Riverkeep Page 6

  And now the maddening woman was here, keeping perfect time as ever. From the parlor, behind the closed door, came the urgent silence of Pappa straining against the bonds on his wrists and the cloth wrapped across his mouth. Wull was certain only he could hear it.

  He sighed, and felt his wind throb in the struggle to control himself. The constant, dull ache was back: the acid boil of tension and worry that filled him from his guts through his muscles to the tips of his fingers. He ignored it.

  “An’ whair’d ye say ye found this?” said Mrs. Wurth.

  Wull looked at her gray face. Mrs. Wurth had shown no sign of surprise or disgust or humor on seeing the face peeking up at her from the slab; just turned it over to inspect the mottled insides and nodded.

  “It was under the ice by lantern three,” said Wull. “There was weed all round it, like when they gets caught under barges.”

  Mrs. Wurth nodded again. “Whut’s happened to yer chin?”

  Wull put his hand to the torn flesh of his fall. “I slipped,” he said.

  Mrs. Wurth nodded. “Ice is slippy. Sure this is all ye’ve come across since last I was here? I din’t manage last Monday, mind—there was a fire in one o’ the mills, an’ me an’ the boy spent all day shuttlin’ crisps back to the mortuary.”

  Wull stared at her. Mrs. Wurth was from somewhere up north and had a peculiar singsong accent—“morch-oo-airy”—that meant Wull could focus only on the sound of her voice and not her actual words.

  “What?” said Wull.

  “A mill fire,” said Mrs. Wurth, without irritation. “A fair pile o’ crisps. No’ a pleasant job, but we saw a grand juggler in the square. Chap was throwin’ up knives an’ burnin’ torches. . . .”

  “Right,” said Wull. “The face, Mrs. Wurth.”

  Mrs. Wurth lifted the skull fragment in a gloved hand.

  “Aye,” she said, “this piece of face is right familiar. O’ course, faces are faces, an’ much like backsides an’ elbows in that respect.”

  Wull laughed, saw that Mrs. Wurth hadn’t been joking, and turned the chuckle into a cough.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, “I choked on my tea.”

  He and Mrs. Wurth looked at the undrunk tea in silence.

  “Whair’s your faither, did you say?”

  “He’d to go into the town,” said Wull.

  “Oracco?”

  “Aye.”

  “On whut business?”

  Wull shrugged. “He doesn’t always tell me, ma’am. His own, I s’pose.”

  Mrs. Wurth held the skull-piece by its chinless point a few inches from her own, peering into the eyes.

  “As I understan’ it the city has plenty scope for the pursuit of merriment, fur those inclined to that sort of thing. It ne’er struck me as your faither’s line of interest, I must say.”

  “What, merriment?”

  Mrs. Wurth nodded. “Just so,” she said. “That considered, there’s plenty who have gone the way o’ happiness in the past, an’ I can’t say I saw that comin’ either. It often strikes when ye least expect it. Like food pois’nin’. I mind the last time I’d pois’nin’. Both ends, it was, an’ such a spectrum o’ colors as you’ve never seen brighten a privy floor. . . .”

  “Right,” said Wull, who was at a complete loss. When the mortuary was empty Pappa brought Mrs. Wurth into the parlor and gave her root tea and biscuits and the two of them shared unlistenable, looping conversations. It occurred to him that, despite all the hardship the Riverkeep endured in his stand against the elements—all the cold and damp and corpses made runny by water—weekly conversations with Mrs. Wurth might be the grimmest task of all. Talking to her was like trying to nail smoke to the wall. “The face, Mrs. Wurth.”

  Mrs. Wurth tapped the skull’s forehead thoughtfully. “Aye,” she said. “I reckon I knows where I’s seen this afore, right enough. This could be right int’restin’,” she added, placing the fragment respectfully on the cadaver slab and wrapping her face on her way out the door.

  Wull listened for noises from Pappa. There were none, not even the little movements of his feet on the boards.

  He placed his mug beside the face and, using one of the body-washing rags that littered the floor, lifted it up.

  It was completely clean at the point of injury, with no ragged flesh or torn skin. The skin itself was thick and pale from its time in the river, making the hairs of the thin mustache darker still; and the whites of the eyes—open the tiniest crack—were gray.

  It had never occurred to Wull that it might be possible to recognize a person who came out of the river. He didn’t really know anyone apart from Pappa and Mrs. Wurth.

  The undertaker’s footsteps approached the door.

  Startled, Wull tried to replace the face, but fumbled, dropping it mouth-first into his mug.

  “Oh no, no . . .” he said.

  The handle turned.

  Mrs. Wurth stamped the snow from her boots.

  “I’m fair convinced aboot this,” she said, holding a newspaper out in front of her. “On the second page ther’s . . .”

  She looked at Wull, who was clutching a mug of tea that held a piece of human face.

  “What are ye doin’ with that, lad?” she said slowly.

  “It fell in,” said Wull.

  “It’s mibbe best ye take the deid man’s head oot yer tea. O’ course, folk make tea oot all kinds o’ things—there’s a brew made frae the soil o’ beavers is meant to be right bracin’. I like root tea mysel’, pref’rably wi’oot bits o’ cadavers in, though I will admit to likin’ it sugared.”

  “Right,” said Wull. He took the skull fragment out of the mug and shook away the liquid. There were some tea leaves in the mustache.

  Mrs. Wurth looked at him a long moment. “When’s it goin’ to be you as keep?” she said.

  “Oh,” said Wull, “a few days. I’ll be sixteen on Thursday.”

  Mrs. Wurth looked at him another long moment. “A lot can change in even a few days, I’ve always found. Things’re always changin’—’cept deid folk. They’re always the same, ’cept when they’re diff’rent, an’ they can be, dependin’ on circumstances, which can vary to a fair degree.”

  “Right,” said Wull. “What was in the newspaper?”

  “Aye,” said Mrs. Wurth, brushing some of the tea from the dead man’s face. “It’s on the second page there, sketch of a gennulman lost in the waters oot in the estuary. Look at the ’tache there an’ tell me that’s not the same one ye jus’ dipped in yer cup.”

  Wull looked at the sketch, looked at the section of face, then back again. Although puffed and creased by its time in the water, there was a definite resemblance, especially in the shape of the round, squashed nose.

  “It does a bit,” he admitted.

  “An’ there’s plenty bits o’ him missin’, says the paper,” said Mrs. Wurth. “Bits, I shouldn’t wonder, like parts o’ his face, such as ye was jus’ dippin’ in yer tea.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” said Wull. “You know I’m not plannin’ on drinkin’ the tea now, Mrs. Wurth? It was an accident it fell in my mug.”

  “’S up to you what you do, Masser Keep. I ain’t never had an interest in either the contents of another’s larder nor any food whut has a flavor. I mind o’ a time I tried this pickled thing—they said it was a farmyard oyster, but I foun’ out that meant—”

  “What does it say under the sketch, Mrs. Wurth?” said Wull, rubbing his eyes. “What happened to the man?”

  “Aye, seems he was killed by a creature, an’ quite a big one,” said Mrs. Wurth. She smiled with the lower half of her face, her eyes remaining expressionless and dull. “There’s spec’lation it could be a mormorach, if they even exists anymore.”

  “What’s a mormorach?”

  “Well, it’s a big long eel sort of a thing, but th
ey’ve no’ existed for thousan’s o’ years. ’S a story, really, now, an’ I don’t hold with stories much mysel’—not in favor o’ things ye can’t put yer hands on. If I can’t see it, I don’t want it. ’S why I got rid o’ my sense o’ smell. Made that decision aroun’ the same time as the food pois’nin’ which, come to think of it, was shortly after I ate those farmer’s oysters—”

  “Mrs. Wurth! If they don’t exist anymore, why do they think it might be one?”

  Mrs. Wurth scanned the article. “Fisherwoman found a hand in an empty net—green-stoned ring on it identified this fella Blummells. Found another few parts after that, but not much, an’ it seems all the parts were bit clean off, not like they was torn by a mairlan or even a cragolodon . . . like this bit o’ face, right enough—look how it’s sliced apart, all neat like—it’ll be fair valuable if that’s what it is, a mormorach. ’S no tellin’ when magic like that’s goin’ to strike, an’ it’s no’ happened fur so long, folk hardly believe in ’em anymore.”

  “Like you? You don’t believe in them?”

  “’S right.”

  “Even though it says here there’s one on the coast? An’ they definitely used to exist?”

  “’S right.”

  Wull rubbed his eyes.

  Mrs. Wurth scanned farther down the article, tracing the words with her fingers and lip-wetting absently with her gray tongue.

  “Apparently there’s a man says he saw a big giant eel of a thing jumpin’ up oot the water on the night this Blummells went missin’. But there’s not to be much in that—whut’s the word o’ a man when all’s said an’ done?”

  Wull looked at the sketch, then back at Mrs. Wurth’s blank face.

  “I’m a man,” he said.

  “Not yet, bless you.”

  “An’ what about Mr. Wurth?” said Wull. “Doesn’t his word count for anything?”

  “Nope,” said Mrs. Wurth, “that gudgeon’s a head full o’ magic an’ no mistake. I can’t make head nor tail o’ whut he’s sayin’ half the time. Exhaustin’ fellow—I hardly lets him oot the house.”

  Wull rubbed his eyes again. “So what does this mean?” he said.

  “It means I’s goin’ to take this piece o’ Mr. Blummells to the newspaper people to see about exchangin’ money for the story o’ his face,” said Mrs. Wurth, smiling with her eyes this time. “Splittin’ it halfways wi’ yer faither, o’ course,” she added quickly.

  Wull glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. “O’ course,” he said. “I’ll let him know when he gets back.”

  Mrs. Wurth picked up the fragment of Emory Blummells’s skull, wrapped it in the newspaper, and tucked it under her arm.

  “I’ll be seein’ ye nex’ Monday, if you’s around, an’ I’ll be prayin’ yer faither’s back from whatever ill-begotten pursuit he’s got himself engaged in. I’d hate to see a good man like he lost in the pursuit of enjoyment.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Wurth,” said Wull. “I’ll be sure to keep clear of it myself.”

  “Ye’ll be the keep by then, man or no’ man. Good luck.” Mrs. Wurth tipped her cap, wrapped her face in her scarf, and went out, a blast of cold darting in around her through the open door.

  Wull stood in the mortuary until the rattle of the horses’ halters had faded into the distance. Silence returned to the boathouse.

  A mormorach. Something about it stirred his blood.

  He opened the parlor door and peeked in. With the shutters blocking the morning’s sun, the room was a sour-stinking gloom of tight, lived-in airdust swirls dancing in the tiny slivers of light. Pappa was rolling in sleep, grease-matted head swinging over protrusions of collarbone, and his feet had begun once more to move on the boards.

  Wull went to him, knelt at his feet, touched his face. “Pappa,” he said quietly. “Are you all right?”

  Pappa’s eyes burped open: vacant and fogged and deeply ringed with the bruises of restlessness.

  “Sleep,” he whispered. “Sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . .”

  “You can sleep,” said Wull, pushing the hair from his face. As Pappa drifted, Wull held his ankles, absorbing their quick twitches in the aching muscles of his arms. Slowly, Pappa’s head ceased its deep-chested swing and the small movements of his wiry frame calmed to a frightening stillness. His big head hung forward, bristled mouth gaping, a thin rope of saliva connecting mouth to knee.

  There was something under Pappa’s skin, a looseness, as though the muscles were untethering from the bones.

  Wull continued to hold the thin legs after sleep had come, his kneeling feet bloodless and sore, watching the movement in the wasted face and drifting into reverie and daydream, overwhelmed by the sense of lost happiness, his wishful memory restoring the flesh to Pappa’s bones and the warmth to his eyes.

  Eventually he stood and looked at the clock. Even if he meant to return before nightfall, there was at least an hour before he would have to launch the bäta.

  He thought of the black-frozen wicks, impervious to the licks of the matches’ fire, and the iron rods of the lanterns iced into ever-thickening whiteness. He thought of the mormorach, swimming now out in the estuary, flying—terrifying and powerful—through the depths. That such a beast could be in these very waters filled him with . . . something. A quake that was not dissimilar to the last days’ fearful tremors, but also caused his muscles to tingle with excitement and desire.

  The books through which he had pored in search of a solution to Pappa’s ailments were still spread across the ledger desk. In habit, he returned to the mortuary to lift his mug, decided instead to hurl it in the river, then went to find mention of the great creature in the pages of his grandfathers’ vast, ancient tomes.

  7

  Canna Bay

  Mormorach: literally, “big, big, terror.” Presumed extinct—with no confirmed sighting in over a thousand years (see also Bohdan, Greenteeth, and Suire)—a creature of semi-myth possessed of incredible strength. Estimates put its length at anything up to fifty-five feet, with the breadth of its trunk around six or seven feet. Its mouth, certainly, was filled with tusks the length of a man’s forearm, and it is the ornate carvings of these ivory pieces (along with its teeth—razorlike shards of translucent enamel more precious than diamonds) that comprise the bulk of its present-day remains. Strongly linked to the occult, the mormorach contained all manner of valuable substances, from the juices of its eyes (said to be curative of blindness); powder of its bones (relief from rheumatic and arthritic pains); and—most valuable of all—the dark, viscous secretions of its brain glands (curative of dead sleeps, paralysis, possessions, sicknesses of the mind, and even, it is much rumored, capable of granting eternal life).

  —Encyclopedia Grandalia, University of Oracco Print House

  Weeds brushed the mormorach’s flanks as it slipped with stately calm through the trench. Several days of hunting had left the waters almost empty of life, and, having finally found something to arouse its interest, it had been following a few ink-spurting squid for more than an hour, moving above them as they scuttled into caves and hollows in the rock. It banked, dipping a slow fin to alter its trajectory, then, as the squid darted back on themselves in a cloud of frightened ink, it twisted in the water, head brushing its tail fin as it whipped its body and dove, mouth wide, taking the squid into its gullet without movement. It bit at the ink, tusks clamping on its face as it sought more prey in the confusing cloud.

  Finally the sensory tips of its mucus membranes stopped their signals of food and it drifted in the current once more, shifting its attention to the large shapes on the surface. The slapped contact of hulls on the water arrived as both food source and warning, and the mormorach continued to drift, bellowing, spinning through the silt in the light of its sonar voice. The surface was crowded, and it allowed itself to rise, settling under a large shape and resting against its bulk, champing its tusks an
d waiting for the guidance of instinct to shape its course.

  Above it, aboard the Flikka, the crew ran to their positions at the gunwale, harpoons and ropes hoisted in firm hands that dripped with sweat even in the teeth of the icy sea wind.

  The captain, an ageless salt known as Doc Fletcher, stood on the bridge with his fist on the tiller, eyes wide in spite of the constant spray. Flocks of graygulls, frenzied by the catchless days, whirled around him, wailing and keening and launching themselves at the tossing surface.

  “The first sight, lads!” Doc shouted. “Launch those bloody darts into his hide! If we lose him to another boat I’ll lash the skin from ye! Come on now, eyes to the water—he’s right under us, and he’ll surely take a look out and see what we’re about. An’ what are we about?”

  “The hunt!” came the response, the deep resonance of many voices shouting as one.

  Doc showed his teeth. The boards of his deck were stained a deep crimson, the wood having soaked in blood beyond imagining each time a whale or mairlan or shark was hauled aboard to have its skin and blubber flensed: the termite-scurry of the crew stripping the fleshy giants to the bone within hours, the meat and fat rendered in stinking fires on deck, skeletons smashed with hammers for corsetry and medicine. The Flikka was a ceaseless engine of death, harvesting the lives of the sea with merciless and relentless efficiency. Doc had stolen the wind of the other ships to beat them to this stretch of the water—a creature so large would hunt in the Rosa Trench, and he meant to be first at the harpoons.

  A mormorach would be a fine addition to his long list of kills, and would finance the purchase of another boat. Perhaps two. Doc had always seen himself at the head of a fleet, a position that would qualify him as gentry. As the arms of his crew bulged with the tension of their lofted weapons, he pictured the house that might be secured on a purseful of mormorach tusks and began shouting again, senseless exhortations of violence and purpose that came through gritted teeth and fell on the hard ears of sailors for whom death meant money and whose blood had already boiled to the point of fury.