Chapter 8 - The Witching Moment

Mr. Grey and Honeydew ran with their ladder. Fleshy, goose-pimpled trees leaned away from the duo on either side. The slowest trunks were scraped by the ladder in the pair’s mad dash. Diamonds of moonlight dropped through the branches atop the grey and flaxen heads. Only for a tock. Then the heads rushed past. The pair charged. To the right. To the left. Between close-growers and over snaking roots. Straight through waist-high hedges and weeds, wielding their ladder like a battering ram.

Behind them The Old Wind screamed in the woods. “I’m sick of creatures. Flee! Flee from my forest. Out! Out of my canopy. Can’t you see I want to be alone?” She hounded Mr. Grey and Honeydew with a ruthless, bitterly-cold air. She tossed twigs and leaves (never food) down from the boughs to tangle in their legs. She followed them up the hills, and blew beneath the hems of their robes. She pursued them into ditches, and sent poured needle-and-leaf waterfalls on them over the banks.

Just as Mr. Grey and Honeydew thought they’d need to make meager shelter from the hollow of a rooty tree, and endure a miserable night with the howling Wind, they broke out from under the trees’ shadows. Moonlight shone on their tired faces as the pair broke into a dirt-floored clearing. The Wind only bit at them harder in the open space. At the end of a little path of sparse flags, however, beyond a knee-high, moss-mortared palisade and bailey, a building squatted atop a mound of lumpy grass. Like a dark bird perched on a pile of limes.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew wasted no time contemplating the scene. They rushed for the structure. The Wind hounded and harried them all the way. The two thundered over an arched stone bridge crossing a reedy ditch. They barreled past an open, spiked gate. They sprinted over the path of scattered stone and under the moon’s veil. They charged up the side of the grassy hill by way of railway-tie steps recessed into the dirt. Finally, they reached the porch and the building’s swinging metal door. Without ceremony they charged inside; ladder, luggage and all. The Wind would have followed them even there, but that Honeydew spun round. She slammed the door shut with a metal bang and threw home the iron bolt.

“Oh how dare you,” The Old Wind wailed beyond the door. Through a murky glass window, they saw Dreamland’s trees tossing like siege-tower waves in a storm. “How dare you force me out. Bullies, beggars, villains, the both of you!” The whole building shook and jingled like a box of nails, and the glass of the windows quivered in their panes. But no matter how she blew, The Wind couldn’t topple the building’s walls.

For these were metal walls, Mr. Grey and Honeydew noticed. As the two caught their breath they saw, in every object and surface around them, a cast-iron tavern. Everything; every post, every rafter, every chair and table, the bar counter and bar stools, the stairs leading to the second story, the door of course, and window lattices, and certainly the nails holding it all together; all of it was iron. Even the window panes had a leaden look to them, as they quivered with The Wind’s beating. There was a huge iron stove in the corner, looking cold and dusty. In the iron baseboards, they saw built-in iron mouseholes. And on the iron hooks in the rafters? And stacked on iron shelves behind the counter? Iron cutlery, iron plates, iron bowls galore. The dust itself, lying like mold over everything, was nothing less than another pillowy layer of metal shavings.

All this hardware shook and tinkled and chimed from the hurricane whirling outside. Aside from the Windmade commotion, the place seemed abandoned.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew returned to the present when an iron shutter bonged against its window. “What a pill she is,” said Honeydew. She kicked her shoes into an iron shoe closet beside the front door and walked with her suitcase to a clear spot of floor near the stove.

Mr. Grey’s eyes walked up the second-floor staircase. He said, “I hope we’re not intruding.”

Honeydew swept a hand across the dusty iron vista. “Yeah, seems likely.” She clicked sarcastically.

“At least we can get off our feet for a while.”

“But no sleep. As usual. Unless that whiner outside shoves off.”

Mr. Grey grabbed his own suitcase and coffin. He moved over to the cold stove, next to where Honeydew was establishing her bed. He opened the front grate with a metal squeal, and started shoveling the ashes inside over to a nearby bucket.

The Velcro strap of Honeydew’s bedroll ripped loud and suddenly as she tore it open. She snapped the roll out flat on the floor and said, “Do you know a teeth-brushing song? Or exfoliating skin?”

“I think I’ve mentioned I don’t know any hygiene enchantments by heart.”

“And you can’t improvise, huh?”

“We have batheing options.” Mr. Grey turned and tilted his head over his shoulder, toward the kitchen on the other side of the room.

“You mean the giant cauldron?” she made another sharp click. “No thanks.”

“We also crossed that stream not many eons ago. I believe you said you weren’t interested.”

“Has Dreamland driven you mad? I’m not jumping in a river covered in ice.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Not by much. You might not feel the cold, but most peoples’ teeth tend to chatter.”

“I’m the one trying to start the fire.”

Silence fell between them. Honeydew finished flattening her bedroll, then moved on to making Mr. Grey’s; perhaps not as neatly as her own. Mr. Grey continued shoveling ashes from the fireplace. He scanned for anything made of wood, anything burnable. He saw their ladder lying in the dust. That, of course, wouldn’t do.

Mr. Grey suddenly noticed a tapping. The sound happened in between the rest of the metal warbles and rattles; distinct from the jangling rhythm of The Wind’s tantrum. He looked about the room. He spotted another occupant, previously unseen.

On a shelf below a round window, set in the wall behind the bar, atop an iron bust of the clam fish, there perched a regal raven. It tapped its beak on the smoky glass. Mr. Grey realized they must have locked the bird inside when they shut out The Wind. That same Wind threw herself against the bird’s portal window when she noticed the feathered creature. She shuddered the glass, shrieking, “Get thee back into my tempest! Give me back my bird.”

The raven said nothing. It hopped off the bust, hopped across the floor, and began hopping up the steps, one at a time. The inn’s only other patron, turning in for the night, thought Mr. Grey. He returned to the stove. To his pleasure he discovered a small bundle of firewood tucked under its wrought iron legs.

Honeydew got up, after arranging their bedrolls and setting out her robe for the next morni… for the next waking period. She walked over to Mr. Grey as he scraped together wood chips for kindling. She held her hand out, palm up. Mr. Grey looked at the open hand for a moment. She thrust it forward and curled her fingers in an impatient gesture. He looked up at her and said, “What?”

“You have the blankets in your suitcase,” she said.

Mr. Grey glanced at his suitcase - sitting on his other side - for several tocks. He very deliberately set the wood chips and the ash shovel down, picked up his suitcase, set it on his other side - toward Honeydew - and returned to the wood chips and shovel. She picked the suitcase up, without a word, and returned to their bedding.

A moment passed. Honeydew said, “Can you cover your head tonight? With the shawl or something?”

“Do I snore?” asked Mr. Grey.

“You breathe too regular.”

“I- What?”

“It’s metronomic. It’s like trying to sleep through a loud wall ticker.”

“I can’t control how I breathe when I’m asleep.”

“That’s why I didn’t suggest you stop. That’s why I asked you to cover your head.”

“Maybe we should try the rooms upstairs. We can take separate spaces.”

“I already have the bedrolls flat and fluffed. I want to sleep by the fire. Forget it, I’ll sleep through your breathing. Again.”

Silence resumed. A coal-dark mouse dragging a pin - purloined from a metal mug on the bar - shoved it over the counter-edge. The pin hit the floor with a tiny tinkle, which was lost in the uproar of The Wind against the inn.

In The Old Wind’s metal house shakedown, one set of tongs rattled worse than the other implements. They jerked about like a condemned man’s legs, from a hook in the ceiling over the counter. Honeydew stood. Hoping to make the space a little less noisome, she walked over to remove the tongs. She stumbled on a pair of hobnailed boots behind one of the chairs. She clicked - more like a snarl - and whirled on Mr. Grey. “Would you please use the shoe closet when there’s one available?”

Mr. Grey said, “I will once I take mine off.”

At that moment they heard a noise behind the bar.

Their senses sharpened instantly. Honeydew backpedaled from the counter she’d been approaching. She flung a hand out to one of the iron stools lying upturned on a nearby table. She hefted it in a whirling cloud of metal-shaving dust, and held the seat-plate before her like a shield. Mr. Grey took up the ash shovel. Time hadn’t let him light the fire, so the pair moved in near-dark. Under the lead-cast, wind-tossed, slanted light of moon filtering through the windows, Mr. Grey’s feet bonged like dropped boulders on the iron floor as he walked up beside Honeydew. They waited, on-guard.

The noise again. A tinkling. Much like all the metallic clangor and chiming shaken from the inn by the angry Old Wind. But not quite the same. There again. Tinkling. Eerily musical. Honeydew clung to her stool’s rungs. Mr. Grey wielded the ash-shovel at a resting, downward angle. Like a claymore. The Wind screamed, “Sounds like a wicked bell-Ogur. Serves you right for snubbing me.” The noise tinkled again. It crept; closer, closer, closer to the counter’s edge. Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s hearts thrummed. Out of sync, both faster than usual. But their stances remained steady. They waited, patiently, preparedly, for whatever came.

A goat with a bell around its neck walked from behind the bar.

Both let out sighs of relief; Honeydew, with a long breath through her mouth and the clanging drop of her stool; Mr. Grey, with an even exhale through his nose and a posture unchanged.

The goat’s fur shone like ink, even in the dark. One of its three big, curling horns scraped like a nail against the counter’s base as it came around the edge. The goat shook its head, and the bell at its neck once more tinkled. It stared at them with quadrated eyes.

Neither gave another moment’s thought for the goat. They returned, without a word spoken, to their individual efforts. Honeydew gathered the worst of the rattling kitchenware and laid it in the thickest piles of metal-dust, where it wouldn’t be so noisy. Mr. Grey went back to the stove. He finished preparing the wood, then set up his violin. He played an upbeat stinger to get a spark on the kindling. The goat watched them disinterestedly. Its onyx eyes transmuted to topaz as the cold iron stove hummed with fire.

Mr. Grey shut the front grating, which made long bars of cidery light across the dusty iron floor and skeletal chairs and tables. He let out another even exhale of relief. He said, “It is nice when something goes right on the first try.”

“For once it might be a warm night.” Honeydew padded back over to the bedding area. She yawned.

“Who knows,” said Mr. Grey quietly. He ground his hands tiredly into the sockets of his eyes, like a mortar and pestle. “Maybe The Wind will settle. If we just let her be alone for a bit.”

Honeydew opened her mouth to speak. A shriek erupted around them. Not a shriek from her, or from The Wind or any other person outside, or from the goat, or from any bit of scraping metal. The shriek came from a violin. Mr. Grey recognized the sound instantly. He looked to his own. But the shriek wasn’t Mr. Grey’s violin either. His violin lay gently, with strings unmoving, in its felt coffin.

A whole troop of shrieking strings followed the first. The sounds came tumbling down the tavern steps, both realized. Sleep-thoughts evaporated. The music joined The Wind’s wails. It screeched. It plucked; horribly, but with macabre beauty. Like a spider, slowly strumming across a dreamcatcher-web, on its way to drain a caught fly’s ichor.

A creak from the floor above. And another. And another. Footsteps.

Mr. Grey and Honeydew now knew they weren’t alone. Honeydew darted for her stool. She said, “Please, please, please don’t let it be some ‘people-playing’ fiddle.”

Another creak. Then a heavy thud. Whatever had dwelt above them dropped to the first step. Then a voice croaked after the strings. “Who’s stirring down there? Who’s provoking the Old Wind? Souls lost at midnight?”

The violin shrieking stopped. But The Wind’s, and another heavy footfall on the next lowest step, made up any difference in terror. Honeydew had her stool, but it drooped in her loose grasp. The creature thudding down the stairs seemed, by entry alone, somehow bigger and more monstrous than the goat. The goat now added its own bleating scream to the noisy room. Mr. Grey let his ash-shovel droop too. Not from a fear in his heart. From a confusion in his mind.

He knew that voice…

The voice croaked again. “Who’s stirring down there? Who’s provoking the Old Wind? Souls lost at midnight?” Right on the heels of the first utterance. The intonation and speed of the words were exactly the same, but the volume was slightly louder. Another thud on the stairs, and another, and then the voice repeated. Louder.

Like a reverse-echo.

“Pots?” called Mr. Grey.

A gasp, tinted in surprise and recognition, came from the voice on the stairs. The gasp rang out in the same reverse echo, just as the first phrase reached a crescendo that drowned out The Wind.

With a sudden flurry of thuds, Nesting-Inside-Pots, Mr. Grey’s Wine Medo fiddle teacher, dropped down the last steps into view. She turned her Jheri-curled, many-folded, cathair robe, and her giant ears, and her eyeless face, in Mr. Grey’s direction. In one hand she held her curled-neck fiddle. The regal raven from earlier perched on the other; it opened its beak and made the single clap sound of a hyoshigi.

Honeydew set her stool down and collapsed onto it when she saw Pots. She wiped cold sweat off her brow and let her tension go with a few deep clicks.

Mr. Grey walked up to Pots. He helped her set her violin and raven on a nearby table. Then Mr. Grey embraced his old teacher in a hug.

---

Pots’ violin strings quivered in the final measure of tender, folksy enchantment. Mr. Grey stuck his feet forward from an iron armchair. He examined the now-perfect lacing of his shoes’ under the slanted bars of stove-fire light. Pots said, “Hope you’re satisfied. It ain’t a fancy ditty, but it does the job.”

Mr. Grey said, “I’m grateful, thank you. Hygiene’s always troubled me. The bowing’s tricky.”

“Put in your moments. Hygiene enchantments take time. Practice lacing first.”

“It’s comforting now, all those practicing moments. I play all the time. When we’re not walking. But even with the ladder, I still think of it. Going through the woods, notes fill my head night and day. Or just night, I guess… In any event, it helps to see a master. Thanks for teaching, Pots.”

Pots set her fiddle in her own coffin - a dented and scuffed case, worn with use - and loosened her bow. Then she felt around on the other side of her chair. Pots’ eyeless face pointed blankly at Mr. Grey. She took a handful of needly sprigs from a pile of juniper. She reached her other hand out, slowly, until she felt the radiant heat of the stove. Waving that hand around until she felt the handle, she opened the door and tossed in the sprigs. The room filled with a sweet, woody smell. Finally, she leaned forward and let the stove’s warmth pool on her giant ears.

Mr. Grey watched without speaking. The Wind had left some ages past. The crackle-filled silence between them was an easy one. After a moment, Pots said, “Before I tuck in, and visit deeper Dreamland, answer my question.”

Pots turned her empty face to him. Though she couldn’t see, Mr. Grey still averted his eyes. He stared at the stove’s molten embers, behind the slatted iron door, beneath the clawlike firebox grate. He said, “Remind me again - the night’s so long I’ve lost track - what was the question?”

“That shindig of mine. I’m planning on a party; here at this tavern. It’s a hoppin’ spot. Elves and skrattels and goblins, they come here to hang. Never faeries though. They must run in their own cliques. Well, that’s the marrow. Dancing, vittles, and music. You coming or not?”

Mr. Grey suddenly felt conscious of the iron armchair’s material. He shifted in his seat. “You’re staying here then? But what about your Oh Well, won’t you miss your home?”

“This is retirement. I’m too old for well music. Dreamland’s for leisure; fiddling just for fun. But you quit waffling around. Are you gonna help?”

“I’m not sure I could. Beside your own enchantment, mine would sound awful.”

“Well that’s fiddlesticks,” Pots began. Mr. Grey shuddered; the cabbage man had used the same word. “You just said you’re practicing; at work and at rest. I heard you before, when you were lighting the stove. Not shabby playing.”

“Fire’s been much needed, while we’ve been roaming the woods. I’ve got it by heart.”

“So stay and help me, you and that nice Honeydew. We’ll play some duets. Share some food and songs. Help me entertain my guests. Take a travel break.”

Mr. Grey looked at Honeydew. She slept in a curl to the right of the stove, beneath a sheepskin blanket which Pots had rummaged from the second-story cupboards. He’d been worried at first that she’d overhear Pots’ mention of the party. But Pots had started her words without any volume. Even when her voice reached its reverse-peak, it rose only to a comfortable inside-voice. Honeydew soundly slept; and the fire cozily crackled; and the long iron flue hummed with heat; and Pots managed to draw a rocking-chair-like creak from her high-backed armchair of solid iron; and The Wind did howl a little, but distantly, so that her storm - the swaying trees under the moon, seen through the leaden window - seemed far, far away from their warm metal dwelling.

Mr. Grey said, “Unfortunately… I want to find Jodee, Pots. And time’s a factor,” Mr. Grey revealed not a hangnail’s-worth of distress in his face or his speech, but his armchair betrayed him. The iron seat groaned like a wagon axle on a hot day, despite Mr. Grey’s perfect stillness.

The distant Old Wind howled loud at just that moment. “Oh sure! One by one and two by two, all the little bunnies go running to their holes when I come through. ‘Let’s not talk to mean Old Wind,’ say you. ‘The Old Wind has nothing worth hearing,’ say you! Well then I’ll just blow and blow and blow all night. You keep to your rotten little burrows until you starve!”

Pots reverse-chortled. She said, “Well goodness gracious, that Wind’s out of temper here. She must hate Dreamland.”

Mr. Grey felt relief thinking The Wind had turned Pots’ attention off the party. He said, “Maybe it’s her twin? She didn’t recognize us, when we first arrived.”

Pots flopped her ears toward the sable goat. It stared glassily at them from the corner, and occasionally shook its head, tinkling the bell around its neck. “She drove that Goat here. It took shelter from her gale. Now, hard breaths scare it. I tried milking it. But doubtless since I’m a witch, her teats are bone dry.”

Mr. Grey thought it might hurt Pots’ feeling to mention the animal was a he-goat, and so said nothing. He looked from the fire to the window. He watched the distant forest - with its bark probably goose-pimpled from the Wind’s cold air - and tightened his shawl unconsciously. The armchair groaned again.

“Alright Mister Grey, what’s eating at your innards? You’re all fidgety.”

“Oh, there’s no trouble. I think it’s this old armchair. It could use a squab.”

Pots pressed him. “I don’t think that’s it. There’s something nagging at you. You sound not yourself,” Mr. Grey breathed in to speak, but Pots interrupted. “You’ve got the same tone. It’s your personality. I can hear these things.” She pointed to her ear for emphasis.

“Pots… I think that… Well. This vacation has turned out, not the way I’d hoped. Back in Glory Days, Jodee created conflict. It ended badly. I picked a side there. I think that’s where I went wrong. I made a wrong choice?”

Neither noticed Honeydew’s eyes shining from the bedrolls. She kept silent and listened.

Pots began speaking soundlessly, and her final echo came out as a whisper. “I heard of pogroms, and about plagues and illness. I don’t know details. It sounds big in scope; something moat-wide scale. Could you have stopped it?”

“I don’t think I could. But it wasn’t my business, and I got involved. That’s what Jodee does; she gets people too involved. She causes conflict. I have to find her; to show her she’s mistaken; to lead her back home.”

Mr. Grey took a deep, long breath. Pots only heard him, she had no eyes to see his face. Honeydew saw it, but what lay upon Mr. Grey’s face at that moment, she’d never tell. Perhaps she only saw the same grey expression as ever. Perhaps she saw something else. Whatever the case, the oil of her eyes - for a fraction of a moment - shone with an unusual flame. Sympathy? Then she closed her eyes, and returned to sleep.

After a long time Pots said, “You said you practiced. But words ain’t got any heft; show me your fiddle.” Mr. Grey unbuckled his coffin and passed the instrument into Pots’ hands. She felt its surface for a moment. “Not a speck of dust. And the wood’s gotten softer. You’ve played a fair bit.”

“It’s solved some problems. I had to play for a clam. And for Ms. Maysey.”

“One thing you should know; instruments also need rests. Time to play for fun. If you press too hard, your strings start to sound tinny. Give ‘em breathing room. And what better way? Help out an elder teacher. Walk in socks awhile.”

One of the midnight mice scurried up the arm of Pots’ chair. Pots must have felt its movement. She reached with a wrinkled hand and stroked the little rodent with her finger. She faced Mr. Grey, with an expectant look in her sockets. The mouse looked at him expectantly also. So did the flightless raven, on the pale clam bust by the window. Even the goat had a glimmer of expectation, somewhere deep behind its soulless rectangles.

Mr. Grey said, “Jodee’s one factor. There’s also my work duties, back in Starharbor. There’s pencils to push, and there’s upcoming reforms. Jack York expects me.”

Pots smiled. Mr. Grey saw, however, some of the stove’s warm flush leave her cheeks. The goat, the raven, and the mouse turned aside with airs of disappointment. Mr. Grey went on, “But if there’s still time - once we’ve finished with Jodee - I’ll drop in and play.”

Pots leaned across the space between the chairs. She reached and patted with her hand until she found Mr. Grey’s arm. She laid her hand overtop his; the pale, freckled skin overlapping the cold stone. She faced Mr. Grey and, though lacking, seemed to lock eyes. Pots said, “You do your duty, if you believe it’s what’s right. If you believe it.”

“Stopping her is right. Jodee does more harm than good. I see that truth now.”

This satisfied Pots. She took her hand away and sat back in the iron chair. She stretched her long-nailed toes out to the stove. “I’m glad to hear it. At least you took some gumption; during my teaching.”

“Those lessons applied, not just to the violin, but to this whole tour.”

“And just remember; never play to please yourself. Never play alone.”

Mr. Grey shrugged. “There’s no fear of that. I’m always with Honeydew. She’s there to hear me.”

Pots nodded. Her face seemed stiff. Perhaps from the jailing shadow-bars cast by the furnace, which looked dark and real as the rest of the room’s iron. She let the mouse scurry from her hand, sighed, and pushed against the arms of her chair to leave.

Mr. Grey said, “Pots, can we just sit? Keep each other company, by the fire a bit?”

Pots relaxed back into her chair. She smiled, and her face lost its stiffness. The blush of the light returned to her cheeks; the furnace shadows over her face seemed only shadows once more.

Mr. Grey and Pots kept quiet company by the warm stove - long into the endless evening - while Honeydew slept comfortably under the sheepskin. The crackling and sweet-smelling juniper filled the metal tavern with a cozy smoke.

Yet every so often Mr. Grey, without Pots’ seeing, glanced through the window. He looked past the cozy room - through the leaden glass - to Dreamland’s woods tossing in the volatile Wind.