Stupefying Stories: August 2016

by Sarah Read

  “At least we act. Not like you, sheep all, ripe for the slaughter. This man—this witch—brings dishonour to Valladolid and you,” Don Rodrigo’s gesture took in all the watching Families, “you do nothing. But I am Rodrigo, Don de Vega, and I will not suffer a witch to live.”

  “On your head be it, then,” said Jaume. “This deed does not lie upon anyone else.”

  “Yes!” shouted Don Rodrigo, and he drove the blade with all his strength into the neck of Alonso de Salazar Frias.

  “No.”

  As Don Rodrigo thrust, the inquisitor slid back, catching the blade between his forearms and snapping it in one single, smooth movement, before wresting the hilt from the off-balance don, who stumbled to his knees. The inquisitor held the broken blade to Don Rodrigo’s throat.

  “This deed does not lie upon you,” said Alonso quietly, “but if you move, I will kill you.” He looked down at the crowd, surging against the creaking line of militiamen. The soldiers did not know which way to turn, and the First Families, their retainers now bristling with weapons licit and illicit, milled in confusion below him.

  “He’s a witch, kill him!” Lope de Vega pointed at Alonso. The inquisitor sighed and, without moving the sword from Don Rodrigo’s throat, twitched open his robes. Around his neck was a cross. Alonso took the crucifix and held it up.

  “Do you see this?”

  At its sight, the crowd stilled.

  “This crucifix contains a sliver of the True Cross. I keep it over my heart to remind me of Our Lord’s sacrifice for us. And do you know what would happen to a witch if this holy relic should touch his skin? He will burn!”

  Alonso de Salazar Frias brought the cross down and Don Rodrigo shrieked in superstitious terror, but his cry was cut short. The inquisitor pushed him flat, stepped over his prone body, and thrust the relic against the forehead of Jaume de Casellas, Don de Valladolid.

  No one moved. From where he lay, Don Rodrigo sobbed. The Families stared in horror as Jaume’s flesh began to smoke. The little man tried to push himself away, but Alonso forced his head to the cross and there was no escape. A deep groaning, like the very ground was in pain, broke from Jaume. Men who had been about to leap forward to help him stepped back, for that was no human sound. Jaume clawed at the inquisitor as flames began to lick over his face, and the groaning grew louder, until it seemed that the very air would split. Then, suddenly, the groaning stopped, swallowed as if an unseen door had snapped shut, and Jaume de Casellas fell upon his back, mouth gaping and arms thrown wide.

  Alonso knelt beside him. The man’s eyes were open and staring, and flames flickered in them for a moment before guttering out. Branded upon his forehead was the mark of God. Alonso returned the crucifix to his breast, then laid a hand on Jaume’s face. The body was completely cold, as if he had been dead for days.

  Climbing wearily to his feet, the first thing Alonso saw was the witch-hunting nose of Lope de Vega.

  “H-how did you know?”

  Rodrigo de Vega, still on his knees, looked up at the inquisitor.

  “I thought you were going to kill me,” he said.

  “So did I,” said Alonso. He held out his hand and hauled the don to his feet. “But any man so stupidly brave that he would try to kill an inquisitor in public deserves a commission in the Autoridad. I will recommend the latter to the Suprema when I make my report.” The inquisitor started to make his way down from the dais.

  “Wait.”

  Alonso looked back.

  “Please,” said Lope, “you must tell me. How did you know?”

  Alonso tapped his nose.

  ¤

  The next morning, Alonso de Salazar Frias, inquisitor, rode out of Valladolid on his mule. He patted the animal’s neck as it plodded stolidly along the road.

  “What would they say if I took you with me?”

  The mule pricked up its ears.

  “Would you like to see the stars?”

  The mule brayed.

  Alonso laughed. And he was still laughing as his perplexed pilot took off from Terrassa, with a scrawled addition to his manifest.

  Edoardo Albert is, on paper at least, a surprisingly exotic creature: Italian, Sinhala and Tamil by background, he grew up in London among the polyglot children of immigrants (it was only when he went to university that he actually got to know any English people). He avers that he once reduced a reader to helpless, hysterical laughter. Unfortunately, the piece that did so was a lonely-hearts ad. Oswald: Return of the King, the second volume of The Northumbrian Thrones trilogy, was published last year by Lion Fiction. His biography of King Alfred, In Search of Alfred the Great: the King, the Grave, the Legend, was published in 2014 by Amberley Books. His most recent non-fiction book is London: A Spiritual History, and he's currently working on volume three of his Northumbrian trilogy. He is quite busy. Edoardo is online at www.edoardoalbert.com, and on Facebook and Twitter, @EdoardoAlbert, too.

  PLEASE PASS THE PURVIEW

  By Conor Powers-Smith

  “This cannot stand, and this will not stand,” intoned Casper Clemens (R-Ala.). He was famous for the violent hand gestures with which he emphasized even his most prosaic statements, having once given the junior senator from Kentucky a split lip and a bruise across one cheek with an almost certainly unintended backhand slap during a debate on tort reform. But now, the old lion kept his arms resolutely crossed, refusing to draw attention to the object of his outrage. “I promise the people of my district that answers will be sought, and found, and that the perpetrators of this vile mockery will be sought and found and punished.”

  The chamber burst into applause, but Clemens spoiled the effect by absentmindedly reaching down and adjusting his underpants, plain white briefs which of course he wore outside his pants, this being a Wednesday.

  In a weak voice quite unlike his usual ringing tones, the great man said, “Yield... Ah, I yield the remainder of my time to the gentlewoman from Nebraska.”

  Eleanor Severide (D-Neb.) took the rostrum, her conservatively cut aquamarine bra and panties hopelessly askew over her smart gray pantsuit. She stammered and squeaked, seeming at times near tears.

  “I applaud the ah...the sentiments of my colleague from the great state of Georgia. Alabama. We must, ah, seek...”

  She was beginning to flail when the president pro tempore’s gavel struck three echoing blows, and that august individual, Richard Levine (R-Col.), rose from his seat atop the great dais—revealing the hem of his powder-blue boxer shorts—and called out, “The time is now 4:57 p.m.”

  The chamber filled with the sound of one hundred men and women rising, shuffling papers, and muttering their dissatisfaction. When all or most were ready, they began.

  “In the great green room,” they recited, “There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of—”

  By the time the final collective “Goodnight Moon” had echoed and faded, it was, blessedly, time to adjourn. The honorable senator from Colorado struck his gavel not once, not twice, but twelve times, and announced importantly yet awkwardly, “Closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  ¤

  “Never mind,” stormed J. Johnson Bailey (R-Mass.) as he strode down the lavishly carpeted halls of power. “Just get it done.”

  If a senate page had begun the day with any dignity to speak of, the mincing hop-step which Harrison Shore was obliged to execute every three or four strides in order to keep pace would’ve stripped him of it; luckily, this was not the case.

  “Find them,” Bailey raged, “and let’s get this horsecrap over with. I want their balls in a vice by Friday. I will not sit through another weekend in this swamp.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harrison said, trying not to notice the way the senator’s cheetah-print bikini briefs bunched ever more grotesquely around his light blue suit pants with every step, nor to wonder why Bailey, knowing today was a Wednesday, had made such an eye-catching decision. He was sure the matching A-shirt was outside b
oth the letter and the spirit of the new law, yet there it was, clinging to the senator’s jacketed torso like a mutant rash.

  Bailey’s tirade was interrupted by the appearance of Daniel Trufant (D-N.J.), who was steaming down the hallway from the opposite direction. Trufant, wearing an unremarkable pair of white boxers over his brown pants, did not stop, nor slow, nor turn in their direction, but still made himself perfectly understandable as he said, “Nice togs, J.J. Heading over to the Pink Plutocrat tonight?”

  “Suck ‘em, Dan,” said the right honorable senator from Massachusetts, but by then his colleague from Louisiana was past. Harrison glanced over his shoulder and saw the obscene gesture Trufant shot back over his own.

  Harrison turned forward again just in time to stop short as Bailey threw open the door to his office and stormed through. Harrison had barely begun to move again, intending to follow, when he had to stop short once more. Bailey, blocking the doorway, turned, scowled, and said, in a seething whisper, “ Fix this, goddammit.” The door slammed shut at least a yard in front of Harrison’s face, but still he felt the breeze.

  ¤

  When Harrison entered the pages’ break room, he counted an even dozen once-bright, once-eager young faces, all wearing identical expressions of despondency.

  “Anything?” he asked, his laptop already open and struggling to log into the Capitol’s overburdened wireless network.

  Pete Painter looked up from his own laptop long enough to mutter, “Nothing. We’re looking for bird crap in a blizzard.”

  Gary Stevens—who’d been occupying himself by staring broodingly at the wall—said, “It’s hopeless. These massive bills; hundreds of pages of legalistic jargon; nobody could ever read all the stuff that comes through here, let alone understand it. Let alone a congressman. Their time’s just too damn valuable to actually sit down and read what they’re voting on, and they sure as hell can’t be bothered to write it. So they farm that out. Private firms. They do such a healthy business, they subcontract most of the actual writing to other companies, who get fat, too, and start sub-subcontracting to smaller ones, who start sub-sub-subcontracting, maybe to some anonymous ‘consultant’ on the Web working for a quarter-cent a word. Before we know it, we’re in the middle of an M.C. Escher drawing. Nobody knows who wrote what, or what our illustrious leaders are voting on on any given day. We still wouldn’t know half the stuff that’s on the books, if we weren’t getting those helpful little tweets.”

  “We got another one today,” Pete said. “I’m just about done typing up the memo.” He clicked around on his laptop for a few seconds, clearly savoring the suspense. Finally, he went on. “Here’s the original: ‘HB 166-77-709-7B, page 375, paragraph 3, clause 3-a: full costumes for 05/01 House, Senate sessions: favorite prostitute from TV/film/lit.’”

  There was a round of snickering. Harrison said, “You checked?”

  Pete nodded. “It’s in there.”

  “They’re not gonna like this.”

  “Well, with all due respect,” Gary said, “screw ‘em.”

  By then, Harrison’s laptop had managed to claw its way online. He didn’t expect anything interesting in his inbox, and, as usual, that was when something interesting appeared. In this case, it was a reply to one of the wave of inquiries he’d sent out over the previous week. He knew his list of bill-writing firms and independent consultants was woefully incomplete, and he’d so far received not so much as a peep from the ones he had managed to contact; nor had he expected to, in this tangled labyrinth, where the threat of crippling legal action lurked around every corner like a minotaur in a three-piece suit.

  He vaguely remembered writing to KT Legislation, a legitimate-sounding moniker that might for all he knew denote some Bangladeshi beneficiary of outsourcing. He clicked on the message, trying to appease the gods of found information by continuing to expect nothing useful.

  Apparently they were appeased. Someone named Kaitlin George, who listed no title but seemed confident enough speaking for the company, was willing to meet with him as early as Friday afternoon. He tried not to get too desperately hopeful, in either his reply or his own mind, but the desperate hope was difficult to strain out of the former and impossible to repress in the latter.

  He reread her tantalizing promise of “something you might find interesting as regards your questions concerning KT’s practices” three times. Then he snapped his laptop shut, and for a few minutes sat listening to the nascent betting pool forming in one corner of the room. He thought briefly of tossing in a twenty, but his top choice, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, was already getting poor odds.

  ¤

  Thursday was crazy hats day. The chambers became a bicameral Kentucky Derby grandstand of bizarre headwear, though a simple propeller-topped beanie would’ve sufficed. That, or something similarly discreet, had been the choice of the majority of the congressmen on the first such occasion, but since then that fraction had dropped precipitously. Each week saw more pith helmets, naval tricornes, bullfighter’s monteras, Queen’s-Guard bearskins, and elaborately decorated sun hats the diameter of truck tires.

  At least on Wednesdays they were too embarrassed to get into this kind of jealous escalation. But that might not be true for long. Harrison couldn’t help remembering Senator Bailey’s exotic choice of the day before. Was the shame finally fading enough for Wednesday’s intimate requirements, too, to become a source of competition, like Monday’s highly contentious face paint day?

  That would be bad, considering their constant willingness to escalate. There was nothing in the law requiring body paint, for example, but that hadn’t stopped Michelle Lake (D-Calif.) from showing up on the previous Monday topless except for an elaborate mural depicting a swarm of butterflies flitting across a night sky, complete with large, extremely full moon and curiously rounded mountain peak. Most didn’t have the bodies to pull something like that off. But would that stop them?

  Harrison had little time to spare for such forebodings, ominous though they were. His Thursday was occupied by more immediate matters: distributing buttons bearing the images of various background characters from The Simpsons (as per Senate Bill 744-76-537-6D), shining Senator Bailey’s shoes (at the senator’s request), collecting and grading hundreds of three-paragraph summaries of last night’s PBS NewsHour (by law), organizing Bailey’s son’s Little League team’s federally funded trip to Fenway Park (request), brushing the senator’s hair every time Bailey removed his coonskin cap, then brushing the cap (request), passing out copies of Frog and Toad are Friends for that day’s end-of-session recital (law), making arrangements for the senator’s wife’s upcoming stay at a luxurious, discreet detox facility in rural Vermont (request), and ensuring that the bowl of M&M’s in the senator’s office contained one and only one light brown piece (request).

  He devoted what spare milliseconds he had to trying to restrain his hopes for tomorrow’s meeting. He got so worked up imaging the kudos which would accrue if he were able to put an end to this debacle—maybe even a singling-out in the media, and a consequent jumpstart to his own political ambitions—he decided to stop into the break room for a dose of bitter reality.

  He got plenty, along with the bonus disappointment of finding that the pool had already considered his second choice (the three-breasted Martian hooker from Total Recall), and ruled that the costume would have to entail an actual baring of the futuristic triumvirate. He thought briefly of Representative Lake, but he didn’t think she was into science fiction.

  ¤

  On Friday he managed to get out early by pleading a family emergency and getting Pete to cover for him. Pete was free because of the unfortunate dermatological reaction to some lead-based face-paint suffered by his usual boss, Bill Bosch (R-Ohio), whose staunch opposition to any and all industrial regulation was rumored to be undergoing an ideological transformation in the private clinic to which he was currently consigned. Pete was a good page, but Harrison was sure Bailey would still find, or if necessary, inv
ent, reasons to scream himself inside out. That was just his leadership style.

  Leaving early meant missing most of the day’s activities, including the morning Halo tournament, the presentation of the civics-themed dioramas, and the fifteen minutes of debate each chamber was allowed on Fridays (which was generally worth watching, since it directly followed the afternoon drinking game).

  On his way to the address Ms. George had provided—which appeared to lie in a tidy suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Annapolis—he listened idly to the NPR broadcast droning from the radio, a discussion of the best-received outfits of this jeans-and-T-shirt Friday. The consensus pick was the “Don’t Mess With Texas...If You Do, Get Tested” shirt worn by Harvey O’Keane (R-Okla.), which was believed to be a rebuttal to the more innocuous “OK, No Way” message sported on the previous Friday by Ellery Haskins (D-Texas).

  Most of Harrison’s mind was on the meeting ahead, swerving wildly between hysterical hope and dismal anticipation of disappointment. He nearly missed his exit, and drove past the little ranch-style house twice. When he finally pulled into the driveway—all his except for a gleaming red moped—his hands were sweating, and the first ominous pulses of a powerful stress headache were beginning to appear at the base of his skull.

  He was barely out of the car when the house’s front door swung open. Waiting in the doorway, one slender arm extended to keep the screen door open, stood a woman who couldn’t have been more than Harrison’s own twenty-two, and whose hair was too close a match to the moped’s deep, dark red for the affinity to be coincidental. She wore a businesslike white blouse and tweed skirt, and no shoes, socks, or stockings of any kind.