The Devil's Workshop

by Donnally Miller

  “Codfish?” Connor crossed to come closer. “Surely I do.”

  “What ever became of him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jack, do you know?”

  “I don’t. One night he was there. The next morning he was gone. I never gave the matter much thought. As you’d not notice an insect that’s been buzzing round you when it takes its leave.”

  “I remember him, a comical man. He was on one of the vessels we captured. A rich man’s toy or a tutor I’d guess. I kept him because always there’d be some daft remark on his lips to make you laugh. It never failed. I hadn’t given him a thought in some time. This gentleman says he was swallowed by a fish.”

  “Codfish?” asked Connor.

  “Yes.”

  “Swallowed by a fish?”

  “So he says.”

  “I’d have paid good money to see that.”

  “So you were carried around by this fish, and you made the acquaintance of my friend Codfish.”

  “It appears so,” said Tom. “But one day the fish became enraged and spat me out. So I swam to the shore, where I met the widow woman of Coldblood Farm and her young son. And that night my old mates Vincenzo and Mr. Chips came breaking their way in. There was a bit of a dust up. The widow’s son was killed. Also Mr. Chips. But I know naught of any gold.”

  “Did they have any gold on their persons, or did they speak of where they might have put it?”

  “They did not.”

  “And you spoke of only Vincenzo and Mr. Chips. Did you see aught of Diego?” asked Jack.

  “Certain I did not.”

  There was another pause as Crazy Dog sat and pondered, his eyes fixed on Tom. It was the sort of pause that comes after a far off burst of lightning, before the first rumble of thunder.

  “This agrees with what the widow told us,” said Jack.

  “That it does . . .” said Crazy Dog. “But it brings us no closer to the gold.” He stood and walked slowly across the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He stirred the fire with a stout iron poker that stood next the hearth. “John, I only met this Vincenzo one time and that was but brief. I believe you’ve had the opportunity to get to know him a bit, is that not so?”

  “We were cabin mates for a few days. I know him to be a cheat at cards.”

  “Did he ever speak to you of any place on the Coast, any place that might be of particular interest to him, or did you know him to have any family, or perhaps a friend or two?”

  “No, he never spoke of his family and the only friends of his I know of were men on that vessel, Diego and Mr. Chips. I know I should have learned more from him about his family and where he was from, but I didn’t. I’m afraid it’s the old empty noodle again.”

  “Close mouthed, was he?”

  “He was a man who’d not use three words if two would serve his turn.”

  “Have you ever eaten a sheep’s eyeball?”

  “. . . Sheep’s eyeball?”

  “There’s them considers it a delicacy. They eat them with periwinkle forks. It’s said your sheep’s eyeball has the consistency of mayonnaise. Did you not know that?”

  “I’m certain I did not.”

  “Is there anything you could tell me that might bring me closer to finding the gold I’m seeking? Did you see aught on him at all that might be of use to me?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Now you said that pretty quick. Perhaps you want to think about it?” As he spoke, Crazy Dog stirred the logs in the fire again. When he was finished, he stood looking at the red hot end of the poker with an unpleasant smile on his face.

  “I wish I could tell you more.” Tom gave him an ingratiating smile, almost spaniel-like. “You’ll find I can be a valuable man when there’s somewhat to be done, but in this instance there was naught that I saw.”

  “That’s what I’ll find?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  There was a pause, as Tom was uncertain if a question had been put. Crazy Dog’s eyes screwed him to his chair. Finally, Tom said, “I would not have thought he had any riches at all from the manner in which he was living, which was to break into a widow’s farm to rob her, but if you say he had gold, I’m certain he did.”

  “Kind of you to take my word.” He lifted the poker from the fire. “Do you know how they get the eyeball out of the sheep’s head?”

  “I’d not thought on that. I’d guess they gouge it out.”

  “That’s not how it’s done. Hold him, Jack!” Jack grabbed Tom from behind. He wrapped one arm around his shoulders, and with the other he grabbed his hair and pulled back his head. “No, they hold a hot iron up next to the eyeball in the sheep’s head like this, till it sizzles and swells up.”

  “Take that away!” cried Tom.

  “The eyeball will swell up to twice its size, that it will. It’s a splendid thing to behold. And then it will pop right out of the socket. A much finer method than your gouging, don’t you think?”

  “My God, what do you want from me?” Tom was scared to struggle. The poker was so close to his eye he was afraid he’d skewer himself.

  “I believe you’re in league with your old cabin mate, and I want you to tell me where he put my gold.”

  “If I knew I’d tell you!”

  “Is his eyeball swelling, Jack?”

  “It’s not swelling at all,” answered Jack. “You must place the poker closer.”

  “Pity. I don’t think it’ll pop out. Oh well, I doubt we’ve any periwinkle forks in any case.” He looked at the innkeeper, who sat on a stool next the kitchen, saying nothing and sucking at his teeth. “If my hand was to tremble I’d poke out your eye. Don’t close it. I’d think you’d want to preserve the eyelid, but it’s all one to me.”

  Tom tried to push back against Jack, but it was like pushing against a brick wall.

  “Now I want you to think back very carefully,” said Crazy Dog. “I’m sure there was something you saw on his person, or on that of Mr. Chips, that would put us on the trail of that gold.”

  “There wasn’t anything.” Tom was almost shrieking.

  “I believe you were confederate with the other three. They sent you in first to scout the place, as it were. Is that not so?”

  “No! No!”

  “Well what a shame, honest John, I don’t believe you.” He jabbed the poker into Tom’s eye. The pain was a sharp explosion in Tom’s head and he felt his cheek bathed in a warm gush of blood.

  “My God! You’ve put out my eye!” shouted Tom. Jack let go of him and he fell to the floor. “Christ, why’d you do that? Oh, it hurts! It hurts!”

  “Stop your crying. You’ve another eye; that’s why God gave you two. You’ll wear a patch. There’s many good men do.” Crazy Dog leaned the poker against the chimney.

  “God, it hurts!” Tom was writhing and pounding his fist on the floor. With his other hand he covered his mutilated eye. The pirates were dead silent. The innkeeper had gone into the kitchen. “You didn’t have to do that. Why did you do it?”

  “I said stop your crying!” He tossed Tom a damp cloth that had been used to mop up some spilled ale. “Put this on the wound and stop your unholy blubbering. You’ve learned something now. You did not give up your eye for naught. You’ve learned if you tell me a lie I take out your eye. You’ve an eye remaining. If you want to keep it you’ll tell me the truth.”

  “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “You’ve not told it to me yet. I’ve had to figure it out myself. But now I see it all. After you were joined by your three confederates there was an argument over the gold, and I guess Mr. Chips lost, and you took his share for yourself, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Where is it?” Tom was blinking his remaining eye. He tried to wipe the tears out of it so he could see Crazy Dog clearly. He was still lying on the floor. “Now we’ll try again. What can you tell me about this third one, this Diego? He’s a bit of a mystery t
o me.” Crazy Dog was walking in a circle around Tom, the firelight glinting yellow and red on his ale-soddened beard.

  “Diego wasn’t with them. I never saw him.”

  “Is he perhaps also in the ground . . . ? John, you must help me. I’m not one who’d leave a man eyeless. A man must have at least one eye to see. The loss of an eye is not such a misfortune, unless it be the only eye one has.”

  “I can tell you nothing!”

  “Oh, I’ve the feeling you can tell us quite a bit.”

  “Just look at me. Does it look like I have any gold? If I did I’d give it to you, I swear I would, but I don’t have it.” He was holding the rag over his eye, rocking back and forth, whimpering in pain. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Now, that’s not satisfactory.” He took a dagger from his belt and fingered the blade, all the time looking at Tom. “I don’t ask for much.” He looked out a window at the steadily falling rain. “Where is my money? No one will tell me.” There was no sound except the rattle of the rain on the roof and Tom’s low keening moan. Crazy Dog turned to face Tom. “You walked away with Mr. Chips’s share and you buried it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you did. Nothing else makes sense. Why would you leave her, and with your foot not healed? To squirrel away the gold. Hold him, Jack!” Jack put his knee on Tom’s back and leaned on him hard, holding his head against the floor.

  “No. No.”

  Crazy Dog kneeled down. “Know what I could do with this knife? Open your eye, look at it . . .” He held the blade an inch from Tom’s eye. “I could pluck your eyeball out of your head and hold it over the fire. Roast it nice and slow. Then I could eat it.”

  “I don’t have your gold.”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you put it?!”

  “I didn’t put it anywhere.” Tom felt Jack’s breath hot against his ear.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?! Say it!”

  “No!”

  “Say it!”

  “No!! No!!”

  “Say it!!”

  “You’re stupid!!”

  Crazy Dog slid the point of the knife between Tom’s eye and its socket and pressed. Tom screamed. Jack held him while Crazy Dog rocked the blade back and forth, cutting around the edge of the eyeball. Tom’s feet were kicking the floor in sheer shock and terror. “You’re a sad boyo, you are. You’ll not enjoy my gold. You may keep it from me, but I swear you’ll be sorry you did.” When the eyeball was out he used a corner of Tom’s shirt to wipe the blood off his blade and then stood. He looked at Tom and gave a doleful shake of his head. “And you know what else? Your name’s not John.” Turning to Jack, he said, “I think I’ll ask you to run with a couple of the lads to Kashahar, there to take the Seahawk and bring her hither.”

  “I’ll only take one,” was Jack’s reply. “We’ll use the two horses.”

  “Throw him outside.” Connor and another lifted Tom’s body and opening the door they tossed him onto the ground outside the tavern.

  After he’d fallen, Tom heard the clump-thump draw near and felt a hand on his shoulder. He heard Connor say, “You should’ve tried harder to get away. But at least now we can’t tell when you’re lying.” Harsh laughter was cut short as the door shut.

  Tom lay in the pouring rain, making anguished gasps till he staggered to his feet, blinded, knocking into fence posts and tumbling down the steps. But he refused to fall again. If he did he feared he’d never get back up. He heard the splash of galloping hooves in the puddles nearby as Barnacle Jack departed for Kashahar. Turning towards the sound he was seized by sudden fear. What if they took him back inside and hurt him again? What if they weren’t done? Blindly, not knowing if he was on the road or on the grass, he ran, his legs straining to get him away, to hide in the darkness. Holding onto nothing, with no way to see, running from the memory of hurt, trying to outrun the pain, out of darkness and into the unknown, he ran.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE SPECTER OF THE WOLFMAN

  A specter was haunting the plantations of the Coast, and that specter was the wolfman Famularis. Where had he come from? No one knew. Who were his parents? The facts were not known. In the absence of facts, the slaves told legends of Famularis’s origins as they sat at their humble repasts or worked at their various tasks, and these passed from mouth to mouth, and plantation to plantation. One story ran as follows: he was the illegitimate offspring of one of the masters. He had been conceived in a moment of forbidden passion, his mother a slave. The same day he was born a white son was born to the master’s wife. Famularis’s slave mother stole the master’s baby, boldly putting her own in its place, and when the enraged master, seeking to destroy all trace of his illicit amours, came to his mistress’s birthing bed to kill the child born out of wedlock, he unwittingly killed the son he’d sired on his own wife. Matters standing thus, Famularis had been raised as the pampered scion of the household. Many noted that his skin was unusually dusky and his hair remarkably nappy, though few possessed the audacity to point this out.

  As he grew, whenever he saw a slave treated unfairly or with disdain, he would take the side of the slave and see that restitution was made. He had a natural affinity for the oppressed, and yearned at all times to overthrow the oppressor. One day, seeing a slave horsewhipped for an infraction of which he was innocent, he took the slave’s side. Ripping the whip from the offending arm he turned it against the one doing the whipping. Other slaves joined in, and a melee broke out. This fight would have ended as they always did, with the greater force of the slave drivers overcoming the resistance from the slaves, had not Famularis, at the height of the hostilities, transformed himself into a wolf. Snapping his massive great jaws and howling an awful roar that sent shivers down the spines of all those present, he was a slavering nightmare, ripping the arm from one slave driver and using it to pummel the next. When his enemies fell, he devoured them, feet, shoes, hands and all. The slave drivers fled in disarray. He was left lord of a grateful band of emancipated slaves, whom he then led into the Forest, establishing a community in which there were no masters and no slaves, all were equal, and all could live together by following three simple rules.

  It was a tale that merited repetition, and in the heart of the long, hot summer, when the cotton must be harvested and the sun stood overhead and the heat shimmered on the fields, when the calls of the slave drivers were at their harshest, and the snaps of their whips at their most intense, the slaves took heart and slipped away in droves to join the upstart band. In the hottest time of the summer a wildfire dream was burning in the breasts of the underclass.

  Famularis watched as his little band grew, becoming an unmanageable mob. New slaves arrived, first in a trickle then in a flood, and he did not know these newcomers. He didn’t know their names, where they came from or what work suited them best, but he could see that when they looked at him they were forced to reassess their outsized expectations. He saw the questions in their eyes: Could it be that the specter Famularis was only a man? Was he going to transform? What was the source of his power? And more than anything else, the one question that burned their brains and bothered them the most: was there anything to do here except clean out the damn latrines? They gave him wary looks. He himself was uncertain. When he’d been under the spell he’d felt reborn, recognizing the forest for a living thing and sensing that the sky above, crowded with stars thick as thought, bore messages of a brave beauty he could only hope someday to comprehend. Now, merely human, he felt abandoned and desolate. He wished he could transform at will, but that was not possible. The time and manner of his transfiguration were not his to choose. Why couldn’t he be a wolf whenever he wanted? Why couldn’t he be a wolf all the time? Why couldn’t he be a wolf right now . . .?

  It was his power that cut him off from the rest. It made him different and in their eyes dangerous. They feared him and they feared the power he had discovered within himself. They would do a
way with him if they could, he knew it. He saw it in their eyes when they thought he wasn’t watching. He knew his every step was marked and assessed. He remembered when he’d felt safe because of the rule that rifles would only be given to the men he trusted. Now he was stubbing his toe on the corollary to that rule which stated that once you give a man a rifle you can no longer trust him.

  But his greatest concern was the desperate game of bait and switch he was playing with Colonel Snivel. On two occasions Snivel had mounted surprise attacks only to find that the slaves’ encampment had been abandoned just hours earlier. As the size of his campsite grew, however, Famularis was becoming less nimble, and he knew soon the day would come when he would have no choice but to fight these vexatious soldiers, something he was reluctant to do on account of the relatively small number of rifles in his armory and the lack of discipline among his followers. Always when new slaves arrived he asked, did you bring any rifles, but in all cases the stupid Negroes had brought only themselves. And when he looked in their eyes he saw it wouldn’t matter how many rifles he had, because these wouldn’t know how to fight, they’d only run.

  Colonel Snivel, meanwhile, was experiencing difficulties of his own. After the most recent raid his quartermaster, Captain Squeak, had sought him out to tell him it was time they returned to Port Jay. They had not brought sufficient supplies for a campaign as lengthy as this one was turning out to be and what remained was barely sufficient to get them back home.

  “That will not happen,” said Snivel. “Have you any idea the ridicule I’d be subjected to if we returned without having defeated these slaves?”

  “At this point it wouldn’t matter if we did defeat them,” replied Squeak. “Once they surrendered we’d have no choice but to release them. We simply don’t have the provisions to hold them captive.”

  “Release them?! What would that accomplish?”

  Squeak didn’t answer. The question held no interest for him. The whole campaign held no interest for him. His time was better spent in day dreams of his cottage in the old country. How he missed the pastoral bliss of his quaint back yard, with its amiable winding paths leading to the duck pond, freckled with lily pads . . . Oh well.