“It’s all right,” Sharkey says. He pulls her closer, his voice lowering to a tender growl: “I got ya.”
They continue down the block, arm in arm, toward the shop. Sharkey’s a stump of a man, a living gargoyle, yet his body gives off such heat: the warmth of a hearthstone, the warmth of home. Swanny’s mind overloads, her nervous system jolts and tingles with competing impulses. She finally pulls away, and Sharkey grudgingly relinquishes her. By the time they reach the stoop she’s processed the unthinkable into words.
“It’s true,” she says. “You know where the fires will be.”
Sharkey, halfway up the steps already, turns back. He looks at her with tired eyes.
“Who told you that?”
“I’m not a fool.”
“So what if I do?”
“You…Keelhaul, he said that you…you asked him to go…”
“Keelhaul hasn’t been doing his job.”
“What job is that, precisely?”
“Running errands. Today’s a case in point. I give him an order, he ignores it.” The rest is a boyish, embarrassed mumble: “Anyhow, he was bothering me.”
“I thought—” But what did Swanny think, just moments ago? She must have amnesia, like someone in a plot twist. She struggles to recall the bare bones: “I thought you were…kind.”
“I saved you, didn’t I?”
Yes, Sharkey cares for her, protects her, provides for her in the manner to which she has become accustomed. And no one else left in this world does. She chooses her phrasing with care: “Be that as it may, you mustn’t—you mustn’t take out your emotions on the help. However passionate you may feel.”
Sharkey spits, as if daring her to scold him. As if asking her to. But Swanny just stares at him, struck by his strangeness as if for the first time: a knot of human gristle and striving, malformed and stubbly, a parasitic twin who struck out to make it on his own. Then something collapses in his expression, and she recognizes him again: his vulnerability, his resignation. His loneliness. She’s not the only one in this conversation who’s down to her last friend. “This place can really take it out of you.”
“Howie?” Her voice is soft.
“Yeah?”
“How do you know? About the fires?”
“You don’t chew, so you wouldn’t understand.” He scratches at his five-o’clock shadow with rough knuckles. “The chaw, if you do enough—it brings you very close to death. Works different for different people, but I used to see ghosts from the past. Used to. Maybe it’s ’cause I’ve been chewing longer than anybody else, but it got flipped somehow. Now whenever I see something, it’s coming from the future.”
* * *
Dear Diary,
The nightmares are getting worse—the nightmares and the memories, which are really one and the same, because what is the past but a recurrent dream, steeped in terrible meaning, which one is powerless in waking life to alter in the slightest? Each night I journey to Wonland County upon the wings of screeching bats flushed by fires from the rafters of Torchtown into the inky sky. I haunt the chambers of my childhood home like the ghost I am soon to become, write my name in the mantelpiece dust, rap out coded messages upon the table in the Great Hall, though no one is there to hear. Then, come dawn, I return to Torchtown with the foolish birds, the pigeons who light upon the ledges of this place only to be snared in the hungry nets of children, destined to roast half-plucked over the garbage can fires.
This is not the life I was reared for, and so my travails here have constituted another education of sorts, though lessons learned after a sentence of death like mine lie hopelessly in the shadow of other appalling facts. Tomorrow I will be two weeks in this place—two weeks closer to the day when, like that rabbit from my past, I will lie split and lifeless upon a slab, a ripened pod of teeth, with no room left inside me for an immortal soul. Yet in these two weeks I’ve come no closer to discovering the identity of Mother’s killers, much less to taking my revenge. What will I say for myself when I face her in the afterlife, in the cold light of some metaphysical solarium, my sins inscribed upon a chalkboard from which they’ll never be erased?
From my interviews with the natives here, I have thus far gleaned only that a single, shadowy figure authors these raids, his henchmen sneaking beneath the city like so many rats. But despite the status my work in the Chaw Shop affords me, I have yet to meet a single soul who will offer so much as a clue to locating this man (or woman) in the flesh. I am beginning to suspect a fearful conspiracy, a consortium of government agents, perhaps, subcontracting their malevolence to the untorched. How else to explain such secrecy in a place where nothing is forbidden and everything has its price?
Dear Howie is the least capable detective, I am afraid. He sequesters himself from the others here, plagued by the demons of his unparalleled talent and most sinister knowledge. He walks among these natives as an immortal, cursed and shunned, though through no real fault of his own. Who could blame him for preferring to speak of the world Outside, my world, the realm of books and art and connoisseurship, that fallen empire forever nostalgic for itself? But although I find his fascination with it, and by extension, with me, comforting in the extreme—a lone oasis of familiarity in the wasteland of the now—it is less than useful to me on my current quest.
More forthcoming, oddly, are Grub and Morsel, the elfin twins who heat the bathwater for my morning ablutions and beg at the Chaw Shop kitchen window for cold cuts and sugar cubes. I am, I must confess, susceptible to their charms. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they bring out the maternal in me, but they do make me sorry that I’ve never had a pet. Through their cheerful nonsense and silly songs, I am coming to understand the logic of this place, the way it looks to those who since birth have lived under its most peculiar laws. I feel it is not pejorative to refer to them as “kindlings,” since that’s what Howie calls them, and he was presumably one himself, in the olden days.