by Will Madden
Stretched across the ground, it seemed even larger now, legs thick as a man’s, nostrils as wide as oranges, somehow more invincible-looking than it had in life. The newly fallen body of a tyrannosaurus or an archangel could not have held them more in rapture, not for the size or silenced danger.
Mandi too felt herself fall under its thrall. Until this moment, I had lived in an age of wonders, she thought.
Gazing at the proud creature struck down, she felt as distant as the rest. Somehow this was not her work. She had no hand. In this or anything.
Her story died in her throat. The words refused to form. The tears didn’t come.
Time restarted.
Around her, a flurry of movement. People attended on the wounded, the dead, and the dying. Searchlights from helicopters shone upon the roof, mussing well-styled coiffures as they hovered closer. Red and blue lights of cop cars flashed in a perimeter down below. Mandi had almost forgotten the police could exist! Journalists from the Spyhole and the Inquisitor interviewed patrons on the scene. Barbacks swept up broken glass and severed limbs, mopped away the booze and blood. A thousand things transpired at once.
None of them were happening to Mandi. No one was looking at her. No one was listening. She was completely alone.
From his DJ station near the retaining wall, Bubo took stock of the aftermath of the Pestilence’s assault. Two knights defeated, the third fled. Witnesses innumerable. The stamp of the Purple Onion everywhere.
Down below, he saw emergency personnel had dragged Heckley from the moat and were administering medical attention.
“Turn the music off, please!” came a voice over a megaphone.
Bubo turned up the volume. All these screaming people were making it hard to think.
The drawbridge lowered over the moat, and Brum crossed over on Abhoc’s horse. A trio of police officers waited for him. Brum pointed up at the top of the tower.
His voice was transmitting over Bubo’s headset.
“The Purp is still up there,” said the knight commander. “He busted in without even showing identification! For a half hour now, he’s been murdering and mayheming at an otherwise peaceful rave. We fought him as best we could, but there’s a pile of bodies as tall as you are. If you hurry now, you might still apprehend him!”
The officers consulted each other.
“Do you have a license to operate that class H vehicle?” one asked.
Brum ignited his booster and trampled over them. As he sped away, officers opened fire, but the shots deflected harmlessly off the mare’s red spider silk body armor.
“Hey Bob,” said a voice. “Bob! The show’s over already.”
Bubo noticed the Purple Onion had retrieved his motorcycle from where it crashed upon his landing. He’d managed to get the engine started and was performing a maintenance check. For a man whose principle adversary was escaping, for whom the cops were closing in, he seemed in no particular hurry. What a weirdo.
“Fuck’s sake, Bob! Turn that racket off.”
A small balding man in a bartender’s polo was standing in front of him.
Bubo powered down his station. “Hi boss,” he said meekly.
“Bob, you promised if I let you DJ tonight you’d bring the best crowd this club has ever seen. I didn’t believe you, but this is always a slow weekend, so I gave you a chance.”
“I know, boss,” said Bubo, “and I know what you are going to say, but you can’t buy publicity like this. Tonight’s gonna—”
“Can’t buy, Bob?” said the owner. “You telling me I can’t just buy four murderers and a catastrophuck? I can’t go down to the murderer and catastrophuck store and buy myself the shitshow I had me tonight? I wonder why that is, Bob.”
“There’s no need to be snarky, sir. It kinda hurts my feelings.”
“Oh, your feelings? Maybe it was protecting your feelings that no one’s offered to kill and maim all my customers for me. As a service to modest businessmen like myself, who’s worried he’s been making just too much fucking money!”
Bubo’s horse hung her head and pawed sadly at the ground.
The Onion Chopper’s engine roared to life. Its rider kicked the bike into gear and charged the gap Brum had broken into the retaining wall. The vehicle fell about three stories before the neon gravity thrusters came to life and lay it down softly behind the police barricade. It disappeared down the street Brum had taken.
“God damn it,” cried one of the officers on the ground. “That’s the second time today!”
“You’re fired, Bob,” said the owner quietly. “You’ll never DJ in Dodoville again.”
“The CKE can help you recoup—”
The owner silenced him with a smack on the cheek. “Not because you wrecked my club. Your playlist is fucking weak. I got a goddamn sword fight on my roof, and you’re playing that witchy shit!”
“What did you want?” cried Bubo. “Choral music in Latin? That’s so cliche!”
“Oh, we got the avant-garde here! Hey everybody, it’s Philip fucking Glass on a horse! Pack your gear and get out. I don’t want to see your face again.”
Robert Schyman aka Sir Bubo Skymole retracted his music table back into his saddle console. Gathering up his reins, he gave the scene one last look around.
“The Church of the Knight Errant has fought valiantly,” he declared. “And although they did not carry the day, one thing’s for sure: the Middle Ages are back, baby!”
He spurred his mare and walked her down the ramp around the outside of the tower. As he crossed the drawbridge, his eyes made a moment’s contact with one of the officers sorting out the chaos on the scene.
His horse cantered out into the night.
EPISODE SIX: The Sniveling in the Spiders' Den
VICTOR SET OFF on the Storm Cycle in pursuit of Lord Brum. After his rout of the Pestilence at Club Towers, he hoped to follow the knight commander back to the CKE’s hideout and break up the entire operation in one night. He just had to make sure Brum didn’t know he was being tailed.
Opening a drop-down menu on his visor screen, he activated his computer’s heat trail viewer. Beneath him, the street exploded into a mottled map of red, yellow, green, and blue: the energy residue of this evening’s traffic. Countless streams of heavy-axled tires crisscrossed the barely perceptible etching of bicycles, the hybrid tracks of a rickshaw, and the motor treads of Percy Kaplan’s grossly misnamed “street submersible.” One set of horse prints.
He cut the Storm Cycle’s headlight and followed. Switching his bike to Prius mode, the engine made less noise than leaves changing color in the fall.
The charger’s Equine Battle Boots(TM) headed down Soapy Smith Boulevard, hooked right past the antiques manufacturing plant, doubled backed via Unter den Zendern to the Dodos River, where they meandered a shadowy path through the vice district. The heat signature suggested a cantor. Victor instructed his bike’s computer to calculate speed and match pace.
A shooting star flashed across heaven. Less than an hour ago, that had been him! But a thousand times brighter, accompanied by an explosion—and purple! Tomorrow the Spyhole would run a four-page spread on his meteoric descent into combat and his subsequent victory. The way he’d split the night like a thunderbolt—a force of nature!—would finally compel his writers to style him the Violet Storm. Which was good, he thought, chuckling. If one more headline called him Purple Onion, people were bound to start thinking that was his name!
On the heat viewer, the exhaust of the charger’s aft thruster rose in the distance like a red sun. Brum had dismounted and hitched the animal to a parking meter, where it stretched its neck to nosh the leaves of a nearby willow tree.
The trail had led to Leper’s Leap, a secluded spot on the river which had been frequented in the past by society’s scorned amours. The geography of Dodoville’s illicit love had since shifted, but reputedly it retained popularity with other activities trying to avoid public censure.
The shadowy willows offered his
adversary too many ambush points. Well, nowhere to go down there but the river; Brum would have to come back this way. Victor preferred to wait him out.
Shouting in the distance! A broil, metal on metal. Deploying the digital listening feature on his helmet, Victor made out voices: “Roll for initiative!” “I fear thee not, harbinger of destruction!” and “Take it thusly, catamite of the Hornèd Cockatrice!”
He really didn’t want to go down there in a jumpsuit and mask—someone might ask for his armor class! Still, that was really a lot of screaming, even for dwarven blood-mages.
Slowly, with caution, Victor advanced through the willows. Probably only harmless fun.
Or Pestilence reinforcements.
He skulked a little faster, risking the snap of a dry twig or two.
By the time he neared the clearing, the tumult had fallen eerily quiet. Except for . . . Was that music?
As he stepped from behind a curtain of willow branches, the expanse of lights on the far side of the Dodos confronted him.
At his feet, pieces of LARPing gear lay strewn across the grass, darkened with the gore of hacked-off limbs, crushed skulls, and broken necks. He counted a dozen bodies in a state that called for dental records as if a pack of werewolves had just torn through. The battle couldn’t have lasted two minutes.
Toy poleaxes, maces, and handheld trebuchets. Horace Brumfield was a cold-blooded murderer, but this had probably been an honest mistake . . .
On the bank stood the knight commander, his foot leaning upon the concrete wall that followed the River Dodos to the sea. His batwing helmet also lay atop the barrier. As a humid breeze blew in from the water, the curls of his mullet rose and fell like waves upon his shoulder. Under his chin lay nestled his cigar box violin. His eyes were closed, his face like a babe sleeping at its mother’s bosom. Hardly a splatter of gore upon him. The breath he drew was slow and regular.
A dark spinal column dripped from the park lamp above him. Was that even possible?
If the Horselord marked Victor’s approach, he gave no sign. As the bow rose in Brum’s hand, poised against the night, Victor could see the branded body of the violin: “Warranted 40% genuwine Havana tobacco.” A sticker read “Product of Dodoville.”
Brum struck the low string. The catgut creaked and moaned. Like a dance partner, the current caught up the sound and waltzed it downstream. The bow flashed again; Brum struck the high string. It whimpered and screeched. The river snatched the note like royal decree and rode it hard from Dodoville’s seaward shore toward the ocean. The bow flashed as it cut across strings, a blur of hand working a war of slashes and thrusts, tracing a history carved into the city’s rotwood flesh: the aluminium worker scalded to death at his press station, the black marketeer fed to eels amid cheers on the stage of the Mountebank, the hermit who starved through bitter winters upon barren crags. Victor heard them all in the song that sprang from Brum’s hand.
Weird and lively now, the melody soldiered on in bandy-measured march, in mountain shadow shuddering as glittering-insane gouts of terror and love were hurled from its fiery maw. It sang a celebratory dirge, a mournful triumph, a rage against fate, and an embrace of ruin. Fevered dreams of beautifying illness, an encore an overture, a sound, a sonnet, a hell-born roar.
All this Brum summoned and cast off into the river. Into time, into stillness and death. Played upon a moldy box with a crooked stick unfit to stir soup.
Around them, the strewn and broken bodies listened with dead ears. Had their life not been torn out through newly-cut orifices, the faces would have worn no less surprise to confront such depth of soul in this sordid little park on the city outskirts.
“We have to finish this,” spoke the Violet Storm into one of the lulls, cracking his knuckles inside a yellow glove.
A wrathful moon, pocked and scarred from the predation of stars and comets, hurled down a spear of light from its perch in heaven. Like a stone, the warhead skipped across the river’s limpid stream to shatter its glow harmlessly upon the knight’s broad chest. Brum resumed his elegy upon the violin, his bow countering the moon strike-for-strike as if this struggle between him and it were the more immediate danger. In fury, he played. Against the cold illumination of the cosmos, against karma, against remiss springs that brought his soul no renewal, against the annual club fees that did renew but without his confirmation.
Victor hated to get pushy during Brum’s bout of introspection. Still, he sighed loudly and pretended to glance at the watch he wasn’t wearing.
If anything, the enormous man played even slower, more mournfully, like he was trying to smash you over the head with his fucking sadness.
“I’ll come back next week,” Victor said sarcastically, his patience running thin.
The fiddle paused. Brum spoke softly into the silence.
“A few weeks ago, they told me my mother had died. Said I should go home and put affairs in order.” He raised the bow again as if to play, but let it fall soundlessly at his side. “I . . . don’t keep ‘affairs.’ When I come, the neighbor woman had the body laid out on the bed in the upper room. Exactly where I left her when I run away as a boy. Every stick of furniture the same, I saw. The wallpaper. I’d left all this then to leave it. So what was I doing here now?”
Brum looked between the bow and violin as if he’d never seen either before.
“I decided to burn the house down, figured that’d be the handiest way. Take care there are no loose ends. Before I dropped the torch, I saw a bundle of letters by the bedside. Thought they might be key to finding the stash mother hid during the gang wars, so I gave ‘em a look. No luck. Letters I had written. To a girlfriend, long ago. The day I left home, of course, I didn’t tell her goodbye. The girl got angry and mailed back all she had of me. Mother kept ‘em all those years.”
He set the fiddle beneath his chin again and adjusted one of the tuning keys. He sounded a chord. Worse. Much worse. The notes flat and whimpering, he forced his way through some old children’s melody.
“I read the letters. Skimmed. Mostly to see how one fills so much paper. Made no damn sense at all, those words. Love anger or lust, it all sounded the same to me. But what struck me was.”
He played now as if creating beauty were a moral failing, as if in defiance of his hand the strings confessed his flaws. A man for whom brutality was the only virtue.
Suddenly he stopped.
“I sounded like anyone else. That chatter people fill their lives with. Look at me, who am I, what’m I about. My life, too, once made of words. Today I am Brum. Brum is what Brum does. To tell what’s inside here,” he touched his chest, the soft spot above the armpit, “I’d have to show you. There is nothing to tell. I am Brum, that is all.”
Somewhere behind them, Mt. Myrtle grumbled listlessly, repressing her deathly inclination for another hour. The heat of the day had broken, and condensation wept down the stones of the river wall, over dark mosses and spray-painted vulgarities, evoking a rich odor from the black muck below.
“Look around you, Onion, the landscape.” He finger pointed as he named them. “Willows. Water. Sky. If ever you chose not to speak of these again, you would forget the words. You’d forget they have names.”
He was silent a moment. His chin rose, his eyes gazing toward the moon.
“Today there are no names for the landscape of Brum.”
Victor wondered if the knight knew how to hear his own violin, if he cared that it betrayed how even Brum the Destroyer could not unwrite the humanity in his genes. Victor imagined a prisoner in solitary confinement, looking through the arrow slit in the wall that let in the only air, waiting for the moon to pass so he could look up and try to find his living self on its ancient barren face.
“Go away, Onion. Take your camera. You have carried the day, but for you, I have only silence.”
The device hidden on Victor’s jumpsuit was in fact recording. The little red light was on.
The two men exchanged a brief glance of understanding
. As the knight’s bare torso turned again toward the river, the regal lion tattooed across his shoulders seemed to shrink and cower.
Victor nodded and disappeared into the willows, his slippers squelching in the fresh gore as he left.
Surely, Dodoville had heard the last of Knight Commander Brum.
The Storm Cycle’s single headlight cut through the fog on the mountain road. Disengaging the purple filter and the running lights, he wove in and out among night smugglers—fast enough to make them feel suction in his wake.
Vroooom! What an awesome day! He’d had a car wreck, ziplined like a ninja into battle, jousted as a knight errant, meteored like a meteor, and acted kinda paternal as a father-confessor. By the time he got back to the Spyhole’s offices, his chief editor, Citroën von Chesterdrawer, would have a front page splash ready for the morning edition. Violet Storm confronts Dodoville’s most ancient enemy; defeats them across the arc of heaven like a modern-day god.
More terse, though, probably.
Till now his vigilante exploits had met with mixed opinion, but tomorrow he would be Dodoville’s hero. Because his battle against the Pestilence had been frickin’ cool. And nothing tops cool.
Up ahead, he saw an unpaved offramp marked “No Trafficking Permitted.” He took this exit, racing until the road dead-ended in a wall of collapsed rubble. At the last moment, he skidded out onto a spur. A motorized ramp helped accelerate the bike over a clay pit—where he executed a superman seat grab, even though no one was looking—and landed him in a cement basin that opened into the old municipal drainage system.
Victor leaned low to clear the ceiling as the Storm Cycle entered the tunnel.
Experimental ambient music played on his helmet speakers as wall-lights ignited to guide him through the maze beneath the city. The pattern of colors, purple mixed with kelly green and lemon yellow, spiraled around him or lashed back and forth above. The Storm Tunnels, he called them. He sped up, making ever sharper and more dangerous turns, the walls seeming to narrow around him.
