The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  Sylvester had the obscure feeling he ought to stick up for the dangers of living in Foxglove.

  “We do have some very fierce sheep,” he said.

  Rasco looked at him from under deeply drooping eyelids. “And soldier ants that can strip a lemming down to the bone in less time than it takes to hiccup,” he added.

  “How hot does it get out there?” asked Mrs. Pickleberry, clearly bored by this display of bravado by the two males.

  “As hot as a furnace,” said Rasco. “Hotter. The sun’s rays can have the blood boiling out of your veins in fountains soon as look at you. That’s why we should stay here until darkness and get some sleep, rather than take the risk of being caught out in the open at midday.”

  Sylvester recognized there was no point in arguing. If Rasco didn’t want to go any farther until evening fell, then no one was going anywhere. The lemmings wouldn’t last ten minutes in the open in this strange and vicious town. Anyway, they’d never be able to find Madame Zahnia on their own. So, the four of them made themselves as comfortable as they could, sneezing in the dust of a dark cavity, and soon dropped off to sleep.

  To Sylvester’s surprise, none of them woke until the outside world was growing dark once more. The mouse and the three lemmings, noses in a neat row, peered beneath a ledge of brickwork that hid them from the sight of anyone who might pass on the sidewalk.

  “Do you,” whispered Viola, “think Cap’n Rustbane will have abandoned the search for us?”

  Sylvester fought the impulse to snort derisively. “Some chance,” he said. “Not if I know Rustbane. He’ll still be hunting us, up one street and down the next, and he’ll not give up unless there’s something that forces him to.”

  “Oh,” she said in a very small voice. “That’s not terribly good news, is it?”

  “Not really,” cut in Rasco with an attempt at joviality, “but it could be worse, couldn’t it?”

  “How?” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

  “Oh, look,” said Rasco. “See that pretty moth over there?”

  “Well, let’s get ourselves out of Hangman’s Haven, anyway,” said Sylvester. “Once we’re in the jungle, surely he’ll never be able to find us. Not once we’re under the protection of your famous voodoo grandmother, at least,” he added as a courtesy to their guide.

  “I’d almost hope Deathflash did track us down to grandma’s place, mon,” said Rasco darkly. “She’d put paid to him and his murderous scheming, she would. A strong dose of voodoo would do for him, you can be sure, and if it didn’t she could get some of her zombies to eat his brains.”

  There was a horrible stillness of soul among the lemmings.

  “Your people do much of, ah, that?” said Sylvester at last, wondering if that really was his own voice that had said the words.

  “Much of what?”

  “Eating, ahem, people’s brains.”

  “Not as a matter of course, no. It’s just, like, when a zombie gets hungry, you don’t want to be standing between it and the nearest head, is all.”

  “Ah.”

  “And you most particularly don’t want to be the owner of that nearest head, see? The zombies ain’t too fussy about making sure you’re dead before they start crackin’ your skull open.”

  “I think I’m going to—” began Viola.

  “Me too,” said Sylvester.

  There was a sort of faint gulping noise from Mrs. Pickleberry before she added, “I already have.”

  “Then that’s a second reason we want to get out of here as quick as we can, ain’t it?” said Rasco in a reasonable tone of voice. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He shot out of the narrow gap like a bullet from a gun, and the next time Sylvester saw the little mouse as anything other than a disconcerting blur, Rasco was standing on the far side of the street, waving at them urgently to join him.

  “You next,” said Sylvester to Daphne.

  “I can’t run that fast.”

  “Me neither.”

  “’Specially with me rolling pin to weigh me down.”

  “I’ll carry it.”

  “You better not lose it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Okay. Here goes.”

  If Mrs. Pickleberry made it to the other side of the street any more slowly than Rasco had, Sylvester’s eyesight was too insensitive to detect the difference. He looked at the rolling pin in his paws and wondered how in the heck he’d been so stupid as to allow himself to be lumbered with it.

  “Now you,” he said to Viola, hoping she’d assume the tremble in his voice was brought on by adoration.

  “You scared?”

  “Scared? Me? Nah.”

  “Okay, you go first.”

  “Ahem. I think it’s the role of the male to hold himself in readiness to come to the rescue of the lovely ladies in distress.”

  “You are scared.”

  “I am?”

  “Never mind, though. So am I.”

  And with that she was gone from his side. The next he saw her, she was standing between Rasco and her mother and, like them, beckoning to him. Even more startlingly, she was holding her mother’s rolling pin in her non-waving hand. Sylvester looked down at his paws. He’d never even noticed her taking it.

  Oh, well, Sylvester Lemmington, he thought feverishly. This is the moment. This is where the adults get sorted from the children. When the tough get going the going gets tough. Now ain’t that true and reassuring? Wait a moment, I think I got that the wr—

  Without his brain having given them any command to do so, his plump little legs were running out of the shadows of the overhanging wall and into the full brightness of a pair of streetlamps, and a full moon that chose precisely that moment to emerge from behind a cloud.

  Sylvester was certain he must be making a riveting sight for the entire population of Hangman’s Haven. Who could fail to notice the spectacle of a not so slender lemming, already beginning to gasp for breath, as he stumbled and skittered on the first part of a journey that had unanticipatedly multiplied many times over in length?

  As if in answer to his question, something was going awry with his legs. Well, it wasn’t really his legs’ fault, so far as he could ascertain. Ascertain without looking down, that is, because he knew that if he looked down he’d certainly trip and fall flat on his face. It felt as if, in place of ordinary air, the ground had become covered in honey or molasses. His feet were definitely sticking to the sidewalk every time he tried to lift them up, and his lower legs were struggling to make progress through a liquid so viscous it was the very next thing to solid.

  He wasn’t running. He wasn’t even walking. He was swimming – and not so much faster than a fly stuck in wet concrete. Surely everybody must be watching him, their hands on their hips as they guffawed with laughter at his predicament. He was the object of derision for every cutthroat and miscreant in Hangman’s Haven on the whole of Blighter Island. They’d be talking in the taverns for years about the plight of the fat little lemming that got himself stuck in an ocean of syrup and kept flailing away until he hadn’t any strength left to flail with and how, at that point, Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane had stepped in and announced the most sadistic and revolting method of execution he’d ever devised—

  Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane!

  The three words went through Sylvester’s consciousness like a red-hot wire through butter.

  Legs that, until an instant before had been made of solid lead, were now suddenly light as a feather.

  I could run along the surface of this molasses lake!

  No sooner said than done.

  “I think you got across here quicker than any of us, darling,” said Viola. “That’s twice you’ve done that. Moved faster than the eye can see. You must tell me how you do it. But,” she added as Sylvester puffed out his chest and began to preen himself in pre
paration for a long, not entirely self-effacing explanation, “not now. At the moment, dearest, we have to make tracks for the jungle.”

  For the jungle! While the three words “Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane” had struck the most fiendish form of terror into Sylvester’s heart, the three words “for the jungle” filled him with exhilaration. There was a strange whiff in his nostrils, an odor he’d smelled somewhere before, and it took him a moment to recognize it for what it was: the salty tang of brine as the sun begins to rise over the horizon of a brand new day at sea.

  For a moment, he thought one of the pirates must have crept up on them, but then he realized what he was smelling was his own excitement.

  “For the jungle,” he echoed, then began to wonder what being in a jungle could possibly be like.

  He was to learn soon enough. It was a place where molten balls of sap fell from the skies onto the necks of perfectly innocent, unsuspecting lemmings, and where tree roots looked like giant boa constrictors.

  But first they had to get out of Hangman’s Haven.

  Rasco was a sure guide, but he was small and swift-moving and very much the same color as the shadows – of which there were more of than there were sunlit patches. He had a habit of getting a long way ahead and then wondering why they hadn’t caught up yet. After a while, the little mouse started becoming less prone to committing this error. Well, after the couple of times when Mrs. Pickleberry had been the first of the lemmings to reach him, in any case. Even so, he was still infuriatingly easy to lose, especially after they’d left the center of Hangman’s Haven behind and were making their way through the more sparsely housed outskirts. There, the lights came only from windows and the homes were few and far between that hadn’t boarded up their windows in self-defense.

  Come what may, though, the three lemmings couldn’t afford to lose him. As complete strangers in this town where lives were worth less than spit in the wind, they were more vulnerable than they’d ever been before – even when Cap’n Rustbane had them in his merciless grasp. Without the mouse, it would be only a matter of time before their corpses joined the long, somber line of those floating down the dark gutter that leads to oblivion.

  Sylvester tried to say something of this to Viola at one stage when Rasco had allowed them to pause to regain their breath.

  “You mean we’re dead as doornails unless we stick close to the little—”

  Sylvester clamped his paw over her mouth, hoping she’d not bite.

  “Sssh.”

  “She’s right,” said Rasco brightly. “I am little. I know it. There’s no need to be so sensitive ’bout me feelings.”

  Sylvester gave him a watery grin.

  Then they were off again.

  What was worrying Sylvester all this while was that there were no signs of pursuit by Cap’n Rustbane and his bloodthirsty cronies from the Shadeblaze. Surely the pirates wouldn’t have given up this easily? Surely they would be combing the town for the fugitives, especially since those fugitives had already made them look foolish. Sylvester’s estimation of the pirates wasn’t all that high, and he knew for certain many of them would have been happy enough to call it a day early on and head back to the Shadeblaze to spend a few hours in the muzzy grip of a quadrupled grog ration. But Cap’n Rustbane himself – and Jeopord, plus a few others – were made of totally different stuff, and they’d not rest until they’d tracked down the lemmings and extracted horrific revenge for crimes real and imagined.

  So, where were they, the pursuers?

  He tried to ask this question of Rasco at another moment when the mouse stayed still long enough for speech to be possible.

  The little fellow shrugged. “I just live here.”

  “Yes, but—”

  The worst moment of the whole night, Sylvester later decided (at about the same time as he was deciding that nothing which had happened to them during the escape from Hangman’s Haven was even on the same page as the horrors they discovered in the jungle’s lush, overpoweringly fecund embrace), was near the end of it. The air was full of bizarre cries and unearthly screams, all coming from the miasma of blackness that lay between the runaways and the first paling of the eastern skies. Rasco had left the lemmings on their own for a few minutes, sheltering in the lee of someone’s gateway, while he scouted on ahead. He was sure, he told them, that he knew some people hereabouts who’d give them a safe haven and some food while they recuperated from their hours of flight.

  “We’ll soon be there,” said Sylvester, trying to sound comforting, hoping neither of the Pickleberries would think to ask him where “there” was.

  “Soon be where?” said Mrs. Pickleberry, on cue.

  “Soon be with young Rasco’s grandma,” said Sylvester.

  “Hm.”

  Just then the faint light in the sky seemed to get hugely brighter.

  “What was that?”

  “Ssh,” said Viola forcefully.

  There was a long, low, ominous creaking noise that seemed for a moment to be coming directly from the ground beneath their feet. In blind panic, Sylvester clutched Viola to him, then discovered it was Mrs. Pickleberry he’d grabbed by mistake.

  The rasping sound wasn’t coming from the ground, he realized. It was coming from directly behind where they were standing, in the lee of the ponderous, peeling-painted wooden gate.

  “Someone’s coming out of the house,” hissed Viola.

  Sylvester didn’t even bother thinking before he spoke. “Run!”

  He and Viola fled across the open but fortunately deserted roadway. There was no one around at this early hour of the morning except whoever was opening the gate they’d been lurking behind but, even so, Sylvester felt once again as if the moon’s silvery rays must be picking him out as if he were a dancer hogging the spotlight. With every pace he took, he expected to hear a shout of fury as the alarm was sounded.

  But no bellow split the night air.

  The only sound was heavy, labored, wheezy breathing and the long crrreeeaaaakkkkk of the gate being opened.

  Sylvester and Viola cowered together, trying to make themselves invisibly small. The moon was enthusiastically washing light over the whole area where they stood. Where were clouds when you needed them?

  And, now that Sylvester thought about it …

  “Where’s your mom?” he whispered.

  He felt Viola’s shoulders shrug beneath his embracing arm.

  “Dunno. I thought you had her.”

  The figure emerging from the gate was still hidden by shadow. There was plenty of shadow, Sylvester noted sourly, on that side of the street. Here, by contrast, where he and Viola could have done with as much as possible, there was nothing.

  Worse than that, there was dew on the ground. The moonlight was making it look like a trillion tiny diamonds, each one of them intent on making the presence of the two lemmings even more obvious than it must already be.

  “She’ll be all right,” said Viola into Sylvester’s arm. “She always is.”

  He wished Viola’s voice sounded a little more confident.

  Then he spotted Mrs. Pickleberry.

  The older lemming was about as far from all right as it was possible to be. She must have tripped almost immediately once the three of them started running – caught a claw in a crack, perhaps, or got her rolling pin snarled up between her hindlegs. She was lying in a heap on the sidewalk not half a yard from where the unknown stranger was now turning to close the gate behind him.

  The unknown and exceptionally bulky stranger. In the darkness, all Sylvester could make out was what seemed to be a vast, bizarrely shaped mountain of musclebound sinew, with haphazardly placed bulges which he assumed were extra-large muscles. One of those bulges, to judge by its position, was the stranger’s head. It seemed as muscular and sinewy as the rest.

  At least Mrs. Pickleberry wasn’t out in the open mo
onlight. Sylvester started thanking the shadow whose fickleness he’d a moment ago been cursing.

  Far overhead, the cloud shifted a little.

  For the first time, Sylvester and Viola could see the person who’d opened the gate.

  “Oh no,” breathed Viola.

  At first glance, Sylvester thought the individual must be a human being, like Threefingers Bogsprinkler and one or two others of Rustbane’s piratical crew, but there was something wrong with the shape of the body. The arms were longer, the neck shorter, the shoulders more slumped, the legs stockier and more bowed. Sylvester dredged through his memory, trying to recall where he’d seen pictures of creatures like this.

  Then he had it.

  “A chimpanzee,” he murmured in Viola’s ear.

  The name meant nothing to her, he could tell.

  “Smaller than one of the human creatures but far, far stronger,” he explained. In fact, either this particular chimp was still not fully grown or it was a member of one of the smaller chimp species – Sylvester had no way of telling. The primate was wearing work clothes, an overall made out of some rugged canvas-type cloth, and had a sleepy expression on his face. He paused outside his gateway to focus on lighting a stubby little pipe with a match struck on the seat of his pants. The flare of the kindling tobacco lit up his face.

  He looks friendly enough, thought Sylvester, relaxing a little.

  Viola must have understood the relaxation of his body, because she trod firmly on his foot to stifle any impulse he might have had to start staggering across the road, paw held out in greeting, saying to the chimp, “Hello there, my friend. We’re strangers in these parts and …”

  Satisfied his pipe was properly lit, the chimp tucked away his matches in one of the pockets of his overalls and, from another, pulled a long, curved object that Sylvester recognized.

  “That’s a banana,” he told Viola.

  “Makes two of you,” she muttered, her eyes on Mrs. Pickleberry, who seemed to be holding herself very, very still.

  There was the tiniest of squeaks from just behind Viola.