Chapter 12 - The Tower
Time cooled…
Mr. Grey slammed the flaking-painted door of the empty tower shut. Nothing told Mr. Grey of the tower’s vacancy. But he felt something in the atmosphere. The Wind - acting older and colder than ever - raged outside. A wordless bluster, the voice of Desolation. The tower had leaned at its tip, and the grass that grew around it had rubbed against his chest as they approached. “Empty,” said the drooping roof. “Uninhabited,” said the loud grass rustling in The Wind. “Void,” said the shudder of the slammed door.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew set their ladder and luggage beside the door. Within the first floor room, a long silence laid itself out. It stretched its legs through the still blanket of dust covering the floor. It wrapped its arms around giant firbolg skeletons which leaned against the walls. The remains had taken a sooty look from eons of calcification, and the marigolds that shot up here and there between the bones seemed like tiny embers; so that the skeletons were like exhausted bonfires, shedding their final sparks with a mute chill.
Mr. Grey startled the silence when he spoke. “Good thing we found this place.”
Honeydew walked quietly over the dust toward one of the slitted windows. The silence began to settle again, but startled back to its feet when Mr. Grey went on, “We’ve been fortunate to find shelter whenever The Wind’s had these sour moods.”
Honeydew might have been deaf for all the attention she paid Mr. Grey. She stood before the window, and picked at the rust covering the metal sill. The thin shape of the window and the spreading scourge of rust made the glass look like a weeping cut in the stone wall.
The silence tried once more to nestle in the dust and bones. Mr. Grey wouldn’t let it. He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes tiredly, but spoke. “Perhaps it’ll be warmer here than Pots’ tavern.”
“Perhaps,” said Honeydew. Not in agreement; with a mocking, contemptuous note.
“The Wind can’t stay cold forever.” Mr. Grey waited a moment. Then he gave a tired sigh and repeated himself. “Good thing we found this place. We’ll set out for Jodee again soon enough.”
Honeydew nodded with a grim face, expressing irritated, self-confirmation. She said, “There it is.”
One of the Wind’s cold gusts snuck beneath the door. It stirred up the dust around the bones and sent chills down Mr. Grey’s legs. He took his anchor shawl and whipped at the floor to clear a sleeping space. He said, “There what is?”
“Jodee of course. She always leaves your lips sooner or later. Whether it’s some stranger’s turn to hear, or me for the thousandth time.”
“I’m sorry, but I-”
“I don’t think you are sorry.”
“I am sorry,” said Mr. Grey, in a voice of unusual determination, “but finding Jodee before she changes Dreamland for the worse: that’s our task.”
Honeydew stared through the window. Mr. Grey let another breath leave his nose, and thought that now might be a good chance to let that silence rest. He crouched and wiped at the floor with his shawl.
Honeydew thought otherwise. “It’s your task,” she said. “That’s true. You can’t make it mine.”
Mr. Grey stood and held his face as stone by force. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not going to wander through an endless, moonlit wood. Crawling after some girl who kicked a hole in a desk. All with the vague scheme of making her fill out some ridiculous parchment.”
“I’d be pleased if Jodee filled out a visa. But we’ve seen how finding her is about more than parchmentwork. It’s about stopping her. Stopping the spread of harm. Or discord.”
“How?” asked Honeydew. Mr. Grey pursed his lips. “We don’t even have our own visa now. You’ve dragged us without direction - without breath - from one comfortable spot to the next.”
“It’s not without direction. I’ve suggested plans at every stage. But,” Mr. Grey went on, with a rising voice, “you refuse to hear my opinions.”
“What’s there to hear?! You don’t have opinions. You ‘think’ or ‘guess’ or ‘suppose’. You raise these middle-of-the-road-statement shields.”
Mr. Grey threw - yes, threw - the anchor shawl to the dirt. He stepped sharply to a different window and looked outside.
The elderly, bitter Wind now churned up the branches of the soft wood trees like great breakers. She ripped the dry leaves into the night sky like sea spray, leaving behind skeletal wooden limbs.
Mr. Grey watched the scene for a silent moment. Then he said, “You made us ditch Tom for saying, essentially, the same thing.”
“What?” said Honeydew. She turned to him with an incredulity-marred face.
“When Tom told the Defense Force about us in Glory Days. He said he did it to force me to make choices. To have opinions. You called him a traitor for that. But now you’re saying the exact same thing.”
“I didn’t force anyone.”
“You did. You shouldered him while he was sick.”
“But I didn’t make him go. You did. You gave that secondhand speech. You made some diverting excuse of his being ill and unfit. I didn’t want him waddling behind us. But you sent him packing with one of your non-committals.”
Mr. Grey turned from the gale through the window and faced Honeydew. “You were against him. Always. From Wine Medo on, against Tom and me, no matter the choice. You say my words are ‘noncommittal’, and ‘secondhand’. At least I say something. At least I try to engage. But you… Whenever we’ve reached some diverging path - when we went to see Pots in Wine Medo, and back when we made our scheme at the Glory Days racetrack - you always find some way to be on your own. I thought that once we got the ladder from the harvesters, and had to carry it together, there might be understanding between us. But no. You spend as many tocks as possible Brooding. You speak only to tell me what you’d rather be doing than working together.”
“How snivelingly needful! We’ve spent almost every waking moment of this vacation together. Every waking moment, your metronome breath loud in my ears.”
“We’re not together. Not genuinely. We might walk side-by-side, but you’ve never shared the joys of the places we’ve been. There was a moment, back in Glory Days. Tom and I sat on the cart with our feet running through the grass. That moment - that peaceful moment - is what our whole vacation should have felt like. But you won’t talk about those moments with me, you won’t even share them.”
“To make you happy, I need to bore myself? Comment on how the leaves look like crunchy pieces of fire? Or mention the shapes of the rocks that get stuck in my shoe?”
Mr. Grey stalked back and forth between two of the decaying skeletons. He ran a hand through his hair and tried gathering his thoughts. Honeydew followed him with the oil eyes - full aflame with triumph - and a grim smile. Mr. Grey stopped, drew his ticker, watched a tock, then said, “It’s not about the rocks or the leaves or the cart rides. I just want to share a thought every once in a while. To share this vacation.”
“You need something worth sharing.”
“I just said-”
“Looking at a wine lake and calling it pleasant isn’t sharing. That’s not an opinion. It’s barely a statement. You’re terrified you’ll say something with meaning or weight.”
“Should I behave as Jodee? Tell locals to dig up their long-standing flower gardens? Tell tourists to spread harmful scents to everyone they meet?”
“You’re not capable of it. You’re too afraid of being wrong to give a firm word to anybody.” She walked up to Mr. Grey, calmly. Suddenly Honeydew shot her hand out and snatched the metal ticker from his grasp. “Whenever someone comes close to forcing an opinion from you, out comes this stupid piece of gears and metal. You watch the hands roll. Then something meaningless dribbles from your mouth. One quick consult of your reset-ticker, and it’s back to proper, cautious, inoffensive, uncaring Mr. Grey.”
The door of the tower banged open. The Wind had struck with a blow of wordless fury. Her breath sent dust flying through the room.
Mr. Grey would have none of it. He marched to the door the moment it opened. Before The Wind could shove herself fully inside, he slammed the door in her face, and shut her out with the bolt. Nor did he give the silence its space, but spun back upon Honeydew.
“You, calling me uncaring?” said Mr. Grey. The perfect stoniness of his face twitched. “Now that’s the peak of hypocrisy.”
Honeydew said, “I’m not afraid of voicing my thoughts.”
“That doesn’t mean you care. What ‘you think’ shows a vacancy of care. That is, for anyone but yourself. Every town we’ve trod, the first thing you want to know is what you can purchase for yourself. Every landmark we’ve seen on this road - the lost city, the carriage castle - it’s about what you can do while you’re visiting. You’ve no regard for others. You want excitement, and you’re always disappointed once we know the lay of the land. You won’t or can’t see that excitement only exists in a place where you’ve taken the time to have real conversations - when you’ve bothered to learn someone’s name. Real interest requires somebody to be excited with. You can’t buy excitement.”
“I am not disappointed in every place we’ve been!”
“You are. You hurry us along.”
“You were the one who rushed us from the barn dance.”
“We have to find Jodee.”
“And the carriage castle? We could have continued our search from inside.”
“Don’t pretend you care about finding Jodee. You wanted to stay in the castle for its creature comforts. Not for any higher purpose. Not because you wanted friendship with the family.”
Honeydew smacked one of the marigolds from the ribs of a giant skeletons. She clicked angrily. “You’re changing the subject. Plenty of places in Dreamland, I asked to stay. Instead of roaming the rooty wilds. You dragged us on.”
“And what a turnaround that is? Why wasn’t it like this in Wine Medo, or Glory Days? What about ‘effort’? What about ‘seeing the sights’? Why the sudden urge to settle down?” Honeydew turned and looked through the rusted window to the storm outside. Mr. Grey went on, speaking louder. “The only reason I can see is; now that putting one foot before the other gets us closer to Jodee, you decide it’s time to slow down. Is it just because it helps someone other than yourself, you’ve suddenly lost interest?”
“It’s not,” said Honeydew. She turned stiffly back to Mr. Grey. She leveraged his own, cold expression against him. “I like this place. Dreamland. I like it here. I like the moon, and even the cold. I don’t like the woods, but I like the places in between. It’s closer to enchantment than I’ve ever been. Closer than I’ve felt listening to your music.”
“That I do believe.”
“Another reason I don’t press on; because this Jodee search is pointless. In actuality.”
“She’s. Hurt. People. She’s attracting locals and tourists alike to bad habits, bad choices. Choices that lead to not existence.”
“She’s also spread joy. What about those old women you mentioned in the stove house? What about the merchant in Stone-Head Town.” It was Mr. Grey’s turn to watch the storm, and Honeydew’s to press on. “And what do you think the odds are that taking her this stupid visa will help or hinder any of that? I say, astronomical.”
Mr. Grey took a final look at the churning sea of Dreamland’s woods. Limbs and branches clattered together now, shorn of their leaves, but still holding the overripe growths of corn and apple and gourd, like tumors. The Wind had torn the trees ragged in the forest around the tower, carpeting the floor in the shed skin of dry leaves. The outer scene had become a cemetery of skeletal wood.
Mr. Grey turned to Honeydew. Their faces matched each other now; both chilled in their expression, but with the leftovers of anger’s hot flushing on their cheeks. Mr. Grey, in a stiff voice, said, “We won’t know if we can stop her unless we try.”
“You won’t,” said Honeydew in a matching tone. “I’ve known for eons. Nothing someone like you will ever say can make someone like Jodee stop.”
Mr. Grey took his ticker back. Honeydew let him. He said, “I think that’s a selfish opinion.”
“At least it’s not a weak one.”
They turned from one another. Honeydew walked to the ladder, untied her luggage, walked to a door which led to the upstairs levels. and left the room. The latch gave one sharp click as the door closed behind her. Mr. Grey said and did nothing to stop her; he looked out the window until she’d gone.
The silence laid itself out quickly after her departure. The calcified skeletons with their fire-ember marigolds; the re-settled dust across the floor; these were all the company left to Mr. Grey.
The Wind howled outside. Mr. Grey couldn’t leave. As had once happened, in his workers’-prison back in Starharbor, his eyes roamed the space in desperate search of distraction.
The eyes, after a long scan of the lonely room, settled on his violin coffin.
The trees shiver in a cold Wind’s gale. Seen through the green tinting of the rust-rimed window, that forest under the bright blue moon dances silent; like moving paint on the glass. The door of old hickory, with its oiled bronze bolt thrown home, and the jagged walls of mortared granite, separate that first floor room from the outer uproar. The black skeletons slouch on a soft bed of dust the color of space, while deep orange and lemon yellow and bright red marigolds creep through their ribs and eye sockets. All of it, lying still as a coffin’s insides.
But the silence breaks.
Music slithers through the dust. Music crawls up the wall mortar. Music runs its notes over the marigold petals. The grey statue in the corner bends over the strings. No preamble. The stone arm pulls the bow torturously - like the wheel of a rack - again, and again, and again. The violin strings tremble with slow, sad notes. The theme repeats twice, thrice. Varying minorly, always desolate, singing where none can hear.
Then the arm strikes. Faster and faster and faster. The notes fly off the string. Still sad. Now wild. Now reckless. The black skeletons, the bright flowers, the green glass and the moon behind it; all and one twitch for a moment. As though pained. As though afraid.
Just before the arm reaches a sprint - before the notes launch the immediate finale - a stop. The rippling music smooths. The fingers drop one string, then another, climbing slowly down the notes. Relaxing. No harm intended.
Then the notes rise again, with four long, cutting motions of the bow. Long vibrations. And the colors of the room split open. Are slashed. Then shorter notes, puncturing and stabbing. Slashing, puncturing, stabbing notes. Again. Again. The marigolds drip yellow, orange and red. The rust runs into the granite wall. The notes hack through the room’s vibrancy. With eight sudden, long, drawn-out, horsehair-and-metal screams of exhalation, they dance in the carnage.
All the while; the grey statue waits in the corner. Unmoved, the only color unhurt. Inflicting on the room, over and over, the cutting, and the stabbing, and the dancing song. Playing on with callous hands.
Just when the moon has bled its white into the trees; when the black of the skeletons begins to creep up the flower stems; when the rust of the window seeps into the granite; just then the notes shift. Suddenly, a rising tone of triumph. Like music let free in a sun-filled sky. The music of redemption. The reversal of the Cruel, Lonely, Melancholy notes. The grey fingers dance up the fingerboard. Leaping higher. Higher. Higher still!
Too high. Something mad prowls in the notes. Something insane in the way they screech off the strings. Something enormous in the jarred angling their vibrations make in the room’s color. These notes scream like a lunatic; a warped, twisting tone. The grey hand on the fingerboard tenses for each one as if in seizure. The other hand drags the bow hairs heavy across the string, like a corpse through mud. The music drops. Lonely tumbling, dismally plunging, down, down, down.
There is no more false ascendancy. No more do the room’s colors celebrate the music’s shift. Now the intention is plain. Now the strings thrum with purpose. Now the bow saws back, forth, back, forth. The music rubs the particolored flowers, and the pale blue moon, and the anchor shawl. The enchantment drags through every color and shadow and light in the room. Like a thumb rubbed down a rainbow.
The grey arm lifts up, swings down, strikes the strings with the bow. The note is on-key, but horrible and unforgiving. On every object in the room, the colors flake, like rust off an old metal pipe banged on cement. Fragments of black skeleton explode up and spatter the marigolds. Blue moon chunks pepper the granite like holes in the wall. Grey lifts up, strikes again. And again. Each blow on the strings, each note, shatters already twisted colors. Motes of every thing of color spatter on every other thing of color. Each great swing of the arm strikes like hammer to anvil, beating the vibrant room to a determined shape.
The beating stops. The fingers let ring some slower notes. A gentle swirling of notes, through a messy pond of broken color. A brush, flicking idly over a board of staticky, wet paint-noise. The notes bask in the moment. As though saving this last image of broken color. A prelude to the finale.
The music sings again. Faster and faster again. Strings and bow again. Twisting blueredgreenyellow garble. Enchantment; grand and macabre. The notes push and draw again. Faster and faster again. The arms of the figure grey. Mechanical. Determined. His color alone unbroken, his matte solely untouched. Faster and faster and faster again. And the colors; and the shadows; and the highlights; and all the painting that is broken and bled and scattered around the figure in grey; all of it, blends.
Everything now turns - as the notes go faster and faster - towards one universal, flat sound. One universal, flat color.
Grey. Blinding, dismal, uniform grey. The color of deep world stone, never exposed to light. Grey. Everything washing away to grey. The warped anchor shawl; indistinct grey. The broken flowers and shattered skeletons; grey. The moon and stars and space and window and wall and door and rust and trees and floor; grey. Contour; lost. Shading; lost. Faster and faster and faster, the notes. Flattening and flattening; the scene. Making it indistinct. Making it uniform. Making everything greyer, and greyer, and greyer, and greyer, and greyer…
Something cracks.
Mr. Grey sat alone in the first floor room of the tower. Before him, swaying fire gave light and heat from the old stone hearth. A creamy pallor entered Mr. Grey’s matte eyes as he sat watching the flame. It threw a long, rigid shadow behind Mr. Grey; the contour of himself sitting in a wooden chair. This shadow overlaid the dust on the floor behind him, like a judge listening to head-hung Mr. Grey’s confession. The firbolg skeletons sat in the same dust, against the granite walls of the room; their calcified bones aflame in the fire’s amber glow and sparking with the blooming marigolds; listening to the sentence passed by the silhouette judge. Beyond the rusted window, The Old Wind had gone away. The trees lay naked and still under the moon.
In this room, Mr. Grey sat. Motionless. He stared with head bent into his dry hands, watching the tocks pass on his ticker. The metal bar clicked around the pale marble face, behind the front of glass.
The tower’s bolted wooden door erupted open. The old iron strike plate on the wall ripped from the stone. The plate and screw plinked off a firbolg skeleton. The door itself thundered against the inner wall and quivered on its hinges. Mr. Grey glanced sharply at the sundered entry, but did not rise. Two figures, both out of breath, stepped inside.
The foremost and loudest of these two stirred up the dust on the floor with commotion. This one wore a suit of pale metal - emblazoned over the breastplate with a star, an endless knot of five points - and a face-concealing helmet plumed with leathery feathers. The quick, heaving breaths of the person inside the suit made the armor scrape with each inhale and exhale. This figure lifted its gauntleted hands, tore the helmet off and flung it aside, and revealed the beady-eyed mousehair of Ms. Maysey. She waved hello at Mr. Grey, dug her pipe from a pouch at her side, and sucked desperately on tobacco.
The other figure - tall, with a hood - stepped easily in behind her. It closed and leaned against the door to keep the fire’s warmth within. It lifted a pale hand with long fingers, pulled back the hood, and revealed Death. He waved also, and lit up also, but with a cigarette.
Mr. Grey watched them while they smoked. He neither rose nor said hello. When Ms. Maysey had joined several tobacco lungfuls to the haze made by the fireplace, she said, “Hello Mr. Grey!” He nodded to her. “The Wind said we’d find you in this tower. Just ran against her. Boy was she in a mood! Of course The Wind has her reasons, I mean, probably. Wow! It is nice and cozy here.”
Ms. Maysey cast an appreciative look around. Then her eyes found the marigolds and widened with fear and doubt. She rushed over to the flowers and waved her smoking pipe above the petals. She said, “Mr. Grey - and reallytruly, I don’t mean to tell you your business - isn’t it dangerous? Sitting here? Among these flowers?”
Mr. Grey watched without expression at Ms. Maysey wafting the smell of tobacco over the flowers. He said, “I’ve been de-scented. It’s no trouble.”
In the shadows of the threshold, Death held his cigarette away and chuckled. He stroked his bristly chin and eyed Ms. Maysey with an appreciative narrowing of his baggy sockets. “Yeah,” he said conversationally, “found this lady lost in the woods.”
“Did you?” said Mr. Grey without interest.
“I set her up in that suit. Keeps her fresh. But then, she wouldn’t be wandering, period, if you hadn’t mixed up her business.” Death tisked at Mr. Grey.
“What’s that?” asked Ms. Maysey.
“Nothing little mousehair. Nothing at all. You just keep yourself pure.”
“Thank you, Mr. Death! I’ll try. It’s difficult with my constitution.”
“I know.”
“These flowers seem a bit wilted, don’t they? And what are these bones?”
“Firbolgs,” answered Death, casting a look at the slumbering skeletons.
“They’re so large. Are they nice creatures?”
“Can’t speak for the breed, but I’m on tight terms with this gang.”
“It seems a kind of dreary place to spend the night, Mr. Grey.”
Mr. Grey’s eyes had gone back to the contemplation of his ticker. He said, “I’ll be fine.”
“You have nothing to do but sit and breathe in this stale air.”
“I did some enchanting earlier.”
“That’s what The Wind said. What’s that you’re looking at?” Ms. Maysey scuttled over, clanging all the way, trying not to disturb the dust in her thick metal suit. She took her pipe and held it away this time, as she leaned over Mr. Grey and looked down at the ticker in his hands.
Mr. Grey glanced and caught the eyes of Ms. Maysey’s mice. He said, “I was counting the tocks.”
“What happened to the glass? There’s a fracture.”
“It’s been through a lot.”
“You’ll need to seek a ticker fixer. Like back in Wine Medo.”
“I suppose… Yes, that’s so.”
Death smoked and watched them from the door. Ms. Maysey set a gauntlet arm on the back of Mr. Grey’s wooden chair. “Mr. Grey - I don’t mean any offense - is anything the matter?”
Mr. Grey sighed through his nose. “I’m just tired.”
“Oh.”
“Was there something else? There’s rooms upstairs if you need somewhere to rest.”
“There is something else!” Ms. Maysey suddenly exclaimed. She shoved from the chair and began clanging around the room. “Oh you wouldn’t believe the misery I’ve endured. First I had to drink that awful dream juice just to get here. Did you think it tasted like swan oil? I thought it did. Although I’m not perfectly sure, since I’ve never tasted swan oil of course. It did not agree with my insides.”
“Terrible I’m sure,” said Mr. Grey, watching his ticker.
“Then I had to jump over this very tall wall, which didn’t agree with my outsides; namely my arms and legs. There were these awful faeries. I think they tried to… to… to seduce me. They had all this food and music; it tasted and sounded good at first. But it left me so hypnotized. Out of sorts.”
“It sounds awful.”
Death, who was bent over a set of firbolg bones, said, “It is. Faeries are bad news.”
“They kept us in this big house,” Ms. Maysey went on, “which reallytruly was like a prison, now I come to think of it, though I probably shouldn’t go that far. Anyway, then we had to break out. And I had to hold one of my novelty spoons up before me to keep the faeries off. And that of course wore out my arms and made them sore for days. I mean nights. Then I got lost in the woods for an eternity. All alone. By myself. I tripped on - I think - every root in the forest before Death found me. I don’t know if my knee skin - which was already so thin - will ever be the same.”
“But you reached this tower,” said Mr. Grey. “So unless there’s something more?”
Ms. Maysey almost smacked a gauntlet on her forehead - her mice shied back - before she thought better. “Mr. Grey! I’ve forgotten the most important part. Tom was there.”
Mr. Grey looked up. “Tom’s in Dreamland?”
“Yes! That’s what I meant to say the whole time. He’s terribly sick.”
“Terribly,” added Death.
“We came to Dreamland to find you, and that’s where we both got caught, and Tom came up with this plan to break us out, but then he got re-captured on the escape. Oh Mr. Grey, I didn’t know what to do…” Ms. Maysey’s voice had ridden to a higher and higher squeak. By the end it ascended beyond hearing.
Mr. Grey looked between Ms. Maysey and Death for a moment. Then he stuffed the broken ticker into its pocket. He picked up his violin coffin. He grabbed his anchor shawl off the arm of the chair, looped it over his shoulders, and stood.