“I’m standing right here until you apologize.”
“I strongly advise you to move from that spot.”
“Not until you take back—”
“Sir! For your own safety—move away from that spot!”
“I’ll give you three,” squeaked the boy, the gun shaking in his hands. “One…two…”
“Don’t shoot!” shouted Jo.
The hedgehog whirled, pointing his gun at Jo. “You again? Shut—”
And at that moment, several things happened.
There was a shrieking blast of wind that sent sand flying, paper lanterns swaying. A plane roared far above—and something fell from the sky, down into the garden, and down onto the hedgehog’s head.
The hedgehog collapsed. His gun accidentally fired.
Something like a mountain threw itself in front of Jo. Her ears exploded, the world reeled, and then everything was silent except for a faint ringing in her ears.
Colonel Korsakov staggered backward, clutching his shoulder, about to topple. He had been shot.
But he managed to glance at his watch.
“Precisely on time.”
Then he fell.
Jo scrambled back, just barely avoiding Korsakov as he thudded into the sand, and tripped over the thing that had fallen from the sky—a brown cardboard package, with these words written across the top:
TO: JO LAROUCHE
FROM: THE ORDER OF ODD-FISH
After that, everyone had the leisure to start screaming.
THERE was something ridiculous about the ruby palace by day. It looked tired, not exuberant; its concrete walls were cracked, its paint faded and stained. The debris of last night’s party lay strewn about in the harsh daylight—ripped streamers, broken champagne glasses, burnt-out torches, and some guy’s underwear floating in the pool.
It was a blisteringly hot Christmas. When Jo woke up she was already sweating. The palace’s ancient air conditioner was churning at full blast, but Jo still felt uncomfortably hot—and nervous, what with a wounded Russian upstairs, groaning and rolling about on his creaky bed.
Jo opened her eyes and looked around her bedroom. The walls swooped away all around her, blanketed with fake gems, arching upward and drawing back together in the gloomy, cobwebby ceiling far above her head. Her little bed, plastic table, and scattered clothes were dwarfed inside the vast sparkling gaudiness, as if lost in a giant jeweled egg.
Who was Colonel Korsakov? Jo went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, and squinted at herself in the mirror. In the morning light, she found it hard to believe Korsakov really existed. Still, she could hear him grunting and shifting upstairs; it made her uneasy, as if there were a wild rhinoceros in the house.
Jo padded out of the bathroom, glanced dully at the party-wrecked halls, and thought about the package that had fallen from the sky. The package with her name on it. And…the Order of Odd-Fish?
She hadn’t opened it. She had left the package in Korsakov’s room, almost wishing it would be gone the next day. But she couldn’t help feeling the package was waiting. She almost felt like it was daring her.
In the meantime there was Christmas morning, and Aunt Lily’s hangover, to deal with. Jo dragged the moaning, woozy Aunt Lily out of bed, got some coffee into her, and helped her hobble downstairs to the darkened ballroom.
As usual on Christmas morning, Jo and Aunt Lily opened their gifts in front of their battered aluminum Christmas tree, listened to carols crackling on the AM radio, and had a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. They couldn’t buy proper presents for each other this far out in the desert, so every year they rummaged through Aunt Lily’s storage rooms for forgotten trinkets and exchanged those instead. This year Aunt Lily gave Jo a fake gold sarcophagus, a prop from a mummy movie she’d once starred in. Jo gave Aunt Lily a giant stuffed octopus she’d found rotting away in the attic, origin unknown.
Ordinarily Aunt Lily would’ve been delighted by the octopus, but this morning she was a wreck.
“Oh, why do I do the things I do?” she groaned, holding an ice pack to her head and fumbling with an antique shoebox-sized remote control. “Jo, could you—Jo?”
“What?”
“You mind if I turn on the Belgian Prankster?”
Jo grimaced. “Do we have to watch the Belgian Prankster?”
“Please, Jo—ooh, I feel like somebody turned on a blender inside me. You know? I think the Belgian Prankster’s in Denmark this week. Do you think, could I just…?”
“Okay, okay!” Jo could never resist Aunt Lily’s wheedling.
Aunt Lily clicked the remote and the television slowly came to life. A goggled man in furs was rampaging around the streets of Copenhagen on a dogsled, chasing screaming Danes. “The Belgian Prankster!” said Aunt Lily, and her eyes glazed.
Jo lay in the sarcophagus, her eyes closed, and tried to block out the yammering of the Belgian Prankster. She was expected at work in an hour, but there was still some time to relax after her exhausting late night. The inside of the mummy’s coffin, lined with black velvet cushions, was surprisingly comfortable. Lying in it, she felt pleasantly dead.
Still, the dim quiet of the house by day, after last night’s wild noise and glittering lights, made her gloomy. She had a headache. The television was shrill, frantic, too loud. And the Belgian Prankster…
“Hey, Jo?”
Jo opened her eyes.
“That package—why haven’t you opened it?” said Aunt Lily.
Jo turned over. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like it’s mine.”
“Of course it’s yours,” said Aunt Lily. “Had your name on it, anyway, huh?”
Jo frowned. “It also said something about fish…have you ever heard of that? The Order of Odd-Fish?”
Aunt Lily didn’t answer at first. After a moment Jo twisted up out of the sarcophagus and looked at her. Aunt Lily seemed to be concentrating very hard, puzzled and frustrated.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I think I have heard of an Order of Odd-Fish, somewhere. But I can’t…it must’ve been a long time ago.”
Something about the words Order of Odd-Fish disturbed Aunt Lily; Jo could tell. Her eyes darkened, and her usual liveliness faltered. Jo and Aunt Lily sat silently in the crumbling ballroom’s gloom, and even though Jo was sweating in the heat, she shivered.
“I do want to open that package,” said Jo. “But didn’t Colonel Korsakov say it would be unsafe in the wrong hands?”
Aunt Lily perked up. “Korsakov? What does he know about safe? The fool threw himself in front of a flying bullet. He’s lucky it just nicked him.”
“You could say he saved my life.”
“It was his fault there was any shooting in the first place. I’d kick him out of the house if he weren’t so darned cute.” Aunt Lily turned back to the TV. The Belgian Prankster was pouring tons of cottage cheese down the streets of Copenhagen, burying his fleeing victims; the audience roared with delight. Aunt Lily started to get distracted. “Well, if you do open it, let me know.”
“I won’t open it until he wakes up,” said Jo.
“Suit yourself.”
“Maybe I’ll take a bath,” said Jo.
“Whatever.”
Jo’s bathroom, like everything else at Lily Larouche’s palace, was a gilded wreck of red and gold marble, kaleidoscopic mirrors, and frenzied geometric mosaics, dimly lit by dozens of spicy smoking candles sprouting from a brass chandelier so mammoth and ornate it seemed like a fiery flying city. Jo lay soaking in the ivory bathtub, the silence broken only by the distant chatter of the television, and thought about Aunt Lily.
When Jo was small, she had believed Aunt Lily was the most fascinating woman in the world. But nowadays Aunt Lily was just exasperating. The more Aunt Lily aged, the more childlike she became; soon Jo found that she had become the real parent of their little family.
Jo loved Aunt Lily, but it was hard taking care of her. And she had little help. There was Dust
Creek, where Jo worked as a waitress, but everyone who lived there was old, almost dead. Every Christmas Aunt Lily threw a costume ball for her old Hollywood friends, but otherwise the ruby palace had few visitors apart from Hoagland Shanks, the local handyman. He showed up once a week to shuffle around the palace, supposedly repairing this or that, but mostly he just stared off into the distance and mumbled about different kinds of pie he liked.
There’s got to be more to life than this, thought Jo, sliding deeper into the warm pink foam. I can’t spend the rest of my life squirreled away in this old house. But where can I go?
She went nowhere. Jo spent her days prowling the red dusty hallways, looking for new ways to kill time—practicing the antique organ, riding her bicycle awkwardly around the blazing golden ballroom, or just lying on the roof, staring out into the desert night sky.
More than anything, that note from the washing machine—that word, dangerous—teased her, pricked her curiosity. She still had the note. She was secretly proud of it; she liked the idea of being “dangerous.” Sometimes Jo thought that if she was really dangerous, she would run away—just steal one of Aunt Lily’s cars, drive to the city, and see what the world was really like. The idea excited her. It sounded like the kind of stunt Aunt Lily might’ve pulled when she was young.
So why don’t I do it? thought Jo, frustrated. What’s holding me back?
It was almost time for Jo to go to work. She got out of her bath, dried off, and changed into her waitress uniform—a pink, itchy polyester dress that didn’t really fit—and went to check on Colonel Korsakov.
She knocked on his door. No answer. Jo hesitated, then cautiously tiptoed into the darkened room.
Korsakov lay on the sagging bed, snoring and snorting, his stomach heaving under his pajamas like an unsteady mountain of jelly. Jo stared in a kind of awe. Korsakov was somehow even more colossal than she remembered—like an exuberantly portly walrus.
On his bedside table sat the package from the sky.
The back of Jo’s neck tingled. She reached out, touched the package…no, she couldn’t open it. She would wait for him to wake up. All his talk about “unsafe in the wrong hands”—Jo had never thought of her hands as wrong, but she had never thought of them as particularly right, either. And yet…
She took the package.
The room was silent. Even the snoring Korsakov was momentarily still. And before Jo knew it, she had broken open the lid, sifted through wadded-up newspapers, and grasped the thing inside.
Jo stared at it. It was a black box, made of intricately carved wood and decorated with silver designs. A faint jingling came from within. She put her ear on it and heard something like a tiny alien orchestra: gurgling chimes, the cry and echo of horns, murmuring beeps and bloops…
Jo turned the box over. A silver crank stuck out the side. What would happen if…? She touched it and her hand trembled; she felt fluttery, as though she were on a roller coaster that was right at the top, just about to take the first plunge.
An angry voice broke Jo’s trance.
“It’s unbelievable! The dirty rag! Shameless!”
Jo dropped the box in shock.
A giant cockroach had walked into the room, three feet tall, wearing a purple velvet suit with a silk shirt, cravat, and bowler hat. A green carnation was fixed in its buttonhole. The cockroach clutched a newspaper with four arms, reading it through a monocle. Jo backed away, but the insect barely acknowledged her.
“Libel! Scandal! Outrage!” said the cockroach. “I suppose you, too, would like to hear the latest slander about me?”
“What?” said Jo weakly.
“Oh, listen to this!” said the insect, flourishing the newspaper and reading aloud: “Intoxicating evening at Christmas costume ball…Shootings, canings, and bludgeonings from the sky enlivened the evening, as well as the irrepressible SEFINO…Sefino, who dresses with that desperately flamboyant chic depraved cockroaches so effortlessly achieve! Nor did it take long for the enterprising gentleman to find someone to bind him palp to thorax, and subject him to delicious humiliations in the cellar.” He hurled the newspaper across the room. “What on earth! Really!”
Jo managed to stammer, “Who…what are you doing here?”
“A youthful indiscretion,” continued the insect, waggling his finger. “A dreadful nightclub in Cairo—an excess of gin—a frightful glass chandelier that, I maintain, was improperly installed—it could’ve happened to anyone, don’t you think? Or do you?”
“Um…it could’ve happened to anyone?”
“You have good sense. I can tell. We’ll get along smashingly,” said the cockroach. “You are Jo Larouche, aren’t you? I’m Sefino, of course. And it’s all very well for you. You aren’t hounded night and day by these…these jackals! Chatterbox indeed. Will I never be rid of these rumor-mongering muckrakers?”
Jo gawked at the insect. She had no idea what to do. Shout for Aunt Lily? But what help would she be?
Sefino ambled over to Colonel Korsakov and poked him. “Korsakov got himself shot again, eh? Not surprised. The man’s hobby is getting shot. He has a positive talent for it.”
“You know Korsakov?” said Jo hopefully.
“Know him? He’s my partner! Have mercy on us all,” said Sefino. “Thirteen years of working with a man who has philosophical debates with his digestion! Often I’ll be talking with him and then I realize he isn’t responding to me at all, but chattering away with his precious intestines. Oh, Korsakov is off his nut—don’t believe a word he says.”
“No, I’ll believe the giant talking cockroach instead.”
“That’s too sweet of you. Maybe you can talk some sense into that damnable Chatterbox, the howling cad, what? I shall write a letter to the editor,” he exclaimed, rummaging through his numerous pockets with all six legs at once (quite a sight). “You wouldn’t have any stationery, would you? You do take dictation? There’s a girl.” Sefino cleared his throat. “Dear Chatterbox…no, strike that…Dear Eldritch Snitch. I slap you with the satin glove of righteous wrath! From what noxious nest of nattering nincompoopery do you release your rancorous roosters of rumor…”
Just then Jo heard Aunt Lily creaking up the stairs. She had an alarming thought—if Aunt Lily saw a three-foot-tall talking cockroach in her house, could she handle the shock? Jo looked around wildly. Maybe she should hide the insect, or—
The door opened, and Aunt Lily shuffled in with a breakfast tray. “Ah! I see you’ve met Sefino.”
“What!” Jo stuttered. “You…you know him?”
“Oh, yes!” said Aunt Lily brightly. “Found him in the basement while you were in the bath. Poor dear was tied up, hanging from the ceiling. Now that’s the sign of a good party! I mean, if you’re into that kind of thing.”
Sefino narrowed his eyes. “Madam. As I explained, I was not tied up in your cellar for salacious amusement. My enemies—”
“Now, now.” Aunt Lily patted Sefino’s head. “You don’t have to make excuses to me.”
The insect wiggled his antennae, stamped his feet, and turned about in circles of barely suppressed rage; finally, with majestic dignity, Sefino cleared his throat, and was about to say something quite cutting, when he was interrupted by Colonel Korsakov.
“Harrumph! Hum! Ooog,” rumbled Korsakov, opening his eyes in confusion. But then he saw Sefino, and recognized Jo and Aunt Lily, and settled back weakly. “Breakfast…?”
“Right here!” said Aunt Lily, and bustled around Korsakov, plumping his pillow and setting the tray in front of him. The old Russian heaved himself up, grunted thanks, and immediately started in on a heap of bacon, eggs, toast, and sausages.
Jo had just about had enough.
“Am I the only one who thinks something strange is going on?” she nearly shouted. “Aunt Lily! There’s a huge talking cockroach standing there! Aren’t you surprised at all?”
“Yes, yes…I know, it’s strange, but…” Aunt Lily closed her eyes. “Somehow he reminds me of…You kn
ow, Korsakov and Sefino are both familiar. I’ve met them somewhere before.”
“I didn’t wish to seem overly forward, Ms. Larouche,” said Colonel Korsakov, his mouth full of eggs. “But I, too, feel I have seen you before.”
“And Ms. Larouche does not seem, ah…entirely unknown to me,” admitted Sefino with distaste. “Though I am quite sure I don’t know why.”
“Then why are you here?” said Jo.
“An excellent question,” said Colonel Korsakov, helping himself to more bacon. “But first Sefino and I must address a more pressing matter: why was I shot?”
Sefino looked offended. “Surely you don’t blame me—”
“I do!” said Colonel Korsakov, accusing him with a sausage.
“I was waylaid! Shanghaied! Bound with ropes and left for dead! I shouted for hours and no one came—except for one of Chatterbox’s lackeys, to snap some photos for the morning edition.” Sefino flung the newspaper at Colonel Korsakov. It was called the Eldritch Snitch, and the front page had a humiliating photo of Sefino tied up and hanging upside down in the ruby palace’s basement. Jo was startled to see her own basement on the front page of a newspaper.
“Had you come to my aid in time,” said Korsakov, buttering a slice of toast, “I would not have been shot.”
“Oh, do come on,” exhaled Sefino. “The proper question is, why do you always get shot?”
“What!”
“Come clean about it already. You’re never so happy as when you have a nice fresh bullet lodged in your belly.”
“I never!” roared Korsakov between bites.
“You seek it out!” raged Sefino. “You deliberately enrage armed lunatics! You love getting shot; admit it!”
Korsakov flung down his toast. “Boiling Brezhnevs! I refuse to sit here and—”
Jo broke in. “Hey! You still haven’t told us what you’re doing here!”
“Yes, yes…you’re right, of course. Explanations are in order.” Colonel Korsakov gave a final glare at Sefino. “We’ll tell you what we know—which isn’t much, I’m afraid. Sefino and I, you see, we are wanderers.”
The Order of Odd-Fish Page 2
