Chapter 3 - Disco Barndance Masquerade

A thumping drum and smooth base enchanted through the trees. Strobing rainbow light flickered between the trunks. Gentle singing - a loud voice, but almost whispery in its softness - versed across the roots. “Midnight creeps so slowly-”

Two forms moved out from the shadow of the boughs. Mr. Grey emerged like a statue sloughing off the wild overgrowth. Honeydew stalked like a wolf into a sheepfold. Together they stepped into a quadrate clearing of tall grass. From the treeline they arrived almost onto the doorstep of a brick, corn-crib style barn; shooting up half-a-dozen stories over the trees. The sliding front doors stood thrice the height of either wanderer and stood open wide. Every swinging loft-door, every paddock portal, every window round or square, gaped. The building shook - from its mossy, runic, concrete foundations to its bannered gables - with dance and song.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew peered inside. The barn thronged with dancers, every one wearing an animal’s head. Some wore cow or sow or horse masks. Some wore faces of geese and ganders. There were chickens and ducks, dogs and cats. Each mask had its own individual stylings, and there seemed no division by species. Rodent, feline, fowl, and hound mingled under a rotating, prismatic-flamelight chandelier. Some grooved and shuffled over the barn floor. Others cut a baroque buckle in the lofts. A few dipped and dived and do-si-doed across the wide wood rafters.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew stepped, maskless, into the barn. Honeydew arced her smile of approval from the spinning chandelier to the loft waltzers. She said, “Now this is taste.”

“No finger foods though,” said Mr. Grey, who scanned for servers and found none. To him, the crowd seemed rowdy. And large too; lots of strangers in masks. Still, he reflected, that could work better for their cause. He climbed his eyes up the multi-leveled stacks of rafters and lofts and dancers. “They seem jovial. We could split up, ask after Jodee, and regroup if we learn anything useful.”

Honeydew nodded once. She sprung forward and vanished among a crowd of fox-trot hustlers. Mr. Grey strode, stiff and awkward, into the dancers.

He passed before a raised wooden stage. Giant metallic-parchment letters hung from the rafters over it, and declared that the band performing was ‘The Dreamland Royal Orchestra’. The band - presumably the same - enchanted beneath this metallic banner, atop this wooden stage. A full ensemble of instruments were on display: a grooving bass, the crisp ebonies and ivories of a grand piano, brass instruments of all shapes and curves, and even a full Glory Days Chorus line of bearded men. Mr. Grey walked before this line of hairy singers just as they sang, “It’s good to be alive!” They held out their hands in unison, as if exhorting Mr. Grey to their sentiment.

One of the dancers, a woman in a paint-horse mask, tossed her elbows and shoulders - dangerously so, Mr. Grey thought - in swingy motion as she danced near him. He turned to her, cleared his throat, and said, “Pardon me.”

The lady kept her body moving in time with the singer’s voice, but she turned her horse face - fixed in a startled expression - to him. In a voice muffled by mask and music, she asked, “What’s witchin’ you buddy?”

“My name’s Mr. Grey, and…” he saw her attention veering already, so he quickly asked, “do you know Jodee Coats?”

“She a singer?”

“She’s a tourist.”

“Don’t know any tourists,” was her answer. Mr. Grey barely caught it over the heart-thudding beat of the enchantment.

“I’ve heard there’s a dragon in these woods?”

She shrugged in time with the beat. “So what?”

“Won’t all this song and dance bring it?”

She shrugged to another beat. “If it comes it comes,” came the muffled voice. She danced away. Mr. Grey just caught her last words through the music. “Forget the missed stitches; learn to love the yarn!” The woman’s horse mask flopped as she grooved to the fading song, and joined the dancing crowd.

Mr. Grey tried the same approach with several more barnstormers, all with similar outcomes. Some ignored him outright. Few were concerned about the dragon, or any kind of danger; they only wanted to dance. None knew Jodee. One dancer wearing a sheepdog mask shimmied up to Mr. Grey. He held the top buttons of his cardigan-robe open. A collection of beast faces hung from hooks on the inner lining of the robe, next to a sleeveless, bedazzled undershirt that glimmered in the chandelier. Price tags attached to the masks offered them for only a few pebbles. Mr. Grey had already seen Honeydew - distinguished by the golden-lily eyes of her robe - dancing in a mask of her own; a wolf. All the same he declined the mask vendor. The man pressed, shouting over the thumping music, “Come on buddy. Join the ball.” Mr. Grey shook his head, and swiveled to question others in the crowd.

Just then, a shudder shook the building. It started from the roof and worked its way down the rafters to the floor. The band let their instruments down. The tune faded. The animal faces looked up.

A trapdoor in the ceiling opened inward on a pulley system, and a dark, round shape sank through the open roof. Mr. Grey only half-saw the shape from his floor perspective. He noticed it docked at one of the upper lofts. The clunk of a falling bridge reverberated through the hushed whispers of the barn. Two lesser shapes skulked out of the dark, round one. They moved to a lighted upper ledge in the barn.

“Dancers bird, dancers beast, dancers with four stomachs, and dancers with two!” whined one of the dark silhouettes crouched on the top deck. “We beg you pause in this convivial air. For, my partner and I have something of… a matter in which… we wish to relate a…”

“Proclamation,” barked the other silhouette.

Even if the two silhouettes had not stood in a lurking hunch; even if the glasses they wore had not glinted over their shadow-faces; even if the closest chicken-masked and duck-masked dancers had not quivered with sudden fright; Mr. Grey would have known the voices of Blackjaw and Slake: Finders for Hire. He sighed through his nose.

“A proclamation,” went on Slake in his oily voice. “Spectacular choice of word, insightful Blackjaw. We believe you have among your number, a prospect pair. The first; an innocent young lady. Golden hair. Raised in the gentle wheelhouses of Starharbor.”

“Name’s Honeydew,” added Blackjaw.

“The second; a man of stone. A man, with nary a finance to render him aid. A man misbelieving himself free of pecuniary difficulties. A man walking among you, destitute, under the appellation of Mr. Grey.”

“Got his facts wrong.”

“We have, in our possession, a contract, bearing his name. Signed by him, certainly.”

“Impossible to prove not.”

“And under Queen’s Law, he shall find the contract quite legally binding. We have, in fact, a warrant. Now, if this-”

“Quit ruining the vibe!” cried a voice from the crowd. Instantly, the stomp and song drowned Blackjaw and Slake’s rebuttals. The band renewed their blaring tune. The masked revelers threw themselves into the dance. Mr. Grey watched Blackjaw and Slake slink along the upper stories, making for a set of steep, dusty steps leading to the dance floor.

Mr. Grey’s first impulse was; to meet the finder. To talk through whatever new justification they’d conjured under this ‘Queen’s Law’, and confront it in an open way. To decide victory by the pencil and the word machine. As he turned for the stairs leading up, however, he caught sight of Honeydew. She danced now with less enthusiasm than the animals around her; less enthusiasm than she’d shown when they arrived. Her wolf-face pointed like a hunting dog’s at the creeping finders. Mr. Grey saw her hackles rise, her shoulders point. She danced, but she was on guard.

Mr. Grey, like an oracular statue leaning over a vision pool, saw what might happen if he let Blackjaw and Slake corner him. He foresaw a confrontation, not with pencils and lowered voices, but with shoulders, shouting, and many, many watchers.

Mr. Grey changed his plan. The mask vendor had left Mr. Grey, and was throwing his sheepdog head back and forth with the rhythm of a new group. Mr. Grey tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned and said, “Change your mind?”

“What have you got?” asked Mr. Grey. The man opened his cardigan.

A moment later, Mr. Grey drummed the floor in a stiff Galop as he tried blending with the crowd. He tapped pretty well to the current song’s beat; a fast-paced drumming with lots of whistling from the band. The chorus of bearded glory days men sang, “-talkin’ ‘bout bad girls,” His motions weren’t fluid, but few noticed under the dusky, glowing, spinning chandelier. It spun, and flashed, and splashed light like mixed jams - moonberry, apricot, grape, cherry - over the beams and floors and dancers.

Mr. Grey’s eyes rolled. Here were Blackjaw and Slake, maskless, spooking a flock of girls in fowl masks. There was Honeydew, face hidden behind a wolf’s snout, sending a girl in a sheep mask hip-checking to the barn’s other end. From behind rectangular holes in his own mask, Mr. Grey kept specially-peeled eyes for any detached dancer. When he noticed such people, Mr. Grey danced stiffly and covertly over, introduced himself politely, then asked if they’d seen Jodee. His interrogations uncovered naught.

Mr. Grey began to feel this barn wasn’t the place to seek Ms. Coats.

Mr. Grey looked to the last spot he’d seen Honeydew dancing. She stood there still, waltzing among a pack of dogs. And, between Mr. Grey and her, there skulked the shadows; Blackjaw and Slake, Finders for Hire. The finders saw him. They knew him instantly by his posture. Quill and contract sprung to their hands. Honeydew followed their moves, ready to bring her shoulders to bear. The finders lurched at him. From the stage, Mr. Grey heard the piano player strike up a new tune. The singers sang a warning, “Humidity’s rising…”

Mr. Grey fled. The finders followed. He tried losing them in the dancing crowd, slipping into a trip of cultish dancers in goat masks. He beat his best caper, while the singers sang, “Barometer’s getting low.” Behind, the lights flashed against the glasses of Blackjaw and slake. The finders followed. They forced their way into the ring of goat masks with their warrant. Mr. Grey broke from the circle. He stepped; to the right and to the left; up the stairs and across the rafters. The finders followed. He grabbed the long, smoothed pole of a giant pitchfork and slid back down to the dancefloor; while the light of the chandelier dyed all around him in rainbow light; a light which - like the lights of the change of address office, or the lights of Lord Snake’s Wine Medo castle - refused to touch Mr. Grey; while the Glory Day’s line of bearded, single-shoulder-robe-wearing men chorused, “It’s raining men, amen!”

Still, the finders followed. Mr. Grey could not break their sight. With every beat, every twist, every blare of a trumpet or thrumming chord of the piano, they closed the distance. Blackjaw and Slake took care not to disturb the other dancers. They knew they couldn’t stop the party. They skulked relentlessly in pursuit of Mr. Grey, between the thronging people, like parasites through a wide membrane orifice.

As Mr. Grey passed under the spinning flames of the chandelier, inspiration struck. The chorus wound up their song with a final fading, “Amen.” Mr. Grey rushed to where he’d left his coffin by the stage. Blackjaw and Slake rushed after him. The band prepared their next piece. The crowd became a tornado of hips and elbows thrown in a frantic Cardiff Stroll. Mr. Grey slid in at the edge of the performers. As the band struck up their tune, Mr. Grey joined them with a fiddling enchantment.

I must tell you, while the rest of the band continued their thumping disco score, Mr. Grey played something like Beethoven’s 5th. The band worked with him. It wasn’t bad.

Mr. Grey’s joining of the players interrupted the chase of Blackjaw and Slake. They paused before the stage. They saw Mr. Grey of course; hard to miss the statuary fiddler in a goat mask among the trumpets and drums and bass and dancing singers. But the finders couldn’t reach Mr. Grey without stopping the music; without pitting themselves against the full waltzing, shaking, jigging, jiving, barnyard host. So, Blackjaw and Slake paused. They folded their arms and gazed at Mr. Grey. And the spinning chandelier lights flashed on their dark glasses and their pearly teeth as they waited.

The band played softer and softer. The song faded. The pianist turned his bull mask to congratulate Mr. Grey, and to politely usher him back to the crowd. Blackjaw and Slake unfolded their arms. They stalked to either side of the stage, each with a warrant copy.

Before they could go far a sudden storm of dancers — beast masks of feather and hoof - stormed over the finders. The people surged over the skulkers and pushed them back from Mr. Grey. This stampede still made a show of dance as they ran, though in reality they fled for the barn’s corners. They ran from Honeydew. Face hidden behind her wolf mask, she let her body fall into frenzy. She threw herself into a leg-kicking, stiff-arm-swinging, body-turning Charleston, discordant and inharmonious with the other dances. The masks could show no emotion, and the other partiers clapped her on, but Mr. Grey sensed an air of terror in the crowd.

With his piece finished and a moment bought, Mr. Grey jumped to where Honeydew danced, right beside his luggage and coffin. She ended her wild jig. The band struck into a new song. The crowd thinned again. Mr. Grey saw Blackjaw and Slake push forward.

Honeydew shouted over the song. “Saw you being badgered. Let’s handle with these idiots now.” She held her shoulders sharp.

Mr. Grey made a quick dart of eyes at the crowd. “We should return to finding Jodee. No one here seems to know her.”

“Come on! This place is great. We can take these two.”

“Actually, I had another plan,” he said. Technically it was true, though Mr. Grey left out he’d only thought of his plan after Honeydew stated hers.

“We can’t run. They’ll just follow in whatever vehicle they’ve got.”

“It wouldn’t be on foot. But you’d have to drive. It might be a challenge.”

After a tock, Honeydew said, “I’m listening.”

They ran for a stall in the barn. Blackjaw and Slake followed. Behind, the music chorused, “PARTY ON!”

---

On one side of the barn - where the music thumped ever on, and the dancers moved without cease - there stood closed, one especially large paddock door. A construction of flaking paint and loose fit, it sagged sadly on its hinges. The rainbow lights flashed in the seam between door and wall. A loose-looking bolt of wood on the exterior made a show of securing the door from the animal dancers’ escape. It might have delayed a scrawny, horse masked dancer. An actual horse with any will could have sundered the lock with a quarter-hearted kick.

Door, bolt, and hinges suddenly exploded off the barn in a dusty mushroom cloud. A pistoned strut of iron in the shape of a webbed foot surged through the dust in the act of kicking down the flimsy wood. The foot landed on the ground with a shudder and a squeal of un-oiled metal. From within the cloud came the popping noise of an old dragon engine; machine-existence wakened for the first time in epochs. In a flurry of dispersed dust, a rusty steam swan screeched through the broken paddock. It stumbled for the dark line of the forest, carrying in its cab Honeydew and Mr. Grey.

Mr. Grey tugged sharp on his set of reins to dodge a collision with one of the trees. He turned and took one last look at the barn. Behind them the lights, and the singing croon of, “Burn baby burn,” faded away.

Honeydew said, “This loose bird o’ bolts won’t hold long.”

Mr. Grey returned to the helm. He said, “But we’re piloting well together. This way, we’ll lose the finders without trouble.”

The two shared a good rhythm with their ride, despite the swan’s beat-up state. As the darkness and branches of the boscage folded over them once more, both had time for a last glance at the barn. Mr. Grey saw the broken door lying in the grass. Honeydew saw the lights dancing through the dusty opening. Both felt a sad pang.

Mr. Grey said, “I’m going to make sure we grabbed everything.” He reached for the buckle of his violin coffin. Honeydew took both sets of reins. She veered around a dense wall of twisted roots massing between two trees. Mr. Grey unbuckled the lid, found his violin tucked safely. He set the coffin back on the rattling floor, and turned to his suitcase. Then he thought of the travel visa - tucked into the coffin’s top pocket. He unzipped it, reached inside, and found it empty.

Their visa was gone.

Mr. Grey darted his hand toward his suitcase, though he knew he hadn’t put the visa there. At the same time, Honeydew saw the motion. She shouted over the screeching rust of the swan. “Everything okay?”

“Well-” said Mr. Grey slowly. He didn’t want to ruin their rhythm.

He spoke too slowly. New sounds arose at their rear. Another dragon engine’s growl. A long steam hiss. Mr. Grey and Honeydew turned.

The forest had stolen the barn light from their view, and their own popping and whacking course through the dense foliage drowned any music. Hovering above the wood, however, next to a moon which had chosen to be full, they saw a dark sky-shape, covering a patch of the stars.

More like two shapes, Mr. Grey noticed; moving as one, both dark in the night. The topmost was like an inverted teardrop, with a flat bottom. Directly under it - under the air balloon, Mr. Grey realized - hovered the cup-like shadow of a gondola. A strange ledge jutted into the night from the gondola’s side; a drawbridge? Two torso-outlines stood over the rim of the cup. Even with their distance, and the half-obscurity of the forest, and the jostling of the swan, Blackjaw and Slake’s dark spectacles glinted by the wan moon.

Slake’s wine pierced like an owl’s shriek above the trees. “Dearest Mr. Grey! Loveliest Honeydew! Why so set against a pair of finders with intentions high? Why so keen on poverty?”

“Not thinking straight,” Blackjaw’s voice growled over the woods.

“Our professional advice-”

“-given free-”

“-is that you turn round. End this senseless hotfoot. Come along easily. You’ll find the Queen’s jurisdiction, and Queen’s Law, belong to the finders this lovely night. And all nights to come! But they might be yours, if only you’d show a will for the teensiest bit of signage.”

Mr. Grey and Honeydew had only half-attended their course; and managed well. A shudder in their swan grabbed their attention instantly away from the finders. They turned forward; just in time to pitch over the edge of a glen.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew grabbed the reins. They twisted. They pulled. They just maneuvered their jalopy into a breakneck, plodding stomp down the grade. The branches and heavy fruits drummed like stones against the metal canopy. The swan tripped - nearly tumbled - over one thick root just before a tall ridge in the forest floor. Honeydew tilted all the way back in her torn-leather seat, and brought their swan into a ballerina-like pirouette.

With dancing and stumbling and the crackle of branches, they carried their swan down the slope on its feet. The ground evened into a low valley. They breathed for the first time in many tock. Another breath - the steam one of Blackjaw and Slake’s dragon-driven balloon - hissed behind them. Honeydew said, “I’ll handle them myself if you’re scared. My shoulders against them?” she clicked confidently. “I say good odds.”

Mr. Grey thought of their visa, possibly in the hands of some five-finger-discounter back at the barn. He almost accepted Honeydew’s proposal. But then Mr. Grey pictured that scene to himself; filled in the image. A scuffle. Shouldering. Honeydew hurt, staunching bites and scratches. Blackjaw and Slake battered, even though they themselves had never resorted to battery; only coercion and blackmail. Mr. Grey pictured, easily, the forest floor of old leaves and needles, wet with blood.

He thought long on this image. Honeydew took her eyes off the path for a tock and flicked them at him. He finally said, “We should keep trying to outpilot the finders.”

“In this old bird? No chance. They’ll catch us. Then we’d have to handle them anyway. Let’s just fix Blackjaw and Slake now.”

“Every stop is a chance for Jodee too. Besides, I had another - watch out, big root - another idea about the Swan. You’d have to pilot by yourself for a stretch.”

For a tock their swan chugged steadily through the canopy; up hills, down valleys, over ditches thrice the size of the one Mr. Grey had jumped in Wine Medo. Another hiss of the finder’s balloon rent the sky. Honeydew click-sighed. “Fine. Give me the reins.”

Honeydew took both leather leads of the swan, one in each hand. Mr. Grey said, “You’ll need to keep it even.” With the practiced hands of girlhood experience, Honeydew shaped the pace of their rusty swan. She brought their clunker into the smooth hobble of an active old woman. Over roots, by apple-laden boughs, across brooks and hollows and slopes of many grades, she steered them evenly. The box of their old swan held steady.

Meanwhile, Mr. Grey faced the finders. Their balloon vanished every so often behind the branches of some taller tree, only to reappear closer than before. Mr. Grey cranked back the retractable canopy of their ride with a grinding of rusted gears. Then he stood very still, and held his arms in a stiff T-pose. His anchor shawl ran taught before him, nearly as statue-ish as Mr. Grey himself. His eyes fixed on the pursuing balloon.

A crow fluttered off a nearby tree, and perched on his extended arm.

A second joined.

More crows came, flocking to the statue. They perched, not only on Mr. Grey, but all across the steady metal of the steam-swan’s box. Soon a murder of beady eyes and crooning caws massed atop the plodding swan. The crows lent an organic plumage to the mechanical bird; a coat of real, midnight feathers.

By now the finders’ balloon hovered overtop the pair. Honeydew hadn’t seen the point of gathering the birds. Over their cawing, she said, “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d… hoped to camouflage us. With the feathers,” answered Mr. Grey. He moved his mouth as little as possible so as not to disturb the flock. “Against the dark woods. It seems to have failed.”

Honeydew twisted the reigns and brought them in a smooth lilt around a copse of corn-trees. “They can track us by sound. The rusty squealing. The crow-caws.”

“Drat.”

A pop from the engine sent a plume drifting from their ride. It startled a half-dozen of the gathered crows, who winged the air just left of the finders’ balloon. Blackjaw and Slake called down another bout of proposals. Their smiles gleamed overhead. They sank toward the swan. Honeydew said, “Think of something new, fast. This swan won’t go much longer. Or, let me handle the finders.”

Mr. Grey had thought of something fast. He dropped his arms.

Immediately the murder erupted in a cawing, feathery cloud. The crows rose into the sky, like a mushroom of smoke from the clanking swan engine. The finders’ balloon just above them took the birdstrike full on, like a grapeshot blast.

There was a pop; a sputter. Mr. Grey saw Blackjaw and Slake’s balloon whizz suddenly high and backward. It flew away from the swan. in a deflating, silly-straw spin, shrinking into the space between the stars. With a last bark and a final whine, just audible over the guttural jaunt of their engine, the finders’ balloon vanished into the leafy horizon.

Honeydew said, “Not bad.” She got half-a-click of approval out, before a grinding from their ride cut her short. The piston-strut legs came to a full halt, with both webbed feet planted firmly on the rooty forest floor. Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s momentum threw them against the front rail. A plume of coal-smoke surged from the exhaust-pipes. The bird sagged, deflating much like a balloon itself. Their cab screeched as it sank to earth.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew grabbed their luggage. They stepped, coughing, from the smoking and popping machine. They turned and watched as the metal swan gave one last sputter of artificial, avian existence. Then it fell silent. The wild rustling and animal noises of a nighttime forest closed in.

“That went alright,” said Mr. Grey.

“Alright,” agreed Honeydew. “Though I wish this thing had lived longer. A long walk back to the barn.”

Mr. Grey had his hands full, but he still brought his suitcase arm halfway to his ticker-pocket, out of habit. After a pause, he said, “Our visa’s gone.”

“What?”

“I checked the coffin, but it’s not there. Maybe it’s at the barn?” Mr. Grey wanted to press on in the quest for Jodee, and didn’t think he’d accomplish that by returning to the dance. But the visa might be back there, and he felt obligated to search.

“If you’d just let me-” Honeydew began with a snarl. She swished a hand to cut herself short. “Forget it. Let’s head back. We’ll check the ground along the way. You dropped it in the escape, I’m sure.”

At that moment, they heard a guttural, primeval, booming roar. A roar to cow The Wind. A roar to shudder the trees; not only the branches, but the trunks too. A roar which seemed even to writhe the roots in the earth. A roar, from the direction of the barn.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew looked at each other. “Dragon,” they said in unison; meaning the biological kind.

They turned, and crept away from the swan.

Away from the barn.

Deeper into the woods.