Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

I slipped over the window sill and lowered myself down till my toes met the rough planks. Then I made my way stealthily to a position just below the window of the professor’s study.

“—but inside,” boomed Fluvius’s voice, “inside, Dr. Baruch, I think you will agree with me that they are as dirty as ever. The waters beneath the skin. You can clean the outer man—and that’s a fine start—but the inner man is another matter entirely. A much-neglected matter.”

“I confess,” responded Baruch, “that I have often considered the possibility of tinkering with the interior flora of the human body, with an eye toward remedying several inherent bodily ills. Many are the moments, mired in the bloody tent of a field hospital or the sputum-flecked ward of a slum asylum, when I fantasized about bolstering the body’s natural defences with a dose of some beneficial live culture.”

“Yes, yes, I knew of your researches, Dr. Baruch! Just why I summoned you out of all your peers. And my dreams tally precisely with yours! I believe I have formulated a potent nostrum that will benefit mankind in just such a fashion as you envision. My potion will not only re-order the patient’s defensive constitution, but also contribute to a more orderly patterning of nerve impulses in the brain, promoting more cogent and disciplined thought forms.”

Baruch was silent for a moment, before responding: “If that’s the case, Professor Fluvius, then what need do you have of me and my skills?”

Fluvius sounded slightly embarrassed, for the first time in my memory. “My trials of this patent medicine of mine have been not wholly successful. Certain of my subjects did not sustain a full recovery. Admittedly, I was working with gravely ill specimens to begin with, but still— I had hoped for better results. But I realized after such setbacks that I lacked the precise anatomical knowledge of a trained physician such as yourself. It is this expertise that I desire you to contribute to the cause. As for salary, I know you are above such plebeian considerations. But let me assure you, your monetary compensation will be far above any salary you could earn elsewhere. Will you join me in this quest to improve the lot of our fellow man, Dr.?”

Crouching below the window as the sun continued to sink and a brisk breeze blew up my gown, I eagerly awaited Dr. Baruch’s response. But my concentration was shattered upon the instant by the sensation of a cold and clammy hand encircling my ankle!

Only with supreme willpower did I stifle all but the most muted involuntary shriek that would have betrayed me to those inside. Luckily, a gull screamed at that very moment to further cover my inadvertent alarm.

Heart pounding, I whipped my head down and around to see who could possibly have grabbed me under such unlikely circumstances.

The shaggy head and leering ugly countenance of Usk greeted my gaze. He stood apelike on the crossbeams of the pilings, evidently pleased as Punch to have caught me in this compromising situation.

Just prior the Palace’s opening three weeks ago, a contingent of the Swamp Angels had visited Professor Fluvius as he was giving us Naiads a lecture on our duties. We watched with some trepidation and unease as these hoodlums swaggered into our sanctuary. They boldly demanded a weekly stipend as “protection money,” in order to ensure that the Palace remained unmolested in its operations. Professor Fluvius seemed to agree, and they went their way.

But then he summoned Usk.

As if out of the woodwork, the gnomish gnarled fellow, dressed in rough working-man’s garb, appeared. None of us had ever seen him before. But he seemed on intimate terms with the professor.

“Usk, would you see to it that those churlish fellows do not disturb us ever again?”

Usk laughed, and shivers went down my spine, and likewise along my sisters’, I sensed sympathetically.

“Righto, Prof! I’ll learn them a lesson they won’t soon forget.”

As mysteriously as he had appeared, Usk vanished.

The Swamp Angels had not troubled the Palace since. And I had heard that, after some enigmatic cataclysm among their ranks, the wounded remnants of their forces had been absorbed by the Gophers and the Ducky Boys.

Since that incident, Usk had surfaced occasionally to carry out the professor’s bidding. But none of us knew where he lived, or how he passed his idle hours.

Now I was face to face with him—in a manner of speaking, since actually he had a more prominent view of my bare nether parts than of my countenance. I resolved not to let him know how much he had affrighted me.

In a whisper, I demanded, “What do you want of me?”

Usk husked out his own words. “Prof’d be a tad peeved, if’n he found out you was keyholing him.”

I adopted my most winsome ways. “Must you tell him?”

“Not if’n I don’t choose to.”

“And what could possibly induce you to choose such a merciful course?”

“Let’s say if’n I were to receive certain favours from a certain lady—favours which I’d be more than happy to make explicit to you. Tonight, for instance, after your work’s all done.”

Usk’s grip tightened on my ankle—the rough skin of his palm feeling like scales—and I quailed interiorly. But he had me in a bind. I certainly did not wish to appear a sneak and gossip in the eyes of Professor Fluvius. No, I had to submit.

“Where should we meet?”

“I dwell in the lowest cellar, by the boilers. Southwest corner. That’s where you’ll find my doss.”

“I—I’ll be there.”

Leering once more, Usk released my ankle, prior to slipping away under the floorboards and among the pilings, sinuous as a fish.

Refocusing my attentions on the study window, I heard only the clink of glasses and an exchange of pleasantries. I had to assume the deal had been sealed, and that Dr. Baruch would be staying with us.

And now I needed to keep my appointment.

I pattered barefoot swiftly past the gaudy marble entrances to the enormous, rococo common rooms, big as ropewalks, where the masses of men and women bathed in segregated manner. The sounds of gay and enthusiastic splashy ablutions echoed outward from these natatoria. I could picture the water jetting from the bronze heads of dolphins, the flickering gas lights reflected off the pools, the cakes of fragrant soaps embossed with the Palace’s trademark conch shell, the long-handled brushes and plump sponges, the naked human bodies in all their equally agreeable shades of flesh and states of leanness and corpulence. The imagined scene delighted me. The conception of so many happy people sporting like otters or seals in a pristine liquid environment seemed utterly Edenic to me. I was more convinced than ever that Professor Fluvius’s Palace of Many Waters was a force for beauty and goodness in this often shabby and cruel world.

Once beyond this area open to the general public—the hubbub abating and I having circumvented with a smile and a nod one of the Palace’s liveried guardians stationed so as to limit deeper ingress solely to the elite—I had access to an Otis Safety Elevator. I stepped aboard along with a man I recognized as the Mayor of Boston, a Mr. Prince: grey hair low across his brow, walrus moustache. He nodded politely to me, and sized me up with the same look a chef might bestow on a prize tomato.

“You’re the one they call Charlie, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’m slated to see your sister Praxie today. But perhaps next time you’ll attend me.”

“I’d be delighted, sir.”

The rattling mechanism brought us to the second floor of our establishment. I parted from Mayor Prince, and watched him enter the room labelled “Praxithea.”

On this level of the Palace were the private rooms for our more privileged clientele, where bathing occurred in elegant tubs accommodating from two to several bathers. Included on this level were the seven special suites assigned to us Naiads. In these chambers, the waters themselves were perfumed and salted, and certain luxurious individual attentions could be paid to the selected patrons.