Creatures of Want and Ruin

by Molly Tanzer

  Fin would appeal to Ellie’s sense of honor—the same pride that had led her to be furious about being given a tip. She’d sold Fin the weird booze that had caused all of this; she had some responsibility here. If she put it that way to her, Fin was sure Ellie would talk. But in order to talk, Fin had to find her.

  Well, she had to start somewhere. Hunting down Ellie seemed as good a place as any.

  4

  Ellie’s father had lied about his age in order to fight for his country, but unlike most who’d done so, Robert West had claimed to be a younger man. It had worked; he had been a big strong fellow in his prime, and the recruiter over in Nassau County knew just how early most baymen’s faces became weathered from all the sun and salt.

  Many men would have been relieved to be too old to go to war, but Robert West couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting down when others were standing up. Unfortunately, soon after joining the 152nd at Camp Upton, a training accident sent him home a cripple before he even left the state of New York. Though discharged honorably, he left without the distinction of having been wounded in the line of duty.

  Ellie remembered the day her father had enlisted—and the day, not long after, when he’d returned home. Her mother had cried on both occasions, but Ellie had not. She’d been unable to speak, to move, to even dare to feel. She remembered thinking that if she kept very still, didn’t blink or breathe, time would not move forward—that things would remain as they were in that moment, forever; that no further change could happen. But of course, just like the tides her breath had come back, and her mother had moved or her father had spoken, and all Ellie could do was carry on, wondering how on earth anything could be normal again. The first time, it had been the idea of living without her father that had paralyzed her; the second, living with a man who looked and sounded like Robert West, but was missing some crucial part of his spirit.

  What she’d eventually come to understand was that normal was flexible—if you performed it, you lived it. Ellie, her mother, and her brother had quickly settled into a routine without Pop in the house, and another when he came back. Soon, it was hard to remember they’d ever had a different way of living together.

  Moving in with Gabriel was similar. Sure, she’d spent the night with Gabriel before, sometimes two or even three nights in a row, but always there had been the expectation she’d be leaving—that she’d “go home,” and that home was somewhere else. Now that wasn’t the case, which was strange to begin with, but also because Lester was there with them.

  But once Ellie got her clothes into the closet, her books on the shelves, her skiff tied up at the dock—once they started all acting like this was normal—well, it was normal. Better than normal, in fact. She and Gabriel became easier with one another than they had been in a good long while; Ellie being settled in the house seemed to make him feel like they were finally partners. It was nice to see Lester studying at the kitchen table, instead of in his room as he had back at home. They all ate together most evenings, and afterward they listened to Gabriel’s wireless, or played Parcheesi or cards.

  Gabriel had installed a porch swing so they could enjoy what breeze they could catch through the mosquito bar. It was awfully romantic, and one fine hot night, after Lester went to bed, Ellie blew out the hurricane lantern and began to kiss her way down Gabriel’s chest.

  “What are you up to, I wonder,” he said softly, though the gentle pressure of his hand on the back of her head to go lower showed her that they were of one mind. Matters were progressing nicely when the sharp snap of a twig off to her left made her stop short.

  “Hey,” he said plaintively, when she did more than pause for a breath. “I was just—”

  “Shh,” she said softy as she heard another crack from the wood at the edges of their property. Gabriel heard that one, too.

  It wasn’t a deer or a bear out there; neither would pause breathlessly after making a sound. It might be a panther, but Ellie had heard enough big cats stalking around over the years that she didn’t hold out much hope the sound had come from a predator on the hunt. At least, not an animal one.

  The night had gone quiet. Something was definitely out there.

  A riotous explosion of every color in the world lit the night, quickly resolving into the pure orange light of flickering flame. The sweat that broke out under Ellie’s arms, across her shoulders, and under her nose turned clammy quickly in the evening breeze. She knew she couldn’t afford to be afraid, couldn’t afford to give in to the touch of madness that had not faded like the bruises she’d acquired that night on Greene’s boat, so she leaped off Gabriel and was out of the screened-in area of the porch before a second dazzling blaze appeared just off to her left. This time, beforehand, she felt that telltale thickening of the air.

  Gabriel trotted up beside her still buttoning up his fly, and that made for such a bizarre contrast with the danger that Ellie wrested back some precious control just by holding back a giggle. She sobered when a third fire erupted in the middle of the driveway directly in front of her, without anyone around to light it. A fourth flared to life, but worst was the fifth; the flames burst into existence behind them at the base of the front porch steps. Whoever was out there in the night must have set it all up beforehand for effect; there was no way anyone could have gotten behind them so quickly, and Ellie knew for a fact that she hadn’t stumbled over some pile of wood and kindling when she rushed out here.

  She turned and saw she was right. There was no wood, no tinder. The bare earth was burning—impossibly, but she could not deny the geyser of flame spouting out of the earth.

  However it was happening—however it had been done, rational explanation or otherwise—Ellie and Gabriel were surrounded, and by more than just fire. She still couldn’t see anyone in the darkness, couldn’t hear over the cracking and popping of the fires. Gabriel grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and she looked up at him—his eyes were wide and darting from gout to gout. He was frightened. She squeezed back, trying to reassure him—of what, though, she did not know, as they were outside, away from their house, without so much as a pocketknife to defend themselves against whatever might be out there in the night.

  She startled when at last something moved in the impossible darkness behind the fires, and then another something, in a different location. They moved like men, but when one darted through a puddle of uncanny firelight she saw they did not look like men. The shape of their heads was very wrong.

  “Why won’t they come out?” Gabriel pushed his glasses up his nose with his finger.

  As if they had heard him, one of their number stepped forward. He didn’t come into the ring of firelight, but stood just outside of it, illuminated by it. It was just a man, after all—a man in a long brown cloak and a round, flat mask that looked like the sun. No, not like the sun—as Ellie studied it, it shifted and looked more like the moon, then like a wheel, and then a coin. It didn’t change shape or color or size, and yet the changes were real; Ellie couldn’t see them, not exactly; it was more like she could feel them. The nature of the mask was changing before her. Her mind rebelled from the idea that she was witnessing something supernatural, but at the same time, she knew there could be no rational explanation for what she was seeing.

  “Hail!” The masked man was solemn, deadly serious, with a deep and powerful voice more like the sea’s rumble than a man’s speech. He raised his hand, one finger extended, pointing at Gabriel. “We would parley with you.”

  “Oh?” Gabriel sounded almost amused. “Well, go on. Parley away.”

  “You dare mock us, parasite?”

  Ellie was furious. She started toward the man, but Gabriel would not let go of her hand.

  “Who are you to call someone a parasite when you’re out here just like a mosquito, bothering decent people late at night?”

  “Our business is with the man who stands behind you, child.” Toward her, he sounded somewhat more benevolent, but it was still the voice of a disapproving god.

&nbs
p; “Is this some kind of royal ‘we’?” asked Gabriel. Incredibly, his voice was steadier than hers.

  “There are no kings here, only men, but we are in agreement, speaking with one voice,” said the man sternly.

  “Great, but how many others do you have out there who agree with you? It’s hard to tell,” said Ellie.

  “Oh, who can say? The number changes daily, and not all whom we speak for could attend this meeting.”

  “Meeting? That’s what you’re calling this?” Gabriel was one hell of a stoic. He was so self-assured, so cool in the face of absolute madness.

  “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t really associate intimidation and chicanery with meetings, but here we all are.”

  “We are here because you are here.”

  “No, we’re here because it’s late into the evening, and you’ve snuck up on me and my bride-to-be, and set a bunch of fires on my property.”

  “Your property,” said the man in the mask thoughtfully. “Is a flea’s roost on a dog’s back its property? I suppose it would depend whether you asked the flea or the dog . . .”

  “Who are you people?” snapped Ellie. She knew this man wouldn’t provide a list of names and home addresses, but she was tired of this palaver. With his mask and his rhetoric this man sounded dismayingly similar to Hunter . . . or her father.

  “We are Long Islanders,” said the man. His mask now looked like a plate before switching to a drum. “We love this island, and we love its history. We love its people, and we want to ensure its unique civilization is allowed to continue—no, more than that. That it is allowed, encouraged to thrive.”

  “Sure,” said Gabriel, squeezing Ellie’s hand again when she opened her mouth. “Sounds like we’re not so different, you and I.”

  “Oh, but we are,” said the man.

  Arms closed around Ellie, pulling her away from Gabriel. She cried out as she and her fiancé were ripped apart, and struggled out of her attacker’s strangely warm grasp for only a moment before a second man grabbed her. With two of them restraining her she could not break free.

  For his part, Gabriel had been detained at the center of the ring, but not so gently—he was now on the ground. Another man in a cloak, his mask a triangle, held Gabriel’s arms above his head; the other, in a square mask, sat on his chest, keeping Gabriel on his back with intermittent punches, first to his ribs, then to his jaw.

  “Stop!” cried Ellie, thrashing but to no avail. “Let us go!”

  The air around her tightened again, and she looked to the man in the round mask. The skin of his hands and the face of his mask seemed to glow a bit, and Ellie could have sworn she saw a little puff of those bright motes in the firelight, sparks of blue and gold and pink against the orange.

  Either she was going insane, or Hunter, Greene, and these men were all tied together somehow. She didn’t like either notion.

  “Peace, child,” said the man in the round mask.

  “You’re calling for peace?”

  She couldn’t see his face, but his body language told her he was surprised. Hunter had seemed surprised by her sass, too. What, she wondered, was so shocking? She knew she wasn’t the only woman in the world who back-talked men.

  “Gag her,” he said to her captors. One hand of four let go of her, and then a leather wallet was jammed into her mouth.

  “Finally, we can speak in peace.” The man turned back to her fiancé. “Gabriel Waldemar Lobasz,” he said, as Gabriel gasped on the ground, “it is said that you, a Pole, think you belong here, in America—and have gone so far as to buy land, and own a business here. You’ve already admitted the former—you have claimed part of this island as your own. As to the latter, do you deny that you are a thief who robs this island of her white oaks and her pines just to sell them to real Long Islanders—at a profit to yourself and a Negro in your employ?”

  “I’m a carpenter,” said Gabriel.

  “And you have seduced a woman whose roots go deep into this island’s soil and dared to claim her as your own, too,” said the leader of the mob as one of his assistants punched Gabriel in the stomach.

  “She—asked me out,” he gasped.

  “She did?” The man in the round mask seemed annoyed by this. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised. We are, after all, speaking of a woman who murdered a man in the night and stole his property. Her association with you has led to degeneracy.”

  Ellie went still. The man in the round mask knew about Greene. And now Gabriel did, too. She saw her fiancé staring at her in the firelight, begging her with his eyes to deny what the man had said. She looked away, ashamed.

  If they knew about Greene, he must have been part of this strange group. And if they were sore about her stealing the moonshine, that must have been theirs, too.

  She thought back to that night on the boat, in the storm—remembered what she had seen, Greene’s bright eyes, his steaming skin, his spit that dripped red, gold, and pink . . . She wasn’t mad. She hadn’t been seeing what wasn’t there. She’d been seeing too clearly what was.

  There was a strange sense of relief that came with the horror of finally accepting the truth. These men—Greene, the ones here tonight, and Hunter, too—they did have some strange and supernatural power. She wondered if they would kill her to avenge their lost comrade, or just interrogate her.

  “Ah, little wayward one,” sighed the leader, shaking his head as his mask took on the appearance of a button. “Will you not go home? You could still atone for your sins, live righteously . . .”

  “Mmph,” said Ellie.

  “Ungag her,” said the man in the round mask.

  The wallet was pulled unceremoniously from between her teeth.

  “It’s no business of yours where I go, or how I live,” she said, after spitting. “You’re not—” She paused before saying my father; she did not think he was, but she hated that she couldn’t say for sure that he wasn’t one of the others. Saying his name felt like summoning him, and she didn’t want him to be here, so she settled on “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “It is the business of all justice-minded citizens when someone in their community steals and kills,” said the man in the mask. Then with delicious irony he added, “Murder and theft are illegal.”

  “So’s making and distributing moonshine—and that moonshine was yours, wasn’t it? That’s why you care.”

  “Whatever you took, or from whom, the point is it didn’t belong to you,” said the man waspishly. “That you murdered a man for it and then sold it for a profit is monstrous.” She had nothing smart to say back to that; even if it wasn’t the truth, it was close to it.

  The man in the round mask produced an unlit torch, seemingly from nowhere, then lit it on the jet of flame closest to the house.

  “We are an organization dedicated to bringing order back to this island,” said the man. “We do what we can to right wrongs, to balance the scales, to see good laws bolstered and bad laws struck down . . . or circumvented. Long Island need not suffer while outsiders decide to change who we are and what we value.”

  “Nobody put you in charge!” Ellie twisted in her captors’ grasp, but they would not let go. “What makes you the person who gets to decide what Long Island is or isn’t?”

  “Daughter of the island, you and I are kin by virtue of our connection to this place. This man with whom you sully yourself is not. He is an expression of corruption, like a canker or a pustule.”

  That phrase, “daughter of the island”—she’d heard it before . . . at Hunter’s tent revival. That’s what he’d called them all: mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of the island.

  For some reason, that phrase solidified for her what she’d so far failed—or been unwilling—to accept. Her father was mixed up with a group of people who not only had an axe to grind with society, but who had the power to perform strange miracles.

  But that wasn’t right either—he wasn’t just mixed up with them. He hadn’t merely
been in the audience that day; he’d been on the stage, right behind Hunter. Perhaps he was one of their masked assailants tonight. She hadn’t noticed any of them limping, but night was good for playing tricks on the eyes.

  “I’m no kin of yours,” growled Ellie, almost hoping her father was there to hear her. “So do what you’re going to do to me, and get out of my face.”

  “Do to you! We’ll do nothing to you. We’re not savages. We want you to go home.” Ellie stared at him in disbelief. “If that seems a lenient sentence, you are correct. Our goal is to strengthen our community, not to tear it apart. You could be a valuable asset to us and our cause, and frankly, your victim was a traitor to us. He turned on us, stole from us . . . You did us a favor by dispatching him before he could do more damage.” Ellie’s eyes flickered to Gabriel, who still looked horrified by all of this. “Oh, didn’t she tell you? No matter. She’ll be leaving you soon anyway, if she knows what’s good for her . . . and for you.”

  The threat needed no further explanation. Ellie shivered in the grip of the two men who held her, finally feeling defeated. Her father, in league with these bullies—her crime, announced callously to the one from whom she’d most longed to keep it—inexplicable masks and rainbow fires bleeding into her life as the man she’d killed had bled out into the rainwater collecting in his boat.

  “It is time to make you understand that we are serious.” The man in the round mask turned to the men restraining Gabriel. “Work him over,” he said dispassionately. “I’m going to torch the house.”

  “No!” screamed Ellie as the man atop Gabriel punched him in the nose, breaking his glasses—the expensive ones they’d gone into New York City to get so he could read his pulp magazines more easily. But as the man wound up for a second strike, the front door banged open.