In Torchtown, the etiquette of fire is an essential fact of life: simply put, one must either help out, or walk on by. Only the youngest children are excused from the social prohibition against gawking at a burning building. One sees them, night after night, clustered around old dormitories or storefront sanctuaries, sucking their thumbs or clutching their raggedy blankets, hypnotized by the playful liquid gold of destruction, even while the inhabitants scream and fling their possessions from the upper floors. Sometimes the children boo when passersby empty buckets on the flames. Sometimes they cry. They love it best when a building lights that hasn’t burned too badly before, one still packed with nourishment for the fire to consume, though of course that sight becomes rarer all the time.
Grub and Morsel are getting too old for this diversion, but they can’t bear to give it up, not yet. I happened by them on the street the other night after some fruitless sleuthing at yet another dour saloon. As hordes of natives jostled past us on the sidewalk, I asked what comfort they could possibly find in this daily vision of annihilation. They tried to explain as best they could, never removing their gaze from the blazing tenement that popped and crackled just across the lane.
“It’s pretty,” said Grub.
“It’s dancing,” said Morsel.
Someone shoved an incinerating gas tank (stockpiled in advance of the coming frost) out the third-floor window, and both boys oohed as it burst in the alley below. I stood with them for a minute more, perplexed and troubled, then reboarded the limo and had Duluth drive me home.
I have since concluded that, in a life so filled with the aftermath of disaster—the blistered lungs of siblings, the comforts reduced to ash—disaster itself serves as a welcome distraction. It is the kindlings’ Toob, their lullaby, their imaginary friend. Perhaps as helpless children, we have no choice but to love what wields power over us, no matter how cruel or unfair it may prove itself to be.
Grub and Morsel told me on another occasion that one day soon, Duluth will take them to touch a dragon—it seems this is a coming-of-age ritual in this savage locale. At a certain age, boys climb the water tank upon the roof of the Wedge, the tallest building in Torchtown, to skim their hand along the underside of a sky lizard when one passes just above. The scales feel like giant fingernails, living plastic, featherbones; no two stories quite agree. Sometimes it takes many nights for a dragon to swoop down close enough. Sometimes one comes too close, or its breath does, and manhood is over before it can begin.
“What do the girls do here, to prove they’re grown?” I asked.
“Make a baby,” both twins chirped in unison. Funny to think that by Torchtown standards, Mother was a child until she was over fifty-five, and I’ll be one all my life. It bothers me that the Dahlberg name will die with me, though I suppose it can’t be helped. My heirs would have all been Ripples anyway, and the world certainly doesn’t need any more of those.
Perhaps I’ll give birth to an infant made of teeth.
Two weeks—two weeks since Mother died, two weeks since I fled the Ripple mansion, never to return. Two weeks married. Two weeks of living with the knowledge that I am condemned to an early death.
At least tomorrow, I’ll finally receive some recompense for my troubles. Tomorrow is my first payday as Chaw Shopgirl, the day that Howie has promised to give me a pistol. I will be armed, and two more weeks hence, when he gives me the ammunition for it, I will become dangerous too. But dangerous to whom? Right now the only enemy I can recognize for certain has already sunk its roots into the very core of me.
Yet for the moment I remain, against all odds,
Your dutiful correspondent,
The Baroness Swan Lenore
* * *
Two weeks into her employment at the Chaw Shop, Sharkey invites Swanny to his bedroom to take her pick of the guns. He’s kept his door locked till now, so despite her best efforts at snooping, she has no idea what to expect. His room has only one dim barred window, facing the airshaft, half-veiled in dusty drapes. Sharkey lights the lamps.
“I hooked up a generator to power downstairs, but up here”—he blows out the match—“I never saw the need.”
The space is unprepossessing, even dingy: the one piece of furniture is a brown leather fold-out couch, loved almost to death, its cushions worn as soft as gloves by Sharkey’s sleeping form. His zoot suits hang on a sagging string of piano wire in the corner; a spittoon, not recently emptied, emits a subtle odor of stale indulgence. An unswept fireplace displays its latest cremation. But none of these draw Swanny’s attention like the books.
Sharkey has an infestation of books. The swarm is voracious and undiscriminating. Bestselling hardcovers, mass market paperbacks, comics, periodicals, instruction manuals, all dog-eared and singed on the page edges: it’s nothing like Osmond’s library (curated and extensive) or even her mother’s (adequate and edifying). The built-in shelves are overrun. The floor is a breeding ground for words. The books teeter atop one another in promiscuous towers; they scuttle across the carpet when Sharkey kicks them, making his way across the room.
Swanny browses for a moment, then kneels on the floor beside the sofa and sifts through a stack of travel guides, their pages glossy with photographic illustrations. The sun setting over a distant sea, amid the Volcanic Isles. A glacier town, bathed in Northern Lights. The Great Crater out west. A meadow sky empty but for spirals of glittering constellations. And, in a volume titled Lifestyles of the Ostentatious, shot after shot of what could well be the Dahlberg estate and surrounding environs in more prosperous times: gardens, woodlands, bird-watching. Verandas and gazebos, stables and tennis courts. Frog ponds and wells.
“I never knew you were such a nature buff,” she says, apropos of the pile.
Sharkey shrugs, taking off today’s zoot jacket to hang with the others on the piano wire. “Sometimes looking at the pictures helps me sleep.”
“Once I bring Mother’s killers to justice, we should organize a trip. We could take your limo to my country home—it’s hardly a day’s drive. You could meet my housekeeper, Corona. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had wine from a cellar.”
He settles in on the couch, discreetly deposits the contents of his mouth into the spittoon. “Who’d take care of the shop while we’re gone?”
“Duluth, or anyone really.” Swanny runs her finger over a photograph of a limpid blue swimming pool, its owner poised at the end of a diving board like a man walking the plank. “If you liked, we could travel on from there. See the world. We might not ever return.”
Sharkey regards her, faintly amused. “Stay Outside, you mean? On the loose?”
“Well, yes, I suppose.” His term strikes her as odd; she tries it out. “On the loose.”
“You’re forgetting. I’m a ‘torchy.’ They round us up and drag us back.”
“I’m not certain the local law enforcement is all it used to be. Besides, I would explain that you were my guest.”
“Too late for me now, anyways. Not much use for an old chawmonger in the great outdoors.”
“That’s an awful shame.”
“Eh, I’ve been.” Sharkey lazes back on the cushions. “One time I made it all the way out to your neck of the woods, actually.”
“Wonland County? Really?”
“It was a real funny place. All those trees, too close together. Got so dark at night. No fires.”
“Black forest,” Swanny murmurs.