Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor

Lucy, Mr Broom, and Tomas, led by the increasingly impatient fish, stepped headlong into the roar of the cavern.

T here is darkness and there is darkness, thought Lucy. This is darkness.

At the start of the journey they had called to one another, called out their best wishes, laughing at the oddity of their lives, elated by their adventure. But then Tomas’s chatter fell away, and after that Lucy’s, and lastly Mr Broom’s, and now did the trial of their escape truly begin, and they set to work with wholehearted diligence.

The water was never any more than waist deep, and the current was not particularly strong, but the fact of their constantly battling against it was enough to wear them down, and they soon found themselves humbled, woefully fatigued, each of them sheltering in their hearts a fear of death which was acute, and acutely real. Later their flesh went numb, which on the one hand dimmed their pain, but also made them clumsy, so that they tripped over unseen rocks and boulders and were dunked frequently; each would lurch up from the water with a great, heaving inhalation of sheer discomfort.

Time and again they arrived at a fork in the river, identified by the bisection of sound before them, and time and again the fish performed without hesitation, yanking agitatedly on the lace, which Lucy had tied to his finger. There was no telling if it were day or night but the men walked on just as far as they could, until on the verge of collapse, when they located by touch an outcropping of sand and rock; they crawled onto this and laid their weary bodies down. The fish had no desire for relaxation, and the lace quivered with a relentless pressure Lucy found maddening. Lest he not sleep at all, he tied it to a large rock. When they awoke they couldn’t guess at how long they had rested, only that they hadn’t rested enough. In spite of this they stood, and stretched their aching muscles, resuming the trek upriver, for they knew their time was limited. They could be injured; they could starve; their will might give out; they might freeze — it was paramount to move while they still had their strength, and the unspoken fact was that the chances of survival were shrinking away with each moment gone by. The darkness was so complete that when Lucy blinked his eyes there was no discernible visual difference, which struck him as fantastical or impossible, as one clapping his hands together and finding that this action produced no sound.

Save for sleeping, they paused only to eat; they had two fish apiece on their persons, one in each trouser pocket. After these were consumed, then did their mood grow all the more peculiar. As is typical of long journeys, they lost their desire to communicate with one another, and lapsed into silence; they were as good as alone now, and each found his thoughts more inclined to wander abstractly. This brought about periods of peaceful calm in Lucy, moments where he forgot his hunger and miserable cold, moments when the fish, as though likewise dazed, did not yank on the lace but moved more slowly, so that Lucy could forget the fact of its existence and purpose, as well as his own. These transient instances were merciful but fleeting; soon enough, Lucy’s woes would return, announcing themselves cruelly, loudly, inarguably.

Days came and went when finally Lucy crossed some nameless threshold, and began to find everything about his situation very funny indeed. He supposed this was the signal that the end was near for him, a notion which was of no great concern. When it occurred to him he hadn’t felt any tension in the lace for while, he drew his hand back, and now he discovered the lace was no longer attached to his finger. This sobered him temporarily, and he called out to Mr Broom and Tomas, but heard no answer. He ceased walking and waited, thinking they would soon catch up with him, but they never did. The swirling sound of the river encircled him, and confused his equilibrium. He had the sensation he was standing on a steep incline, though he knew this wasn’t so; when he closed his eyes it felt as though he were sleeping standing up. What if he were to simply fall away, into the water, to be led back to the safety of the sandy island? But if he were to do this, mightn’t he die, his skull dashed on some jagged rock? No matter , he thought, and his body was tilting backwards when he realized that when he’d closed his eyes, it had become ever so slightly darker. He opened and shut his eyes several times to make sure this was an actuality; and finding it so, he located a hoard of resolve from the innermost region of himself. He took a moment to regroup, and continued apace. The light was increasing.

It was a sunbright, late-spring morning, and before Lucy was a field of tall grasses, and in the centre of this, an apple tree. He walked towards it, collapsing at its base. The sun spilled through the branches, and the earth itself was warm; he allowed this warmth into his blood, then his bones, and there were apples on the ground all around him which he ate one after the other, and his life felt a fantasy of luxury. Soon, he slept; waking around noon-time, he returned to the mouth of the cavern and called to Mr Broom and Tomas, waiting there for an hour and more before walking away, to the east, in the direction of the castle. Possibly it would have been best to re-enter the cave and attempt to locate his friends, but this didn’t occur to Lucy until later, and then only dimly. He liked to think the men had been deposited unscathed back upon the sandy bank, and were chattering away yet in their voluble fashion, but in his deeper heart he knew they were corpses, now.

There was a peculiar foreignness to all the world around him which made Lucy feel wary. Some hours later the village came into view, and he thought of Klara, which summoned an anguish in him. Everything he had been through of late, what difference did it make? What was it for that he had survived, even? When he saw her shanty in the distance he knew he had to go there at once, and he located and hefted a heavy stone in his hand, this to nullify Adolphus’s skull. Lucy had no plan beyond this, but there was the sense in him that once this was accomplished, then other avenues and possibilities would present themselves.

Mewe was sitting out front of his shanty, staring at nothing, a drawn, hungry look on his face. When he saw Lucy, he startled and sat upright. “You’re not dead?” he said wonderingly.

“No, I’m not dead. Hello.”

“But where in the world have you been?”

“Away.”

“Where are your shoes?”

“I lost them.”

“Why is your suit in rags?”

“I have suffered through an era of unluckiness.”

“Yes, as have we,” Mewe said, leaning back. He pointed at the stool beside him and Lucy sat.

“Why do you have that stone in your hand?”

“I’m going to kill Adolphus with it.”

“That would be quite a trick.”

“You don’t believe I’ll do it?” asked Lucy.

“I don’t believe you will, no. Because Adolphus has already died.”

Lucy said, “What?”

“He’s died. They’ve exploded him.”

“Who has?”

“They have.”

“What does that mean, exploded him?”

“It means that he is no longer of a piece.”

“Where is he?”

“Here and there — that’s what I’m telling you.”

“Where is the main part of him, Mewe?”

Mewe pointed to Klara’s shanty. Lucy stood and entered. Adolphus lay on the table in the front room, naked to the waist, and his head was not on his shoulders. It had been taken off cleanly, to the base of the neck. There was a charring at the edges of the wound but his body was otherwise unmarked, and Lucy stood by, considering the incongruousness of this specimen: healthful yet headless. He had no feeling in him as he stared at the corpse, no relief, no sense of triumph. In a little while he laid the stone on the table where the head should have been. Mewe came into the shanty and stood next to Lucy. “It was a cannonball, do you know? A cannonball took his head off.”