Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  The final home—and the one they were at last approaching—was that of House Revan, the greatest house of them all. The road seemed to grow even wider and the oaks all the taller. It continued across the grounds for a good while before reaching any semblance of living. They passed through a series of gates guarded by men clad in grey steel, with red cloaks hanging from their necks. The style of all the homes, and homes there were many, was that of Spanish Baroque. A maze of turns and twists riddled the surface of every building of stucco shells, flower petals and eagle claws. The cornices twisted and turned on the edges of the buildings, providing a fluid melting sensation with a barrage of details overwhelming the senses. There were many buildings that peppered the grounds as the carriage made its way across—past the Poseidon fountain, past the tower of the Gollum Eye, toward the central road that headed straight to the home of the inner circle of Revan.

  As Isabella’s eyes set on the most impressive mansion of them all, Yog Sogoth Makall, her stomach took a familiar twist. The sickness had returned. She swallowed hard.

  “I won’t let this deter me,” she vowed.

  She sniffed at the wind to sense the whereabouts of Minasha Darkglass. As she suspected, Minasha didn’t live in the central home. She was too strange and too much of her own spirit to reside with the larger family of nincompoops. Instead, Minasha and her immediate family resided out in the dark woods just west of the main residence. The time of Isabella’s stowaway adventure had come to an end. She launched herself off onto the roadside and tore across the grounds toward the black woods.

  Much time had passed and the moon no longer haunted the sky. Her feet moved quickly as Isabella had no intention of greeting the sun from the grounds of House Revan. She ran as fast as she could until she found herself in a grove of aspens, the spindly white peeling necks of the trees reaching in a thick cluster all around her. Isabella didn’t need her eyes. She could move by way of her stomach. Whatever direction made her feel worse was the way to go. Sure enough, that sick feeling brought her to the doorstep of a chestnut brown, towering gothic building, the massive arched door looking as though it dripped down from the mushy clouds above. Inside this very door, she knew, paced Minasha Darkglass.

  Isabella couldn’t be bothered with subterfuge. The time to be direct had arrived. She reached out and banged the large brass doorknocker. It thudded and clanged out. Perhaps, she thought, this was the first time anyone had ever come a knocking. A maid dressed in a black dress and a dark shadowy face opened the door.

  Isabella smiled as best she could. “I’m here to see Minasha Darkglass.”

  The woman stared blankly as though not seeing her, forcing Isabella to wave her hand in front of the woman’s face.

  “Hello? Hello? Do you see me?”

  The woman’s eyes never moved, glazed over from who knows what, then slammed the door on Isabella. How rude, Isabella accurately thought. She waited for some time, listening as best she could to hear if any movement took place in the residence. She could faintly make out some banging of something or other. As she stood there and caught her breath, she realized her stomach was really turning to the worse. She didn’t have long.

  She was just about to let herself in when the door opened to reveal Minasha Darkglass. She stood there with her bone necklaces dangling over a white ruffled satin shirt with a black lace shawl. Her fingernails were black, her pointy shoes black, her lipstick, again, black, and her eyes as well, a smudge of black. Her hair was a bird's nest, and she stared at Isabella this time with a haze in her eyes. She was not quite right. She did not recoil or evade. Instead, she stood there with a feeling of blank.

  Isabella jumped at the opportunity. “Good evening, Lady Darkglass. I realize it is a late hour, but I just had to come and see you. I think we got off on the wrong foot last time.”

  “The demonsss came as foretold. Come to my shack. Follow me,” said Minasha.

  She walked out the door, closing it behind her. Her feet moved miraculously fast. They walked through the fallen leaves in the yard toward a foreboding shack surreptitiously lingering in the wood. Isabella had to pause, her body was beginning to convulse from the sickness, the proximity to the woman in black not exactly helping. She bent over and threw up along the way. Minasha stared back without emotion, reached into a pocket in her blouse and pulled out an elixir. She sipped on it while staring without any hint of personality at Isabella getting sick in the woods.

  Isabella waved at her, “No, really, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Just throwing up over here.” She wiped off her mouth and made her way toward the shack where Minasha held the door open.

  A chill washed over Isabella as she entered. She could feel darkness in a way that she had never known. Something foul, rotten and cold lingered in the ways of this mortal soul. A small lantern in the corner made a flickering illumination of the workshop interior. A large workstation was evident with beakers, picks, pokers, and jars. Viscous fluids, samples of rotted milk, fetid mushrooms, boiled animal brains, bone dust, custard rot, junk noodle, blood sponge, and saliva pile were all categorized in small jars across the table. The room seemed to move as Isabella eyeballed small wooden crates holding pigeons, cats, mice, rats, toads, chickens, baby goats and even an iguana—a menagerie of magical sordid ingredients and sacrificial livestock.

  Minasha grabbed a chicken by the neck. It squawked, cackled, and flapped in her hand but she gently petted its head until it calmed down. While she did this she continued to stare coldly at Isabella, her eyes not revealing a thing. Minasha pulled a long butler’s knife from the worktable and slit open the chicken’s stomach. Guts came spilling out onto the dusty shack floor and the bird squawked its final sound. Minasha flung the chicken's body onto a desiccated pile of trash in the corner of the room, bent over, and with her finger, drew a four-foot circle in blood on the floor. Isabella looked over at this strange woman. Magic.

  She had seen Marty do it plenty of times. He loved it. Always joked about how good it felt to gut a creature and send its innards into mojo mayhem. “Dem gizzards got da glitter of da pearly gates.” She didn’t realize others were capable of such mystical enterprises, but here she stood, witnessing this morbid creature finger out a blood circle.

  “Stand in it,” whispered Minasha, pointing her dirty index finger at Isabella.

  Isabella did her best to not laugh, but she was desperately holding on to health. Her stomach was getting the better of her and she realized she might have to cut this visit off.

  “I would love to stay, Minasha Darkglass, but I’m afraid, I am, for whatever reason, allergic to you. My stomach gets sick the moment you come around. I’m afraid this nausea will prevent me from playing little miss witch.”

  Minasha stared intently at Isabella, “Sick when you get near me, you say?”

  Isabella nodded, opened the shack door and threw up just outside. Minasha watched unblinkingly. She was thinking. She went over to her worktable and poured liquids into liquids. Her fingers moved at a furious pace. She looked in drawers, pulled out hairs and spices, and continued her work.

  Isabella found herself on her hands and knees again. The darkness of the night began to fade into the pitch black of sleep. She couldn’t hang on much longer. She just didn’t have time and she had to confront her mysteries as they presented them. This is why she had come. Minasha was a key and Isabella had to grab it. She could see the wet of her puke in the wood chips of the surrounding earth. Small potato bugs were scuttling across the ground. Her puke was a mixture of fluids that had made their way through her body to provide nourishment and lubrication—through her veins, her stomach, her intestines, her esophagus, her body; a series of squishy wet tunnels that this fluid had explored. It now lay on the ground, released into the world. She wished she also could fold inside out and let the squishy tunnels inside her touch the night air. She passed out.

  Isabella woke up inside the shack. Minasha made what appeared to be a smile, an ugly one at that, as Isabella raised he
r head. She was sitting inside the circle, as Minasha had desired. Minasha was feeding her some liquid from a jar, her bony fingers doing its best at a maternal role.

  “It works,” said Minasha, quite clearly proud of herself.

  Isabella could feel her strength returning as she sipped the balm. It tasted of fish guts and grey hair. But no matter, having her strength meant the world to her. As she came to, so too did her senses. Minasha’s words came out long, authoritative and somewhat, surprisingly, commanding.

  “You are locked in the Zillinskin circle. Your actions circumscribed. Your mouth a moth hole. Your movement, perhaps, smaller. You are reduced to talking and for that I give thanks.”

  Minasha reached over to her table, grabbed some rose petals and flung them at a candle flittering light in some odd altar with a stone Pan head just out of sight. She flung them with a twist; her hair, for a brief moment, playing ballerina on the shed wind, playing fun on the moment, in a way Isabella found most peculiar.

  Isabella took a moment. She inhaled her breath and took a beat. Here she was in this weird environment with this ever so odd witch of a woman. She was in a state of peculiar paradise. She didn’t want much out of life. She really didn’t. She just wanted life to live up to a remote sense of how amazing it was to be alive. The vast strangeness of it all! It had always struck her as wild, but more often than not people were amazing in their intransigent position that life was rudimentarily bland and obvious. She sensed their dull aching hearts wanting to constantly sleep, a beating so deep that it just wanted the cozy clothes of the grave—a life of pajamas and sodas—a body so worn, so tired, that its entire existence was hell-bent on not existing. This was Isabella’s perception of humanity and one that found its monstrous counter-balance in the emphatic bone-laden woman named Minasha.

  Minasha, on the other hand, was having a similar reckoning. She had met higher beings. Yes. They were foul-mouthed moody creatures that didn’t give a rat’s ass about her or anyone for that matter. More like children they were—cross and vindictive without parental supervision to put them in place. But none of them remotely had the mood, disposition or calm presence of this mystical cherub. Perhaps it was a trick. Certainly Minasha held a particular disdain that the cruel stupidity of her own people seemed to be matched by a similar myopia by those the coven held divine. Trust was about the last emotion left in her simmering skin. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help feel completely threatened by this small girl.

  Perhaps this was something altogether new. She had been waiting for a sign. Something had to happen. She had sensed for some time that the feud would soon arrive. She felt it alongside the agitated electrons on the evening breeze that spoke of a coming deluge. She had seen it foretold in the upturned possum belly and olive pits. The war. It threatened the great Houses and she knew not what side the higher beings would choose.

  She had stopped asking why she cared for the houses long ago. She knew with every muscle in her being that she didn’t. But it mattered not. It was her obligation. Her destiny. She was the true savior of the great Houses even if she alone knew it. If nothing else, she would do it for Money, Monkey and China, her beautifully wise progeny who already had dabbled with Ouija boards and alchemy. Even her husband, Benjamin, was worth saving. Kind stupidity did have its own rewards and virtues. Other than that, the individual members of the houses were worth less than that chicken on the trash heap. They were just mouths clucking away while the world spun out of control. Her brother, the king, perhaps, the cluckiest of them all.

  She stared down at the girl. She should be trapped in the Zilliskin circle—so the books had stated. But then again, the books had been wrong about so many things.

  “You are trapped in the Zilliskin circle.”

  “So you already said,” said Isabella back, smiling. She loved having the calories moving and grooving in her body and it was not lost on her in the slightest that she had just ingested some kind of liquid that reduced Marty’s sickness. She had just taken into her body the closest thing she had ever known to escape.

  “Thanks so much for this healing balm. It is mighty delicious. Was that trout I tasted?”

  Minasha squinted her eyes in an obvious attempt to try—desperately—to see the truth in Isabella’s words. “It is a fish. Yes. Why have you come to visit me?”

  Isabella made herself comfortable inside the circle. She crossed her legs. She couldn’t believe that this little blood circle would actually work. It was tempting to put just the end of her pinkie outside the ring, but she figured that would stop the conversation, and frankly, wasn’t conversation why she had come in the first place?

  “I came to you for answers, Minasha. I get the feeling you think I am something I am not, or on the other side, you know things about me I do not. Either way, I feel very much in the dark. As you witnessed, I am cursed with a sickness that prevents me from coming into contact with you and that knowledge itself makes me want to know why.”

  Minasha shook her head and paced the room. “You come to me with questions. You want to know things. You are lost. Don’t you see I am lost? I have been calling to you with questions. I don’t know what is going on either. I can feel it but I can’t place it. Something is about to break and I need your guidance.”

  Isabella found Minasha most curious indeed. “When you say that you have been calling to me, do you mean specifically me? Little me, sitting here on your floor? Or are you referring to some abstract desire from the universe? It’s not like I received a letter from you or anything. I don’t know you, Minasha. You know that, right?”

  “I, oh, never mind. You confuse me with your words. You always do,” mumbled Minasha, “but what can you tell me about the coming war? What starts it? Why does it come?”

  Isabella was flustered as well. She had come with questions and not answers. She took a breath. Perhaps she knew something she didn’t know she knew. “I can tell you one thing, that everyone, not just me, already knows. Barrenwood is changing. You can feel it. You can see it. It isn’t an abstract change, but it is happening, not just in the streets of the city, not just in the new markets and docks, but in the very imagination of the city as well. People are changing. The city is mutating.

  “If anything, I would say that the answer to your question resides in the carting away of the mad. Whatever force is behind that, is the force that is changing the world as we know it. And come to think of it, whatever changes the world as we know it, will inevitably lead to a shifting of powers which often means a war. Ha! Maybe I do have answers for you, Minasha Darkglass. I am an augur after all! Oracle Isabella, I like that.”

  Minasha’s eyes lit up. “Your name is Isabella.”

  Isabella realized she didn’t really want to have said her name. She didn’t know why, but it had always felt like a bad idea to let a name get loose. She stayed quiet.

  “A name is a powerful thing you know. Isabella. Words have weight and certain words more so. Your name gives me power. You aren’t the brightest of your kin, are you? Maybe a young one. I can’t tell.” Minasha reached over to her chicken guts and dipped her finger in. She began writing Isabella’s name on the shack floor. I, S, A.

  Isabella felt suddenly panic-stricken. What if she had escaped Marty only to find a new master in this odd woman Minasha. She didn’t like the way she was flaunting her power over her.

  “Stop it! Don’t you dare write my name on that ground!”

  Minasha continued with a slight smile playing on her lips. And with that, Isabella, with her small little fist, punched Minasha Darkglass out with one clean blow. The witch woman took the hit straight to her temple and fell to the ground out cold. Isabella took a step outside the circle to find it had no power whatsoever. Perhaps it needed Minasha to be awake, or perhaps it didn’t work at all.

  Suddenly, Isabella found herself, alone in the back cabin. All the better. She didn’t really need Minasha’s mashed up wisdom. What she really needed was the ingredients to that balm. She grabbed a ca
nvas bag off a peg and began throwing as many of the ingredient jars as she could into the bag. She also carefully put the top of the balm Minasha had made for her inside another jar, as this elixir was the Rosetta Stone of her liberation.

  This escapade needed to come to a close anyway, Isabella thought. She could see the darkness of night giving way to hints of azure. She opened the cabin door and felt that shift in the wetness of wind when the air prepared to hand out the dew. Time to skedaddle. She ran out of the cabin toward the Yog Goth Makal and found a horse grazing out in the vast lands of grass.

  “Get me on outta here,” she whispered in the horse's ear.

  They strode off and Isabella’s heart soared. Flying along the ridge of the Elegiac Hills, she thought about one peculiar thing: Was she really going to escape just when the city of Barrenwood barreled headfirst into civil war?

  Chapter 11

  Fennel paced along Rue de Chartin. He had a night ahead of him and where would he go? He thought of tracking down Isabella. Yes. He would surprise her. He picked up his nose, smelled the wind and listened for clues. He put his hand on the ground and closed his eyes to feel tremors. She was in the Calliope District. Well, so that’s how it is? He took out his handkerchief and wiped off his hand. Such filth. He stood up and made his way along the Aliber River. The streets were lively. People were out dining under the clouds. Newspapermen were screaming news of the coming election. Gypsy children were scurrying about trying to sell gum to strangers. Fennel found the festive mood to be distracting.

  He whistled out, “Boy, boy, I need a shoe shine!”

  A little gypsy kid pulled out his stool and promptly began wiping and shining.