Another Whole Nother Story Page 8

  When the battle first began, most of the onlookers assumed they would be cashing in on their bets in a matter of seconds. But now, nearly an hour later, the haystack-sized man had not been able to defeat his opponent, which was odd because his rival was but a third his size and not terribly muscled. In fact, as a matter of demonstration, you should know that the wiry man across from him had recently gotten a tattoo of a beautiful Polynesian girl in a grass skirt on the bicep of his right arm, the idea being that whenever he flexed his muscle she would appear to be dancing the hula. As it turned out, however, his arm was not sufficiently big to make the girl shimmy and shake her midsection. In fact, the best his undersized bicep could do was to make her wiggle the ankle of her left foot. The end result was a beautiful Polynesian girl who appeared to be dancing not the hula but the hokey-pokey.

  “Wow. That lad is mighty impressive indeed,” said the elderly man who had walked in earlier. He nudged the man standing next to him, who just happened to be Corben Ackerman, owner of the Ackerman Inn. “What’s his name?”

  “What’s his name? Why, that’s Haystack Saunders.”

  “No,” said the elderly man. “The other fellow.”

  “Don’t know his name,” said Ackerman. “He’s a privateer, I understand. And they call him the Mailman.”

  The Mailman, with his deficient biceps and hokey-pokey tattoo, was one of the fiercest and, dare I say, one of the ugliest pirates around. It should also be pointed out that, despite his name, he had nothing to do with the delivery of letters or parcels. He was known as the Mailman for a very different reason—or should I say about two hundred different reasons, because this is approximately the same number of piercings the man had on his face, each featuring a small gold or silver ring. He had enough rings on his left ear alone to hang a shower curtain. Rings lined each eyebrow and both lips and ran around each nostril. They covered a good portion of his neck and the areas of his shiny bald head where the skin was loose enough to be pierced.

  Before the days of plate armor, the best way for medieval warriors to protect themselves against sharp swords was, well, to run away and hide. The second-best way was with another type of armor that consisted of thousands of metal rings all hooked together to form a barrier between flesh and blade. It was, essentially, a wearable chain-link fence and was known as chain mail or simply mail. And this is how the Mailman, with his multiringed face, neck, and head, came by his name.

  His face jingled steadily as his scrawny arm pushed back against the meaty palm of his opponent, whose face grew a deeper shade of purple with each passing minute. The Mailman’s face jingled ever more loudly. The hula girl wiggled her ankle as if to say, “That’s what it’s all about.”

  “You look terrible, mate,” the Mailman taunted in his heavy cockney accent. “Like a four-’undred-pound sugar beet, ya do. Best maybe you lie down for a bit, eh? Take a wee rest. Come on, now. You’ve earned it, lad.”

  Haystack Saunders opened his mouth, ready with a witty retort, when suddenly he seemed to take the Mailman’s unsolicited advice. In one instant, after a full hour of cheering, yelling, swearing, and purpling, Haystack’s face lost all of its color, turning as white as the eyes that had rolled to the back of his head. He swayed—first left, then right, and finally all the way to the floor—but not before the Mailman had forced the back of his hand to the tabletop, winning the match. The victor leaped up and thrust his exhausted right hand triumphantly into the air, turning the hula girl tattoo upside down.

  The crowd erupted in jeers at the loss by their hometown boy and whispers of foul play on the part of the Mailman and his crew. The Mailman’s first officer bent over the fallen Haystack and removed the golden ring from his left earlobe. He was a shifty-looking man by the name of Shifty. In fact, the other members of the Mailman’s crew were similarly named, making them sound like the Seven Dwarfs gone bad. Besides Shifty, there was Flaky, Shady, Scurvy, Sketchy, Smarmy, and Doc, along with a half dozen other men, all of the same brutish ilk, with little to offer polite society and nothing to lose.

  With a crooked smile, Shifty handed the coveted ring to the Mailman, who held it to the light and admired its sheen with no less appreciation had it been the very first he won.

  Jibby and his crew walked in just as a half dozen of Haystack’s supporters dragged him toward the door in hopes that some fresh air might revive him. They did this on orders from the old man with the mustache and the limp, the man known as Dr. Dignan.

  “Hurry now,” he commanded. “If he doesn’t come around soon, we may have to bleed him. Or if that doesn’t work, we may have to drill a few holes in his skull. Nothing serious. Six or seven at the most.”

  As the men lugged the unconscious loser—well, that’s a rather harsh word; let’s call him the second-place finisher—out into the fresh air, Jibby eyed the Mailman from across the room. “Well, Sammy?” he said. “You think you can take him?”

  “With one hand tied behind my back,” said Sammy, rolling up his sleeves.

  “Good. Because we’ll be betting our ship on you. Our ship against his.”

  “But we don’t have a ship,” said Aristotle. “Do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” said Jibby. “But he doesn’t know that.”

  Advice on Resisting Pierce Pressure

  There was a time, it seemed, when earrings were reserved strictly for ears. These days people’s entire faces are being punctured with the frequency of a vice principal’s tires.

  I recently paid a visit to my local neighborhood coffee shop, where each of the persons employed there had no fewer than a half dozen metal objects attached to their faces. I asked one of the employees for a key to the restroom and noticed it was hanging from his left eyebrow. Handy.

  Leaving the coffee shop and strolling through the downtown area, I spied a young couple walking hand in hand. Something (a severe vitamin deficiency, perhaps) had convinced these two that they should each have a ring inserted in their respective noses and that those rings should be connected with a long chain. I honestly have no idea what these people were thinking. I do, however, know what I was thinking: Red rover, red rover, send Cuthbert right over.

  However, as strange as it might seem to me, I suppose this practice of self-mutilation is really nothing new and is no different than our forefathers growing sideburns the size of a badger or our foremothers plucking out their eyebrows only to paint them back on again with a colored pencil. So pierce away, but I advise you to be careful of this new craze. You may find yourself getting hooked on it, which might very well result in something getting hooked on you.

  Chapter 8

  Mr. Cheeseman and the children used the bronze rods as walking sticks and followed Mr. Lumley to a small wooden cottage next to a wide cornfield. There were flower boxes beneath the two front windows of the house, one of which was open with a pie cooling on its ledge, exhaling a sweet-smelling steam. Mr. Lumley led his new friends along a short walkway of flat stones and up the porch steps to the heavy wood-plank door.

  “I like your house,” said Penny.

  “It could be a museum someday,” said Teddy.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Mr. Lumley with a scowly chuckle. “It’s nothing fancy, but we like it. My father and I built it together. He’s passed now. Ten years it’s been.”

  When Mr. Lumley pushed the door open, Teddy was pleased by the wonderful mingling of smells that rushed to his eager nostrils. From the orchestra of aromas he could make out several individual instruments. There was blackberry pie, baked bread of some sort, and something kind of stewy. All in all, Teddy put the smell of the one-room house at a solid nine-point-six.

  Pinky let out a low growl. The growl came not from her throat but from her stomach. If Teddy hadn’t eaten in hundreds of years, then it could be fairly stated that Pinky hadn’t eaten in thousands of dog years.

  “We’d better leave these here,” said Mr. Cheeseman, leaning his bronze rod against the porch railing. The children did the sa
me, and Mr. Lumley escorted his new friends inside.

  With the day’s sun inching toward the horizon, the home was very dimly lit and Mrs. Lumley was left with just the glow of the fire and a few flickering candles by which to cook. She was a fair woman with naturally pink cheeks and dark, graying hair pulled back and pinned into a tight knob at the back of her head. The sight of her husband brought a smile to her face, which doubled in size when she saw that he had come home with guests, three of them children.

  “Well, what have we here?” She put her work aside and cleaned her hands with her apron.

  “I’ve got out-of-town visitors for the evening,” said Mr. Lumley. He introduced Mr. Cheeseman and the children to his cheerful wife, who seemed to give absolutely no notice to their strange clothing or to the fact that their dog was completely hairless.

  “It’s an honor to have you in our home,” she said. “What brings you to our fine little village?”

  “Just in for some supplies,” said Mr. Cheeseman. “Doing some repairs around the house.”

  “Speaking of repairs,” said Mr. Lumley, “Ethan here has figured out the cause of my headache. Turns out it’s my eyes. Just need a pair of proper spectacles is all.”

  “I suggested that months ago,” said Mrs. Lumley, stirring the aromatic contents of a large cast-iron pot hanging above the fire.

  “You did?” said Mr. Lumley.

  Mrs. Lumley rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Men,” she said. “Do they ever listen?”

  “Not to me they don’t,” said Penny.

  Mrs. Lumley smiled at Penny and hurried over to a long harvest table along the far wall. She pulled out a bench that ran the length of the table. At each end sat a small wooden chair. “Please, sit down,” she said. “Dinner will be ready presently. Lamb stew with biscuits and blackberry pie for dessert.”

  Teddy removed the wad of flavorless gum from his mouth and, as a matter of convenience, stuck it to his forehead, as he often did while dining. “I love blackberry pie,” he said.

  “Me too,” said Rat-Face Roy.

  “Grrr,” said Pinky’s stomach.

  While visiting the expansive home of Jacques Bon Mot, one might surmise that there is good money to be made in the business of witch hunting. In fact, the professional witch hunter just happened to be in the process of counting his money when there came a rather urgent-sounding knock upon the front door. Bon Mot looked up from his neatly arranged stacks of coins. There was a second knock on the door, prompting him to call out “Mortimer!” which he, in his thick French accent, pronounced “Mortimay.” “Answer zee door, you wrinkled piece of sausage.”

  “Yes, your benevolence,” said Mortimer in a weak, tired voice. The servant’s ancient feet shuffled toward the front door as he muttered under his breath. “Stubby little snail eater.”

  “I heard zat,” shouted Bon Mot, who was indeed a very short man and did enjoy eating snails on occasion.

  When his eighty-year-old feet finally got him to the front door, Mortimer took the knob in his shaky, spotted hand and pulled it open to reveal the two horsemen, serious fellows by the names of Seth and Caleb, who just happened to have the misfortune of being the husbands of Appalling and Outrageous. They held their big buckled hats in their hands out of respect for and fear of the great witch hunter. Get on his bad side and you might suddenly find yourself accused of witchery.

  “Yes?” said Mortimer. “May I help you?”

  “We’re here to see Monsieur Bon Mot,” said Caleb nervously.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mortimer. “His supreme and wonderful lordship is busy counting his money at this moment. When he is finished, sometime later this week I would imagine, he has made plans to visit an orphanage so that he might have the opportunity to kick some children in the shins. But I will tell him you stopped by.”

  Suddenly Mortimer was brutally shoved aside and Bon Mot appeared in the space his servant had once occupied. “Pardon my valet,” he said. “He’s very old and feeble, I’m afraid. Just look at him, would you? His back is curved like a stale croissant. It was only out of zee kindness of my heart zat I agreed to take him in.” Bon Mot looked at Mortimer, who was just standing there. “Well?” he said. “Don’t you have some wood to chop or some cows to milk?”

  “Yes, your squattiness,” said Mortimer with a slight bend of his already severely bent spine. He shuffled off and Bon Mot invited Seth and Caleb inside.

  “Zis way,” he said, leading them to a well-appointed sitting room that featured fine French furniture and, hanging above the fireplace, a life-size portrait of Bon Mot, which was not as impressive as it might sound, considering Bon Mot’s actual size. “May I offer you some cognac?”

  “No thank you, sir,” said Seth. “We’re here on somewhat of an urgent matter. You see, your services are greatly needed in town.”

  Bon Mot’s right eyebrow rose involuntarily as it always did at the thought of money to be made. “Please,” he said. “Tell me more.”

  Bon Mot leaned against the fireplace, striking the very same regal yet stubby pose he held in the painting above. He listened intently as Seth and Caleb told him how four very strange-looking people had walked into town on the same day that two mysterious lights appeared in the sky, making it a foregone conclusion that those lights were the result of witches racing through the air on their magical brooms.

  “But you said zat zare were four strangers,” said Bon Mot. “Yet only two lights in zee sky.”

  “They must have been traveling two to a broom,” offered Seth.

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s it,” Caleb concurred.

  “Two to a broom?” This was the first Bon Mot had ever heard of witches carpooling—or, should I say, broompooling.

  “We hear tale that they carry with them long golden wands, which they use to cast horrible spells,” said Caleb.

  “And Lumley, the blacksmith, tells of a magic black box with strange, ghostly lights,” added Seth.

  “Yes,” said Caleb. “And the witches travel with a hairless red wolf, so large it could swallow a man whole.”

  This was, without a doubt, the worst case of witchcraft Bon Mot had ever encountered. “Mortimay,” he hollered. He waited and waited some more. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the mantel. He was just about to call out again when Mortimer appeared in the doorway, dragging behind him, with all his strength, a large splitting ax.

  “What are you doing with zat thing?”

  “If you recall,” said Mortimer, “I was instructed by his supreme heightlessness to chop some wood. I thought I might start with the table in the dining room.”

  “Put zat down,” snarled Bon Mot. “Zare is no time, for today we go hunting for weetches! Now hurry off to zee stable and saddle my trusty steed.”

  “To do so would cause my spirit to soar like an eagle,” said Mortimer as he dropped the ax handle to the floor and shuffled off toward the front door.

  “I know sarcasm when I hear it,” Bon Mot shouted after him. “I practically invented it, you know.”

  Bon Mot’s horse was a snow-white stallion named Claude, which he valued nearly as much as he did his precious money. Mortimer led the prized animal to the front of the house where Bon Mot was waiting. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Claude led Mortimer because, try as he may, there was no way the horse could walk that slowly.

  He stopped near Seth’s and Caleb’s highly inferior horses, which were tied to the railing. Seth and Caleb each took a step away from the intimidating beast. It may be hard to imagine being intimidated by a horse, an animal whose two main sounds are known as whinny and neigh, but this was no ordinary horse. “Look at him,” said Bon Mot, beaming with pride of ownership. “Seventeen hands high is he. I can assure you, zare is no better horse for zee hunting of weetches.” He cleared his throat and waited.

  “Yes, your dwarfishness,” said Mortimer with a heavy sigh, as if he were on his way to the gallows. With the cracking of bones, joints, and cartilage, he lowe
red himself to his hands and knees next to the horse, offering his curved, brittle back as a footstool.

  Seth and Caleb gave an empathetic wince as Bon Mot placed his boot squarely in the small of the old man’s back, stepped into the stirrup, and swung his stubby leg over the horse. “I will be back by sunrise,” said Bon Mot.

  “I shall look forward to the event as if it were my very own birthday,” grunted Mortimer from all fours.

  “Good,” said Bon Mot. “See zat my breakfast is ready upon my return.”

  Without assistance, Seth and Caleb mounted their horses. Bon Mot pulled on the reins and Claude reared up on his hind legs with a whinny that was mightier than most. Bon Mot prepared to ride off when he noticed that Mortimer had not moved.

  “Mortimay. You can get up now.”

  “Can I?” said Mortimer. “I’m so glad you think so.”

  Chapter 9

  Gateman readjusted his wig and Professor Boxley wiped the back of his neck. “For goodness’ sake,” spouted the professor. “Just once could you sneeze without sneezing on someone else?”

  “Sorry,” said Gateman, who had never been more unsorry.

  Big was sorry. Sorry she had agreed to take these two squabbling buffoons anywhere. Friends of Ethan Cheeseman’s or not, they were getting on her nerves. They neared the town, and she was relieved that the job would soon be over. As she lead Gateman and the professor over the bridge, the ground beneath their feet began to vibrate. They stopped and turned to see three horses galloping toward them. Atop two of the horses were men with hammock-shaped beards and big buckled hats, while the third, a white monster of a horse, carried a short, cruel, weetch-hunting Frenchman. Big quickly scooped up Digs in her arms, then jumped onto the bridge’s railing.

  Jumping was beyond the physical ability of both Gateman and the professor, so they did their best to squeeze against the opposite rail as the horses bolted across the bridge, rattling it to the point that Gateman lost his balance and nearly toppled over the side and into the river. He managed to hang on, though his wig was not so lucky. It floated to the water below and began a leisurely cruise downstream.