the city. Sometime around two the desperate need to pee roused her from the bed and she found Cornelius standing in the living room like a ghost, gazing out one of the windows. 

“Can’t sleep  either?” she asked. 

“No,” he said softly. “I keep . . .expecting someone to show up.”

“If anybody did, I’d have them tied up in the dumpster in ten seconds flat. No one is going after you while I’m here.”

He snorted at that. “You’re fast -- you’re not invincible. Have you ever even been in a fight before?”

“ . . .No. But I don’t plan on fighting anyone,” she added, crossing her arms. “There are other ways to take care of a threat.”

“You only think that because you’ve never been threatened.”

She couldn’t really argue with his experience, whatever that was, and she didn’t want to. It started to irritate her, his insistence that she was a naive little girl living in a bubble world. Her parents, both working in the criminal justice field, never sheltered her from the truth of the world, even if she didn’t have to experience it directly. 

“You want to play some chess?” she asked instead.  

They played more rounds than she could keep track of, until the birds chirped and his hand shook her shoulder, telling her to go to bed.

The Present

The bathtub practically needed a step ladder just to get in. They had to pass through his bedroom  to get to it and he had to gently push her forward to the bathroom because she wouldn’t stop staring, compiling the color of the walls (dark green) or the types of pillow cases (silk) as if that would reveal anything about him. 

“I will leave you to it,” he said in the doorway. “Try not to linger in the bedroom on your way out.”

“If you have any embarrassing baby pictures, now would be the time to hide them,” she sang. 

“If only so you wouldn’t steal them,” he retorted as he shut the door. 

Steam wafted up from the water. A pile of fresh clothes sat on the sink counter. Roxanne didn’t even bother locking the door before immediately and painstakingly shedding her clothes. Everything ached, even after the pain relievers. When she finally sank down into the water, she almost cried from the relief. 

“I am never leaving this tub,” she whispered to herself. “I live here now.”

She nestled back against the padded head rest, pressed the jets on low, and basked. 

Cornelius had come a long, long way from the scrappy kid she had dragged off the street.  When he first disappeared, she used to dash around the area she found him in, searching for him. She had no game plan in mind if she ever did find him. But the thought of him going back into the world that made him so jaded and paranoid broke her heart. She just needed to see him, to know he made it out somehow. 

After four years of radio silence, Roxanne saw him again on the news, for winning a big chess competition in a huge upset against an established champion. And maybe he had won on his own merit -- he soundly beat her several times -- but she had no doubt that he cheated. For a hot second she debated exposing him but she had no proof and well --He that was a lot of prize money for someone who had nothing. He needed it more. 

Now armed with a name -- John Park -- she followed his career. He lost just often enough to lose suspicion, but usually had an epic come back that netted him a lot of money. 

After a while she got too busy to keep track of him. She finally came clean to her parents, got registered, graduated with a criminology degree and ended up joining the Agency of Powered Heroes. She stayed small time -- her powers worked better for investigative work and rescue rather than full on offensive fights. She got a cover job working as a cameraman/crew person for a daily political talk show. 

She never forgot Cornelius. He prickled the back of her mind like an itch. All the hints and half-formed pieces of his life she could put together painted a dark picture in the city’s underbelly. A predatory, fucked up picture. And while her co-workers fought major villains, she decided to spend her nights looking into a rising gang slowly taking over the poorest neighborhoods in the city. The type of gang that preyed on kids exactly like Cornelius.

Usually whenever a member of the APH stepped in, whatever loyalty that drove the alleged criminals would crumple like wet cardboard. They’d sell out their own grandmother in order to avoid trouble. Also, the Agency could provide protection against retaliation in a way no other law enforcement could. 

But these guys. . . .nothing made them talk. Not threats, not bribery, not promises. A billion dollar winning lottery ticket wouldn’t open their mouths. The only thing she got out of them, consistently, was that the shadowy figure running this gang knew everything about everybody. Things no one else could possibly know. And when he sniffed disloyalty, his retribution was swift and brutal. No one could trick him or lie to him and no one wanted to cross him. 

It sounded uncomfortably, disturbingly familiar. Her gut knew exactly who ran this gang, but she had no proof. Despite her best efforts, he stayed firmly in the shadows. Other people took the fall for him and he stayed a ghost. She lost hope of ever seeing him again. 

And then he ran for fucking mayor.

Part 4 here

[yatescountyhistorycenter]

Written in stoneware: The potteries of Summersite

By Jonathan Monfiletto

A Yates County native who has collected pieces of pottery from various local stoneware manufacturers and researched the history of many of these companies recently reached out to me with a question about the succession of these producers in the Penn Yan area. She had found a stoneware batter pail marked “Conklin & Heimburger, Penn Yan” and wondered how this company might have related to the Mantell stoneware business.

This woman had previously sparked my interest in learning about Byron Ansley and Ansley’s Dairy after she asked me about the company behind an Ansley’s Dairy milk bottle she had come across. Naturally, she now sparked my interest in learning about stoneware manufacturers in Yates County; we have traded messages to share the information we have uncovered in our research, and now I present that research here.

In fact, my research into stoneware manufacturing overlapped with another topic I had begun researching at the time. You see, as it turns out, stoneware production in Yates County appears to have been concentrated around the foot of Keuka Lake – on the east branch, where the outlet flows out of the lake and heads toward Seneca Lake – because of “a choice bed of clay” in that area, according to a May 30, 1958 article in The Chronicle-Express. This area, now incorporated into the village of Penn Yan, was once its own separate settlement outside of the village proper. It was known as Summersite.

In 1832, George Campbell founded the first pottery at Summersite – in modern-day terms, think of the intersection of Lake Street and South Avenue and the location of Red Jacket Park – after possibly working at potteries in Manhattan before arriving in Penn Yan. Another source states John Campbell established a redware pottery in the area before 1830, while his son George took over the business by 1850. This source indicates John and George came from New York City. However, a newspaper advertisement dated February 20, 1832 announces George Campbell producing earthen water pipes, candle molds, and other earthenware at his factory at the foot of Crooked Lake.

The 1958 article, written by former Yates County Historian Frank Swann, mentions the firm of Savage & Knapp operating around the same time in the same area. That appears to have been a partnership of Joseph L. Savage and Samuel Knapp, who advertised in 1846 the sale of flint ware, bricks, and earthenware pieces. According to a chapter titled “The Dundee Connection” in a book titled Stoneware of Havana, NY, Savage also enjoyed a partnership in making stoneware in Dundee with James Holmes, of Barrington, who had discovered a bed of clay on Washington Street in Dundee. The Holmes & Savage partnership lasted just a short time – as did, presumably, the firm of Savage & Knapp – as Savage formed another partnership in the village of Havana (the former name of Montour Falls) by August 1850. In 1848, Holmes had already acquired another partner by the name of Purdee, and they continued making stoneware in Dundee.

Meanwhile, George Campbell sold his pottery in 1855 to James Mantell, who had come to Penn Yan from Lyons the year before. Mantell had been a potter in Lyons from 1840 to 1853 and thus was well prepared to keep Campbell’s business going. For a brief time, Mantell had a partner in Shem Thomas, who had arrived in Penn Yan in 1853 but moved on to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1856. Mantell continued his business on his own until around 1876, apparently concluding his work with his death. By this point, Swann states, the original clay deposit had been exhausted and “suitable supplies for pottery were brought from New Jersey as ballast in canal boats.”

Nevertheless, the pottery industry in Summersite remained strong, with Oscar Conklin, Mantel’s son-in-law, taking over the business. He worked with at least three partners during this time in business – his firms were known as Conklin & Patterson, Conklin & Mingay, and Conklin & Heimburger. F.J. Elliott & Co. purchased the business sometime in the 1880s – a handwritten note in our subject file dates this purchase as May 1883 – though I have not uncovered an end date for this firm or a successor to this business. At some point, this may have represented the end of the stoneware pottery industry in the Summersite area of Penn Yan.

Much like this major industry in the area, the end of Summersite is also not clear to me. I assume the settlement melded into the village of Penn Yan over time as the village grew up, but I have not yet found concrete evidence for this. What I have found, though, is concrete evidence for the start of this lakeside settlement.

According to Stafford Cleveland in his History and Directory of Yates County, the first settler at the foot of Keuka Lake was John McDowell in 1803 on land belonging to Abraham Wagener, building a double log house on the bank of the lake on the east side of the outlet. A year later, William Wall purchased a tract of land on the west side of the outlet – the present-day Indian Pines area – and took steps to form a village, including surveying the ground into lots. However, Wall died soon after, Wagener took possession of the property, and the proposed village never came to fruition.

However, on the east side of the outlet, a village did come into being with the name of Elizabethtown. By 1817, Meredith Mallory had built a flour or gristmill in the area at the head of the outlet, depending on the low fall of water near that location. However, during the construction of Mallory’s mill, Wagener raised the level of the dam at his mill at the foot of Main Street so there was insufficient water to turn the wheels at Mallory’s mill. By September 1818, Gilman Lovering was operating the Bath, Painted Post, and Geneva stagecoach line. The construction of the highway led to the establishment of several taverns in this area. Zara L. Walton purchased the line on January 1, 1819 and kept it going. Exactly one month after Walton’s purchase of the highway, on February 1, 1819, a group of citizens met at Peter Heltibidal’s tavern and approved a resolution naming the community Summersite.

No matter the name of the settlement, it did seem to hold promise for a major village. In addition to the taverns – Wallace Finch started the first one and was succeeded in its ownership by Heltibidal, George and Robert Shearman, and William Kimble – there were mechanics and a grocery, both presumably serving the stagecoach passengers and workers. In addition to the potteries, other industries sprang up in the area. Isaiah Kimble manufactured augurs and bits; later on, Azor Kimble established a carriage shop. When the Crooked Lake Steamboat Company was incorporated in April 1826, there were hopes for a boom in the village. However, the company never got off the ground – or out on the water.

The Crooked Lake Canal opened a few years later, and the age of the steamboats on Keuka Lake soon dawned. However, by that point, the sun seems to have set on Summersite. “The prospective city of Summersite has faded away,” Cleveland wrote in 1873, while Swann noted the community has been encompassed into the village of Penn Yan.

[bu1410]

Good morning TUMBLR - March 6th - 2024

''Mr. Plant has owed me a shoe since July 5, 1971."

Ch. VII - 1984-1985 - Milan, Italy - New York - Mexico

Milan, Italy - Navigli area

Milan, Italy - Via Lodovico il Moro. Housing complex

New York - March '84

Twin Towers, Manhattan - March 1984

Mexico City - Zocalo square and Cathedral of Assumption of the Virgin Mary

Mexico City - Chapultepec castle

Teotihuacan - March 1984

Cancun - March 1984

Contoy Island - Mexico

Isla Mujeres . Mexico - March 1984

The years after Iraq represented for me the return to work in Italy. I responded to an advert in the ''Corriere della Sera'' newpaperwhere a local Company was looking for Site Engineer to follow the construction of an housing complex in Ludovico il Moro avenue, Milan. I had an interview with the Construction company's owner and I got the the job. The project consisted of the construction of a housing complex of 90 apartments. It was the month of June, and I think that was one of the hottest month in a century. Inside the deep excavation foundations the heat was unbearable, it felt like being in the Middle East. Within couple of days I met our Sub Contractor, some artisans from Brescia, professional people and tireless workers.

FORD TRANSIT VAN It was an early morning of July when our Subcontractor's personnel arrived at site with a new van: a brand new legendary light blue Ford Transit. They invited me to the bar in front of the site to ''wet'' the newly purchase van. Once returned to site entrence we had an unwelcome surprise: the van had disappeared!!

Where is the van??? One of the two owners asked.

Well....I parked it here......

Yes but in my opinion…

Oh damn God....where is it gone???

Come on - said the second owner…- good joke but now let's sort it out.....- he almost laughin........... After wandering around for a while, we called the traffic police to ask if they had noticed a brand new blue Transit van taken away: nothing, they knew nothing about it! At this point we were forced to admit that the van had disappeared. All we had to do was walking back to site, take the second van (which fortunately was still in place) and go to the nearest police station, in San Gottardo street. Here began the usual ping pong of questions and answers that always characterizes the relationship with the police in Italy.

The cop repeats the same question for the umpteenth time:

'Are we sure someone stole a van from there? ''

Sh******t yesssss … how many times do we have to repeat it? We parked it, went into the bar, took a hoodie and when we came out the van has vanished…… (then in a low voice to his partner: if he ask one more time I'll punch him in the nose.....

and his mater: stay calm Gino …stay calm please.....…

Okkay okkay...... – the cop finally seemed convinced – let's write the damn report ! (and here the usual description of the facts began with that kind Italian language that only police know and practice. That writing between the courtly and the doubtful, always with verbs in remote past tense, even if the facts described only happened a few hours earlier. We left the police station at noon, but at least the guys had the theft report in their hands.

The van was never found again - after a week or so Subcontractor's people arrived with a new minibus, but they used parking it inside the site yard.

A112 I had bought a red and black A112 car. Nothing better to drive around the narrow and always busy streets of Milan. That year Rome football team reached the final of the then Champions League Cup and match was against the English side Liverpool. That evening I reached home a little late so I left the car parked in front of the house, intending to put it in the garage after the game. Regular time ended 1 – 1 (Pruzzo's equalizer after Neal's initial lead). After extra time Roma lost the match on penalties!! Disappointed with the result and it being late, I went to bed leaving the A112 on the road. The next morning, I left for work very early. At a traffic light on Jenner avanue a driver pulls alongside and says to me:

But where do you have the license plates?

Mmmm… (7.00 am) Well . ...supposingly one in front and the other in back of the car......I answered.

No look… there's neither the one in front nor the one in the back!!!

WTF......I pulled over and immediately got out to realize that yes! The license plates were both missing!! What to do? I riched the construction site to warn my colleagues about what happened, and then I continued and went to the very same Police Station in Via San Gottardo, in order to file a report of license plates theft!

The Seargent recognized me:

Ah yes, you are the one from the van that disappeared ten days ago….

No, look agant… I only accompanied the people who work for my company….

Yes…yes…and in any case tell me why…you come from your place till here to report the licence plates disappearance?

Sorry agant but.....I this morning I didn't pay attention the plates were not longer in position, a driver at traffic light warned me… it's not like someone does it the first thing at 6.00 in the morning to check whether the license plates are there or not …I hop you understands me……

Yes…yes…oh well……but you should have gone to the nearest police station ....why you didn't?

This is the nearest police station, after I realised plates numbers desapperead, agent......And what do I know… without license plates you can't drive around....Can I replace the license plates temporarily with two pieces of cardboard while waiting for the regular ones?

Do what you want… but by law you cannot circulate without original plates numbers.

So it was like that I had two temporary sheet metal plates made on site, with which I drove around ''illegaly'' for a couple of weeks, until the regular plates arrived.

WEDDING In the meantime, me and my tha fiancee Rosalba had decided it was the time to get married. The ceremony took place in the Town Hall of Meda, a city about 25 km from Milan, hometown of my ex. It was very hastily officiated by a short-sighted councilor who had forgotten his glasses at home, so that he began to read the ritual sentences with the documents stuck to his eyes, and he try his best to short cut everything by saying etc. etcetera.....etcetera. We had a reception dinner in a cozy rastaurant called ''La Casupola, nested in a large countryside park.

On our honeymoon we went first to New York, then to Mexico City and finally to Isla Mujeres, in the Mexican Caribbean. To tell the truth, we had chosen Cozumel or Cancun, but the travel agency had advised us against the two destinations because - she said - 'too filthy' places.....''. To tell the truth, in order to reach Isla Mujeres we passed through Cancun, and at first glance it didn't seem "too filty" at all.

NEW YORK The flight Milan – New York was pleasant, and we had the opportunity to meet the Grand Master Pavarotti, an exquisite person. On the plane there were also members of the Italian national ski team, who were going to participate in competitions in North America. Great impression from my first visit to New York: on VI Avenue the wind slipped between two rows of very high skyscrapers, and cut our faces as if we were in the Alps. Another - disappointing - impression of the city was that NY was not at all ''all new and shiny'' as we were shown in films and TV series. I saw a lot of ''new used'' (or used new) in the sense of buildings, subways, streets, sidewalks and benches that were not old but already ruined by use. All this left me with a sense of dismay, making me realize that the "American dream" was perhaps just a dream, and the reality was much more down to earth. A beautiful memory was the climb to the terrace-restaurant of the West Tower of the Twin Towers, even though we were not allowed to go out on the open terrace because the wind was too strong up there. The small museum at the top of the tower was very beautiful with photos and videos of the phases of the tower's construction. The video of the antenna installation on the East Tower was amazing: the workers involved were all members of that particular tribe of Native Redskins who - due to a congenital defect of the hearing system - do not suffer from vertigo.

MEXICO CITY

Two days later we were on a flight to Mexico City, and when the captain of the plane announced to fasten seat belts while aircraft started the descent, we spent another half looking to the endless metropolitan area of Mexico city. The city was immense, and neighborhoods could be seen touching the sides of the surrounding mountains. We stayed at the Hotel Casablanca, on Paseo Reforma, a modern 30-story skyscraper. The following year - on Sept. 19th, 1985 - the hotel collapsed during the disastrous earthquake which claimed more than 10,000 victims. We visited Theotihuacan, the floating gardens of Xochimilco, Chapultepec park and the National Museum of Anthropology – and than Piazza Garibaldi, the Zocalo, and finally the famous ''Zona Rosa''.

QUINTANA ROO We than left for Quintana Roo, the state bordering Yucatan, to reach Cancun. Having landed at Cancun airport, at the time little more than a warehouse, we took a taxi to Puerto Juarez, from where the ferry to Isla Mujeres left. At that time, without the Internet, trips were much more difficult to plan and uncertainty reigned supreme. Today, with all the information available online, we would never have gone to Puerto Juarez to wait for a rusty ship, while there was a fast hydrofoil service that connected Cancun with Isla Mujeres in 35 minutes. The weather had worsened, low black clouds threatened rain, which arrived promptly: torrential rain and wind caused rough seas and a further delay to our ferry. Finally the ship arrived, and after unloading a few passengers and vehicles, we boarded and set off immediately. The crossing was quite troubled, with the sea becoming increasingly rough - we reached the pier of Isla Mujeres late in the evening, the rain had stopped, and a taxi took us to the Posada del Mar, the hotel we had booked through the agency in Italy. The hotel was right on the sea front, the room was good, and the bed was huge, an anticipation of what American call ''California King'' I guess. The next morning we had a typical rich Mexican breakfast: tropical fruit, huevos ranchero with bacon, juices of all colors. Than we set off to explore the island, renting bicycles from a lady who, instead of a guard dog, in the enclosure where she was keeping her bicycles, she had a crocodile that she used to release at night. The lady told us that she had never suffered a theft.

Isla Mujeres, with the elongated shape of a barracuda, is about 15 km long. Very beautiful from a naturalistic point of view, with fantastic sea and beaches on the West coast. We spent pleasant days at the beaches, especially in the lagoon that separates Isla Mujeres with its appendix, an islet that housed the Mia Reef hotel. We visited Garrafon Reef Park, where we could familiarize ourselves with nurse sharks and huge turtles. In the shallow water of the sea a multitude of colorful fish. We witnessed a beautiful show of orcas and seals, and during the show we exchanged a few words with a retired American couple, who invited us to have coffee in their mobile home parked nearby.

How long are you staying? The kind lady asked us

About ten days – I replied

Nooo… we're doing a tour of 3 or 4 months… then we'll see – replied the husband.

CONTOY ISLAND Once we decided to go on an excursion to Contoy, a small archipelago that is a Marine Natural Reserve in Mexico. We took our seats on a motor boat where there were already a dozen foreigners, who later revealed themselves to be a group of Canadians from a commercial TV. Halfway through the cruise - which would have lasted about 3 hours - the sailors made a stop to allow us to do some snorkeling in a shoal. The sea was wonderful, lots of fish and coral – then suddenly, while I was swimming, I looked up from the water and realized that they were leaving me there, alone in the middle of the sea!! It was a prank organized by the Mexican sailors to liven up the day, and when the boat turned around to fish me out everyone laughed out loud looking at my face....... At the time, however, I fell for it, and it wasn't one of the best memories of that holiday. One of the sailors, before arriving in Contoy, had caught half a dozen fish, trevally and barracuda, and once we moored at the small pier he got busy preparing the grill. The place was heavenly, the only building on the island was the guardian's house - a multitude of exotic birds and land iguanas populated the dense coconut palm forest. The fish cooked on the grill with peppers and other veggies was fantastic, the beers were fresh: simply a daay to remember! In the meantime, several boats had docked at the small pier on the island, including a yacht owned by couples of young Americans. They began to harass the numerous iguanas that roamed the surrounding rocks. I noticed that the park rangers were already in alert. At a certain point one of the American boys took an iguana by the tail, and, while swinging it, threw it into the sea. Immediately one of the guardians, still dressed, dived into the water and after a few seconds recovered the animal. The land iguana cannot swim and would certainly have died without the intervention of the park ranger.

Cabrones yanqui, hijo de puta mama que vajas antes que te golpeé!! (American goat son of a bitch go away before I beat you) The Americans untied the ropes, without saying a word, and under the reproachful gazes of all those present, they started the engine of the yacht and left accompanied by insults from all those present. We returned to Isla Mujeres while the sea was colored in sunset's pink-red.

FLIGHT BACK TO ITALY After Rosalba had gotten yet another sunburn, the holiday ended. The hydrofoil took us back to the ''filthy'' Cancun. It was very early and so we spent the day on the hotel beach.

At the beach chiringuito I ate the spiciest bocadillo of my life, and then we went to the airport to board the plane to Miami. Once we arrived in Florida, a local black policeman questioned me in Spanish, saying he was surprised that I wasn't Cuban (I wore a mustache at the time, maybe for that?) and then they accompanied us to the International Transit area. Miami had a very colorful airport at the time: pink and purple carpets everywhere. Later we took our seats on the Mexicana de Aviacion plane that would take us to Madrid. The take-off/landing runways at Miami airport are of the X-shaped type and require accurate control by ground radars. Which evidently did not happen that afternoon, where we had a very dangerous near miss. Our Boeing 707 was already launched for take-off, when at the crossroads of the runways another plane appeared landing: the Captain of our plane applied the brakes, many of the bags fell from the overhead bins, the oxygen masks made their appearance, several passengers screamed loudly but luckily the seat belts held us in place, and no one was hurt. The plane had stopped in time to avoid a collision that would have been fatal to the passengers of both aircraft. We returned to the airport, they let us off, some ladies felt ill and medical intervention was necessary. After about an hour, a second plane was ready: we boarded and took off safely. The following morning, after a stopover in Madrid, an IBERIA flight took us to Linate.

Autobianchi A112

[cymlea]

Bridging Horizons: A Transcendent Finale

As your exploration of Florida and New York reaches its zenith, consider the grandeur of the journey you've undertaken—the interplay of sunlit beaches, towering skyscrapers, and the myriad hues of cultural diversity. Your odyssey is more than a mere traversal between states; it's a testament to the interconnectedness of experiences, a tapestry woven with the threads of discovery.

Sunrise on the East Coast, Sunset on the West:

Embrace the symbolic transition from sunrise to sunset, a metaphor for your expedition from the east coast of Florida to the western landscapes of New York. Witness the celestial journey, a celestial ballet that mirrors your earthly adventure.

Capturing the Essence:

Capture the essence of each destination not just through photographs but through the sensations imprinted on your soul. The warm embrace of Florida's sun, the rhythmic lull of waves, the cosmopolitan heartbeat of New York—all are etchings in the gallery of your memories.

Reflecting by the Water's Edge:

Find reflective moments by the water's edge, whether it be the Atlantic's gentle caress along Florida's shores or the contemplative embrace of the Hudson River. Let the waters mirror the revelations and insights garnered throughout your sojourn.

A Melody of Urbanity and Nature:

Listen to the harmonious melody that emerges when the urban rhythms of Miami blend with the natural symphony of upstate New York. Recognize that even in the contrasts, there is a sublime melody of coexistence.

The Lure of Uncharted Avenues:

Feel the allure of uncharted avenues, beckoning you to explore beyond familiar horizons. In Florida's untamed wilderness and New York's urban alleys, discover the thrill of stepping into the unknown and the joy of unscripted moments.

Cultural Weavings:

Marvel at the intricate weavings of culture, history, and tradition. In Florida's storied past and New York's tapestry of immigrant narratives, find the common threads that unite diverse communities and enrich the narrative of the American experience.

A Journey Beyond Borders:

Acknowledge that your journey extends beyond geographical borders. It's a journey of self-discovery, cultural immersion, and the realization that every destination, no matter how distinct, contributes to a universal story of human exploration.

Crafting the Epilogue:

As your dual-state odyssey draws to a close, consider crafting the epilogue—a reflection on the transformative power of travel. Share your narrative, weaving together the landscapes, faces, and moments that have shaped your understanding of these two remarkable states.

A Heartfelt Adieu:

Bid a heartfelt adieu to the states that have opened their arms to your wanderlust. Whether it's the sun-drenched beaches of Miami or the city lights of Manhattan, express gratitude for the hospitality and beauty that have enriched your journey.

Carrying the Essence Forward:

Carry the essence of Florida and New York forward. Let the lessons learned and the memories made become guiding lights for future travels. Your dual-state odyssey isn't just a chapter; it's a compass pointing towards the next horizons waiting to be explored.

Final Words: A Journey Unbound

As you conclude this exceptional journey through the landscapes of Florida and New York, remember that the true beauty lies not just in the destinations but in the profound connections forged along the way. Your footsteps have left an indelible mark on the shores, streets, and hearts encountered.

May your future adventures be as boundless as the horizons you've glimpsed, and may the memories of Florida and New York continue to echo in your heart. As you step into the world beyond, know that the spirit of exploration is a perpetual flame, lighting the way for journeys yet to unfold.

Safe travels, intrepid explorer, as you continue to embrace the beauty of uncharted paths and the wonders that await beyond every bend in the road. The odyssey is yours, unbound and limitless.

[clairelsonao3]

Happy STS!

What's a bit of dialogue or a scene that you're really proud of, but hasn't found a home yet in any of your stories?

Happy STS! Thanks for the ask!

Well. I did NOT intend to exhume this today (or ever), but since you asked:

CW: Minors living alone and committing nonviolent crimes, mention/implication of parental loss

Above the Chinese fireworks shop was where the pickpockets lived, multiplying like mouselings in the garret. All that summer, they slept on flour sacks and in milk crates, half-naked on the bare metal roof; they drank sawdust whiskey and ate black bananas and melted moon pies; they cussed out old ladies and bet on the horses and smoked cheap cigars and dumped rotting garbage over the heads of passersby, howling with laughter at the screams below. 

They were all orphans, or might as well have been. The street was their mother, their sister, their sweetheart, and their friend. They were all boys, except for one. 

Each one plied his racket. Swing did the glim drop; Fisheye the quick-change; Avenue the pigeon fold. Popcan, just five, as curly-headed and big-eyed as a cherub on a Valentine card, cried until some society girl came to wipe his tears, and Swing could slit her reticule with his jackknife, raining pennies from heaven. For a good three-week run in July, Polo Grounds was king of them all, making two whole dollars a day flipping cards between two milk crates on Cherry Street — find the lady, find the lady, find the lady — until the bulls clubbed it to smithereens and he had to start from scratch next to Mr. Alberelli’s banana cart on Mott. 

Dodger, the tallest one, with the most artful hands and grayest eyes, had earned the right to climb up on the fire escape every night alone, to watch the schooners roll into the India docks, their masts shrouded in clouds as purple-black as amethyst smoke, leaning toward a place and time none of the rest of them could ever reach and knew better than to try. 

But even he looked skyward when Mr. Chung tore the hot air apart with his purples and reds and yellows, testing his wares, Shanghai-style, bang-bang-boom, as if it and all the Lower East Side, and all New York City, and all the world, was a nickelodeon playing just for them. And those swells on Park Avenue, they all said, couldn’t be living half so good.

This was meant to be the opening of my Oliver Twist-inspired YA historical romance I conceived of IDK how long ago. There are a couple more scenes written, but it didn't get much further than this. I guess it’s now my first official Tumblr fiction, since it doesn’t currently live anywhere else and I'm not sure it ever will.

[sticksstonesbonespoems]

The Tower of London

The Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, French, Germans and all the “nationalities” that make up the people soup of London have been joined by the civilizations that soup colonized. It is a wondrous, multi-cultural city. Smack dab in the middle is a fortress that started as a medieval palace and became infamous for executions. The central building was erected by William the Conqueror who is responsible for making the English at least partly French even if they will not admit it as England and France became the Cain and Abel of Western Europe for centuries.

Power, monarchy and human weakness fed war and cruelty. Edward the first taxed the Jewish population higher than anyone else to pay for the construction of towers. Then he kicked them all out of England. The one room dedicated to devices of torture has boards glibly stating that there was not nearly as much torture as you would think. Oh no. There were only 81 cases of state-sanctioned torture. Mmmm hmmm. Who are you trying to kid? That statement should not be allowed to assuage any guilt felt by the largest purveyor of medieval hijinks and abject colonization. There is a quaint little pub across the street from the Tower called the Hung, Drawn. And Quartered. Own it England.

There are some things that have not evolved well. In the 50 or so years since my last visit, the ravens of the tower are now kept locked up. When I was a child, they free-roamed the grounds when tourists were there. Men just cannot be trusted.

Also, not one of us avoids death. Life is for living.

Haman

“So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.”

Esther 7:10

“The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Haman, good provider, brought his own rope.

Arranged with care his own unique reward.

He was risen higher in public death

Than he dared hope to rise in public life,

High as the best carpenters of the realm

Could build, high as the best gallows makers

He could afford to hire could lofty reach.

He twists slowly, slowly, at his rope’s end,

Turning slowly, his gaze could see for miles

Around now if still his eyes could see,

Turning slowly, could scan the capital,

The ways and and avenues that lead to power,

Turning slowly, South, East, North, West, search for

The junction where it all went somehow wrong.

Always and only he had expected

Simple justice: just what he had coming,

Had served his king, had shirked no drudging task,

Kept his desk clean, filed reports on time,

Learned decorum proper to high command—

Whose wife to flirt with and whom to avoid,

How to carve the roast, when to chill the wine,

How to serve up what the king wants to hear

At conference, and serve it up sincere.

Order, protocol, rank, degree, respect—

He knew his place and merely asked that those

Below know theirs; he wasn’t asking much:

The easy bow, the bending of the knee

To rank, acknowledging the earned degree.

His wife at first had thought his ravings odd,

A petty agnostic fret; his friends

Had humored him and failed to understand

His point that so much more than wounded pride

Was on the line, that the whole nation reeled

When one small wretched Jew refused to kneel.

If order, rank, and rule were not for all,

None would have them—the gutted state would fall.

The king, poor blind mindless amorous fool,

Must be saved from himself like it or not,

The state pushed back from the brink of chaos:

Blot out a people to save a nation,

Encourage a race for civilization.

The sentimental sops might call it cruel,

But realists would cautiously applaud:

And see him clear: a man doing the job

That years of public life had trained him for.

He liked to think that the years had prepared

Him precisely to meet this Jewish threat:

A moment to shine high in the klieg lights

Of all the focusing historians.

The man who knew his job and got it done.

Let the klieg lights of time affix him now

Twisting, slowly, slowly, at his rope’s end.

See him now in the bright harsh light of time

As man the butt of all ironic jokes,

Prickled on his own barbed wire, blown to hell

By his own bombs, gassed in the seclusion

Of his own chambers, and asking always

Only for what he has coming to him

And always, always, always getting it.

Man twists, slowly, slowly, at his rope’s end.

Turning slowly, scanning North, East, South, West:

History’s avenues all lead to death.

The light winks, the bands play, the boots march on.

Man dances absurd at the end of his rope.

For life is gala lynching party

Where every swinger brings his own rope:

It’s bring your own rope and reap your reward.

Except once: that grim party crashed by Him,

Intruding, who brought no rope of His own,

But borrowing man’s He stole the scene

And died, took what wasn’t coming to Him.

Look on Him, scene stealer, on His hilltop,

Changing the rules, muddling simple justice

With mercy, redemption, something called grace,

And cheating man of his hard earned reward:

Man’s antic rope’s end dance eclipsed at last

By the still shadow high on Golgotha.

E.W. Oldenburg 1936 - 1974

[tightbrosnetwork]

Tight Bros Network is a concert promotion company based in Atlanta that has been operating since 1999. It was founded by Randy Castello and Unisa Asokan in the basement of the eyedrum art & music gallery, located on Trinity Avenue in southwest Atlanta. Where they had the opportunity to learn how to book shows and work with experimental artists, local musicians, and touring artists from North America and abroad.

In 2001, Tight Bros Network was officially launched, and the company expanded its shows to local clubs The Earl, MJQ, Drunken Unicorn, and Star Bar. The company’s mission has always been to support and promote independent artists and provide a platform for experimental and emerging musicians.

In March of 2004, Tight Bros Network founded the Kirkwood Ballers Club, an open-forum arts incubator and a haven for adventurous experiments in music. The Kirkwood Ballers Club has been a staple destination in the Atlanta music scene for two decades and has provided countless musicians with the opportunity to showcase their artistry.

Spanning July 2004 to 2008, Tight Bros Network served as talent purchasers for popular subterranean ATL entertainment complex, Drunken Unicorn & MJQ. During this period, we worked tirelessly to bring larger national and international artists and DJs to the city. We developed a reputation for booking high-quality shows that catered to the local music scene’s evolving tastes. The experience gained from working with such big artists as Diplo, Four Tet, and Animal Collective to name a few helped us to grow our network and reputation as a top indie concert promotion company in Atlanta. It also set our foundation and enabled us to expand into other local clubs and concert venues.

Tight Bros Network has received numerous accolades over the years, including being voted Best Local Concert Promoter in 2006, 2007, and 2008 by Creative Loafing, Atlanta.

In November of 2008, we switched gears to help our friends book bands at 529, a small club, unknown at the time, located in East Atlanta Village, where we helped nurture a bright local music scene for eight years and played a crucial role in developing 529’s reputation as a premier venue for live music in Atlanta.

During this period, we expanded our reach by booking events at larger venues, such as Variety Playhouse, Terminal West, Center Stage, Plaza Theatre and Goat Farm. We expanded our roster to include comedy events.

Additionally, we partnered with companies like Red Bull and PBR as curators for events featuring emerging artists from around the world. We were also afforded the opportunity to book musical acts for Adult Swim’s Fishcenter live stream (RIP).

In 2016 we returned to Drunken Unicorn where we booked shows until March 2020 when the Covid pandemic hit forcing us to abruptly cease operating at the venue. It was a dark time for live music.

In 2020, when the live music scene was disrupted due to the pandemic, Tight Bros Network shifted its focus to managing Upchuck, a young band from Atlanta that is starting to gain national attention due to its raucous live shows and compelling releases.

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Tight Bros Network has continued to support the Atlanta music scene and provide a platform for emerging artists to showcase their talents.

In the summer of 2021, we helped open eyedrum art & music gallery’s new location in the West End on Ralph David Abernathy Blvd, where we now host Kirkwood Ballers Club on the third Thursday of each month, continuing their avant-garde monthly forum at the art and music gallery where it all began.

[alliance00]

Best Recruitment Companies in Dubai for Skilled Talent Acquisition

Now, Dubai has become one prosperous economy as well while offering rich diversification of manpower and vast business opportunities. Now, at this very moment, an efficient recruitment partner is not something that can be avoided as so many kinds of industries go to compete and get the cream of the crop for themselves. Be it that key role of an employer or just a step above the career; coming into partnership with Dubai's best recruitment agency comes to your rescue in all aspects.

We have already mentioned the top recruitment agencies in Dubai, through which one can be able to succeed and also what makes them different.

Introduction to Recruitment in Dubai

Dubai is an international city and also business capital of the Middle East. As a cosmopolis, it has also attracted international business to it, so thousands of skilled employees must be met for the demands to be fulfilled. And it is here that recruitment agencies play their role by making the employers meet the right talent.

Why Choose a Recruitment Company?

Ever had that thrill of finding the needle in a haystack-that talent? Recruitment agencies are problem-solvers. They remove the headache of hiring through sourcing, screening, and matching qualified people to businesses.

Top Sectors for Recruitment in Dubai

The economy of Dubai is diversified with a lot of sectors including:

Construction and Real Estate: Engineering, architectural, and labour requirements for infrastructure projects as well as house construction.

Technology: IT professionals, software engineers, and data analysts are always recruited.

Healthcare: Doctors, nurses, and other clinic staff are recruited throughout the year.

Finance and Banking: Accountants, auditors, and analysts are always recruited.

Recruitment companies cater to such and many other industries.

Features of the Best Recruitment Companies

What does the best recruitment company in Dubai offer? Here is what to look for:

Industry Expertise: Companies with deep knowledge and understanding about your industry.

Global Reach: Source talent within the Country, regionally and overseas border and across the globe

Proven Track Record: It is a high percentage, which most of the clients achieve.

Client-Centric Approach: With customized clients one can support, take care of all their needs based on necessity.

Benefits of Partnering with Experts

Win over such fights battling everything when they can be served with a professional? Over time-winning and getting the recruitment time and saves one's recruitment.

How to Choose the Right Recruitment Partner

One of the crucial tasks is to choose a suitable recruitment agency. And there is some guidelines on which kind of agency is preferable 

Do they specialize in your industry.

Check the testimonial and success story of the agency.

Does an agency follow ethical recruitment procedures.

Do they know local labor laws and culture.

Spotlight on Dubai’s Leading Recruiters

Some of the top recruitment companies in Dubai include:

Alliance International: They have a global talent network and customized solutions.

BAC Middle East: Head hunters-specialize on recruitment at the senior-most level.

Robert Half: The big league in finance and information technology recruitment.

Each firm represents, hence caters to specific company or commercial requirements.

Challenges in Recruitment and Solutions

Dubai has few recruitment challenges some of these are immigration, culture issues among others. Matures in the recruitment agencies will have a way of bypassing such.

Recruitment Trends in Dubai

The use of technology in recruitment agencies that use AI and machine learning and data analysis have discovered the best candidate to them faster than ever.

How Recruitment Companies Help Job Seekers

They actually provide interview practice, and exclusive access combined with counseling for a nominated job candidate to open some fresh avenues which are not mapped anywhere.

Future of Recruitment in Dubai

The future looks bright for Dubai because it will soon be the hub for worldwide businesses. The recruiters are going to play a more significant role in the quest of finding people in sectors likely to emerge, such as renewable energy and AI.

Why Dubai is a Hub for Skilled Talent

Dubai offered unique opportunities, combined with infrastructure of the finest quality and tax-free income, and attracted hundreds of highly qualified professionals to the region.

Alliance International: A Trusted Partner

For all your reliable recruitment needs, there is hardly any better name than that of Alliance International. There is an exceptional quantum of coverage in years and a success story so making sure the most premium talent around the world.

Tips for Employers to Maximize Recruitment

Want to get maximum out of recruitment? Here is how it goes:

Define the job well and expectations of the job.

Use employer branding to attract top talent.

Leverage your recruitment agency.

Conclusion

It is, therefore, rightly said that finding the right talent is the make-or-break factor for a business. With Alliance Recruitment Agency in Dubai, businesses can connect with the best professionals while saving precious time and resources. Whatever your side of the fence—an employer or a job seeker—recruitment agencies like ours are the way to success in this competitive Dubai job market.

Contact us today to explore how we can help you achieve your goals efficiently and effectively.

View source: https://recruitmentagencyfranchise.hashnode.dev/best-recruitment-companies-in-dubai-for-skilled-talent-acquisition

[zurich-seo-expert]

Switzerland's Luxury Watch Industry and SEO Opportunities

The Swiss luxury watch industry remains a global leader, with brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Cartier, and Omega dominating the market. The market is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.84%, reaching approximately $68.17 billion by 2028. The focus on high-quality craftsmanship, innovation, and premium branding has solidified Switzerland's status as the home of luxury horology​ 6Wresearch Mordor Intelligence.

Key Trends:

Digital Expansion: With the rise of e-commerce, online retail channels for luxury watches are growing rapidly. Consumers increasingly value convenience and accessibility, driving brands to enhance their online presence.

Sustainability and Innovation: Many Swiss brands are adopting sustainable practices and leveraging technological advancements to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers.

Market Leadership: Rolex continues to dominate, holding over 30% market share. Swatch's MoonSwatch has gained immense popularity, showcasing how affordability combined with luxury branding can be effective ​Professional Watches​Mordor Intelligence.

SEO Opportunities:

For businesses involved in luxury watches or targeting this sector:

Content Marketing: Craft engaging content like "Top Luxury Watches for Collectors" or "How to Authenticate a Swiss Luxury Watch" to attract search traffic.

Local SEO: Optimize for searches related to Swiss watches in specific regions or markets where demand is high.

Visual SEO: Enhance image optimization for luxury watches to appear in Google Images, a common avenue for luxury shoppers.

Multilingual SEO: With global audiences, creating multilingual content can tap into markets in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Partnerships and Influencers: Collaborate with watch review sites or influencers to boost visibility and backlinks.

[blogparanormalexpresso2stuff]

US astronaut on seeing a UFO fleet, landing footage & sending letter to the UN about the phenomenon

0:00 UFOs over Germany, 1951.

0:35 UFO landing at Edwards AFB, May 3, 1957.

3:04 Gordon Cooper's letter to the United Nations, November 9, 1978:

"Ambassador Griffith

Mission of Grenada to the United Nations

866 Second Avenue

Suite 502

New York, New York 10017

Dear Ambassador Griffith,

I wanted to convey to you my views on our extra-terrestrial visitors popularly referred to as "UFO's", and suggest what might be done to properly deal with them.

I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion. We my first have to show them that we have learned to resolve our problems by peaceful means, rather than warfare, before we are accepted as fully qualified universal team members. This acceptance would have tremendous possibilities of advancing our world in all areas. Certainly then it would seem that the UN has a vested interest in handling this subject properly and expeditiously.

I should point out that I am not an experienced UFO professional researcher. I have not yet had the privilege of flying a UFO, nor of meeting the crew of one. I do feel that I am somewhat qualified to discuss them since I have been into the fringes of the vast areas in which they travel. Also, I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them, of different sizes, flying in fighter formation, generally from east to west over Europe. They were at a higher altitude than we could reach with our jet fighters of that time.

I would also like to point out that most astronauts are very reluctant to even discuss UFO's due to the great numbers of people who have indiscriminately sold fake stories and forged documents abusing their names and reputations without hesitation. Those few astronauts who have continued to have a participation in the UFO field have had to do so very cautiously. There are several of us who do believe in UFO's and who have had occasion to see a UFO on the ground, or from an airplane. There was only one occasion from space which may have been a UFO.

If the UN agrees to pursue this project, and to lend their credibility to it, perhaps many more well qualified people will agree to step forth and provide help and information.

I am looking forward to seeing you soon.

Sincerely,

L. Gordon Cooper

Col. USAF (ket)

Astronaut "

Interviewer: Yolanda Gaskins.

Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. (1927-2004).