“You don’t get it. There’s this command console that can tell the dragons what to do. All we need to do is find it and figure out how it works. We can tell them to kill themselves. Maybe there’s even a Self-Destruct button on there.”
“Ah, the fabled ‘operations transmitter’?”
“You know about it?”
“It’s an old, old chestnut—an urban legend, if you will. There’s no such thing.”
“Nuh-uh. I heard the city hired this one guy to look for it.”
“And where did you hear that?”
Ripple looks at him steadily—clever, no, but eerily sentient. Humorlessly sober too. “I’m going to do something. I’ve got to.”
Osmond reaches under his captain’s seat for the tackle box he keeps hidden there, flips back the lid, and strikes a match. Ripple cringes as the flame illumes.
“Pro, don’t keep lighting lamps, I don’t really want to see…what the snuff, you do drugs down here?”
“The change of scenery has worked no wonders for my affliction,” Osmond exhales, offering Ripple a puff on a one-hitter cunningly devised from an upcycled spigot. His nephew hesitantly accepts.
“Don’t get me too swamped, though, I still have to explain my plan.”
“You’ll have time to murder and to birth / To burn a name upon the earth, as the poem goes,” Osmond consoles him. “Besides, some chemically enhanced fortitude may be required for you to endure the rest of this discussion.”
“Huh?” Ripple coughs. “Oh fuck. This is worse than the first time I smoked. I have been, like, loam revirginated.”
“I’m speaking of your parents’ suicides.”
“Wait, what?”
“If you will recall, your sudden departure coincided with a violent home invasion—one our private security firm failed to contain, most likely because they were either bribed or had other plans that night.” Osmond tokes again. “Your father, watching on the panic-room monitors, concluded our cause was lost once the marauding crew broke out the gasoline.”
“So it was the cyanide pills.” Sobriety and reason drain from Ripple’s features like dirty bathwater; he’s a mental incompetent again, but a heartbroken one this time. “What about Mom?”
Katya’s suffered the last of Osmond’s bon mots: “Loyal to the end.”
The two men pass the spigot back and forth in sympathetic silence as the docked boat rocks on putrid waves. A gator drifts by, a floating log of malice. In the lantern’s flickering glow, the domed ceiling of the pipe crawls with spidery shadows, a phantom forest of night branches, grasping.
“But,” says Ripple, with some apparent effort, his eyes completely crossed, “I still don’t understand how you got out alive.”
“If vengeance is your aim,” Osmond smoothly elides, “there’s no cause to despair. A handful of Torchtown brigands will be far less daunting foes than the dragons. And they are, of course, the ones entirely responsible.”
“Take revenge on the torchies.” Ripple unhappily contemplates. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t like killing people. I’m never doing it again.”
Osmond notes the “again,” but decides not to inquire. “Never say never, my boy.”
“No, I mean it. It just isn’t…me, you know? Not the way I want to be remembered. Next time, I’d rather just die.” He looks like he might cry, but instead he shakes his head and changes tack: “Besides, Swanny probably took care of that already.”
Osmond chuckles. “Oh, did she now?”
“She was headed there the last time we talked, all powered up for a rampageathon, so yeah, probably…Stop laughing like you know something I don’t. What’s this pink fuzzy thing in front of my face?”
“That would be your nose. Young Duncan, believe it or not, down here your old uncle is privy to channels of information undreamt-of in realms above.”
“The sewer made you smarter?”
“What I’m referring to is the connection between these subterranean but nonetheless lawful waterways and the forbidden plumbing of Torchtown. It’s all supposed to be quite closed off and inaccessible, but nothing stays sealed forever. Pollution seeks its own level, you know. At any rate: I now redeem my prescription”—he indicates the tackle box—“from a commuting loam bearer by the delightfully mercantile name of ‘Mart.’ His primary occupation is to hawk his wares to one client and one client only: the infamous chawmonger of Scullery Lane.”
“So that’s why it’s so strong.”
“Stay with me, kinsman. Mart journeys weekly from an Upstate marsh farm, down through our gondoliering canals, and then farther south still, to passages unbeknownst, where he plies his narcotic trade. The life of a traveling salesman is a solitary one, no matter how convivial his wares, and I’ve found him most talkative on a variety of subjects. Including his eccentric patron. It seems that the aforementioned chawmonger has, through some unsavory means, lately acquired that rarest of possessions: a young lady of breeding and refinement, with whom, one must assume, he takes the most ferocious liberties. Mart tells me that she’s battered about the face, marked with love bites, dizzy with chaw at all hours of the day—yielding and compliant to the monger’s roughest touch. Wait, here, I have some extrapolations I’ve sketched out based on what he’s described.”
Ripple flips open the composition notebook that Osmond hands him to a random page and reads aloud: “He thrust deeper, pushing her to another brink. ‘Spit in my mouth when you climax,’ she whimpered greedily, ‘that nectar of drug and tongue is the only taste sweeter than your—’?”
“Never mind that.” Osmond snatches the folio back. “Have you guessed why I’ve relayed the matter to you in such detail?”
“You’re lonely?”
“Because I’m speaking of your bride. The Baroness Swan Lenore.” Osmond waits a beat for this to sink in. “The torchies haven’t just driven your parents to suicide, Duncan. They haven’t just burned down your house. They’ve taken your wife, and their leader has her still.”
“No way. It can’t be the same fem.”
“The baroness is a witch’s cauldron of mingled passions, nephew. Rage and lust, fury and desire. It surprises me not at all that she’s succumbed to sensual depravity in the arms of a swarthy crime boss.”
“Pro,” Ripple is shaking his head, “pro, she would never.”
“Then go to Torchtown and prove me wrong.”
“Look, the first thing I need to do is slay the dragons, then I can start worrying about…”
“Forget your fairy tales, errant knight! No man can slay the dragons. No man can ‘save the day,’ as goes the tired phrase—minute by minute, it falls away from us, regardless of our best intentions. But there is ‘something you can do’—something that requires little more than a venturesome spirit and an indomitable will. A feat for which intelligence is hardly a prerequisite.”
“What’s that?”
“Love.”
“Uh…”
“Come now, I refuse to believe you’re still tampering with that dead-eyed wretch you found in the waste yard. You’re like an infant who prefers a soiled diaper pail to any of his toys.”
“We broke up, actually.”
“What a terrible shame, I hope you’ll stay friends. But for the purposes of our discussion here, a useful tidbit to consider. Now, back to your wife—”
“Swanny doesn’t want me back.”