Friday Fiction: Baron

 

BARON

 

     When Baron woke up, he felt that he probably shouldn't have. People who felt like this, he thought, don't have any right to get up again. After a moment, he groaned, and inch by inch lifted himself up on his arms. The first thing he noticed was that his arms were bruised nearly black, and the pain in his hand told him that at least one of his fingers was almost certainly broken.

     He looked around his apartment. He was lying half-in and half-out of the bedroom doorway, and at a glance he could see that the whole place had been ransacked from living- to bath-room. Every door was open, every drawer was pulled out and its contents spilled across the floor. In the kitchenette the open refrigerator spotlighted a spill of coffee grounds and sugar mingled on the floor with their empty containers nearby.

     That was a shame. Baron felt he could use a cup right about now. He reached out a shaky hand, kinked a leg out from under himself, grabbed the doorway, and started to inch his way upright.

     When he got into a sitting position, he stopped for a while. He could feel life already returning to his battered body. He rested and quietly let it, although it complained quite a bit as it did so. He silently blessed and cursed the constitution that let him survive such things and waited for his strength to assert itself.

     While he did, Baron tried to assess the situation and come to terms with the implications. It was clearly not a common robbery. He could see that his music center and television were smashed, not stolen. There was more mayhem in this attack than monetary gain. And the beating. That seemed very personal indeed.

     And probably intended to be fatal, he concluded, looking down at his chest. Not only had it been hammered; there were three stab wounds, still oozing slowly from where his movements to get up had reopened them. He’d have to attend to those, and quickly.

     He got up on his black-and-blue legs and stumbled, holding on to the wall, into the bathroom. His dragging feet pushed scattered broken toiletries and hand-towels out of his path. He grabbed the sink and looked at himself in the cobweb-shattering of the mirror.

     He had been stripped down to his underwear, obviously searched. His wiry body was a mass of dark purple swelling. Baron looked at his face and winced at its ruin. His strong arched nose was bashed in, drooling blood and snot into his thin, pointed mustache. His wispy, foxy-red hair was standing in a fiery halo where it was not plastered down with sweat and gore. He reached out and slowly turned on the cold water, and then tenderly, cautiously, began to clean himself up.

When Baron had done what he could, he felt marginally restored, and he hobbled over to the phone in the kitchen to call for help. The line had been cut. Somewhere in all this mess might be his cell, but he doubted it. Instinctively he ruled out alerting his neighbors to his plight. He wasn’t sure who he could trust, and if they were innocent, why get them involved in this trouble? He groaned as he bent down to pick up the broom, thrown from its nook. Leaning on it for a cane, he began to inspect the rest of the rooms.

He found that every personal item of his had been removed, his mementos, his few books, every scrap of paper he had ever scribbled on, and every stitch of clothing, including those he had walked into the apartment wearing last night, before something had clouted him on the head and he’d gone unconscious under a barrage of blows. Fortunately, he thought, he seemed to have soiled himself in the process, and that must have spared him his boxer-briefs.

But this was bad, really bad. He looked up at the lintel over the front door. They had even taken his Eighteenth-Century cavalry sword. He had really liked that. Most people never even noticed where it hung.

He suddenly had the overwhelming feeling that he should be leaving, before whoever it was decided to come back or got curious why nobody was reporting his death. He limped back into the kitchen, took off his briefs, and rinsed them in the sink. He removed a small, heavy item from the secret pouch under the label, and left the filthy leavings there in the drain. He didn’t care. He had already decided he was never going to return to this place again. Too many questions to be answered.

When he was ready, Baron crept cautiously out into the hallway. It was deserted at this time of day, the tenants gone to work or not stirring yet for lunch, and he made his way down to the laundry room without meeting anyone. As he had hoped, someone had left their clothes in the washer. He dressed himself in a still-damp T-shirt and jeans several sizes too big for him. As he snuck through the apartment complex, he lifted a tattered pair of tennis shoes, grass-stained and smelling of dog stool, from the matt outside one door. He walked a little way and then wormed them onto his feet. As unobtrusively as he could, he left the apartment complex and slipped into the city.

Baron wished he had a hat and some sunglasses but concluded that his abused face might be the best disguise for now, anyway. As he slouched along, limping, he looked like many another homeless eccentric wandering the street, and the eyes of the people that he met seemed to slide on past him. That was fine, as far as he was concerned. The fewer who noticed him, the better.

He decided he would have to go see the Lovemans.

He took out the small heavy object he had slipped into his pants pocket when he could, and held it mostly hidden in his hand. It was an old gold coin, worn nearly faceless. As he walked along, he started rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger, with only the slightest gleaming rim showing. In a few moments there was a small grinding, clashing sound, and there were suddenly two coins scraping together there. Without opening his fist, he curled the new coin under his other three fingers. He kept rubbing. In a little bit there was a third coin produced, and he palmed that, too.

Baron knew that the Lovemans would require paying; people with their vocation always did. They were a pair of sisters, or lovers, or possibly just very close professional partners. He never felt particularly interested in finding out which, although he had become aware of them as soon as he had settled into the city, along with several other persons of interest. He knew that they were older than he was but looked younger. They had kept a fairly high-profile shop until a few months ago, when they had vanished, and the place had been shut up. Baron didn’t think they had left town, though, and Baron had a feel for this kind of thing. The only problem was finding them.

He wandered the streets, almost at random. The aches and knots in his limbs loosened up. The dog muck on his borrowed shoes wore away, becoming an occasional fragrant memory. He found a greasy abandoned baseball cap and put it firmly if distastefully over his red hair. He had passed a subway entrance several times before he realized that that was where his feet were trying to take him.

Baron descended the steps and was swallowed into the dark. This was an obviously older and more neglected section of the underground. Many of the lights were missing or smashed, and those that were there glowed a feeble, dim, yellow-green. He walked along the platform. It was filled with garbage overflowing from a battered bin and blowing down the tracks and into the darkness of the tunnel. A body was lying on one of the benches, male or female, alive or dead, it was hard to tell, it was so wrapped up in layers of filthy garments.

Three commuters were huddled as close as possible to the edge of the platform. They glanced up warily as he entered, and then scrambled into the shrieking line of cars that came rumbling in, which stopped only long enough for them to bundle on and be carried off into the dark, leaving Baron alone there with the ambiguously prone figure sprawling silently for company.

“Which way, friend?” Baron muttered, expecting no answer and getting none.

He looked up and down the tunnel. There was a way, over the tracks and to the left, that seemed more unwelcoming than any other. Figuring that this must be it, Baron jumped down, crossed over, and headed into the blackness there.

It seemed to push back at him, not intensely, but gently, uneasily, so that he felt a vague but pressing urge to turn back, which only confirmed his resolve to go on. There was a narrow shelf on that side. Baron climbed onto it, knees complaining, and started feeling his way along the tiled wall, his back achingly exposed to the gaping shaft behind. After a bit he closed his eyes. They were no use in the dark.

Before he knew it, his probing hand reached out and touched some kind of heavy curtain that gave way under his suddenly unbalanced weight. He fell forward into a burst of light, and an angry voice yelling, “Aw, no, no, no, no, no!” He squinted up at the two blurred shapes advancing on him. He had found the Loveman ladies.

One was slightly taller with round glasses, the other slightly shorter with a large mole above her lip. Both wore long dresses, not quite black, not quite gray, not quite purple. They descended on him like bats and began trying to shoo him away as if he were a stray dog.

“Go on, get out! No lazy bums need apply!”

“Scoot along, or we’ll make hobo stew out of you!”

“Go away! Go away, now! No room, no room!”

“Ocupado, por favor!”

“We don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here!”

They had pushed him half-way back through the heavy curtain before he recovered from his surprise.

“The Lovemans, I presume?” Baron asked urbanely, as courteously as he could with their bony hands needling into his sore flesh. “I have some business for you.”

There was a slight pause, and then the ladies redoubled their efforts.

“No, thank you!”

“Shop’s closed for the day!”

“We know who you are, Baron!”

“Even under those silly clothes!”

“We don’t want no trouble!”

“Which you definitely are!”

“So good day, good-bye, and don’t come back!”

“Ever!”

They pushed him into the tunnel, and he was barely able to clutch the curtain and pull himself back before a line of cars went roaring by with a blare of horns and light. He stood frozen, waiting breathlessly until they had passed, then stuck his head back through the curtain.

“Ladies …” he began, only to have an empty bottle smash into the brick wall beside him.

“Ladies …” he began again, and the bespectacled Loveman reached for a heavy old-fashioned flat-iron.

“Ladies, I have gold!” he shouted desperately.

That paused them in their onslaught. They looked at each other, considering.

“Things have been tough.”

“And getting tougher.”

“Gold’s always useful.”

“In troubled times like these, it’s good to hedge one’s financial program with personal investments of real value.”

“I do like a nice bit of gold. So shiny.”

They turned to Baron and smiled.

“Come on in!”

“How can we be of service?”

“Let’s do business!”

They frowned.

“Then you can get out of our hair.”

“Forever.”

“But of course, dear ladies.”

Baron drew back the curtain and entered. For the first time he was able to inspect the details of the room within.

It was not very big, and a third of it was taken up by pipes, ductwork, and bundles of power lines, obviously made as a service utility chamber. The Lovemans had adapted the area very handily, filling every nook and cranny with their stock-in-trade. There was a rack of glittering costumes, mostly black, but here and there a poisonous green or flaming scarlet. There was vial upon vial of essential oils; bundles of dried flowers and plants wrapped in cellophane; skulls of various animals, including human (obviously plastic); knick-knacks of Gothic design; and rows upon rows of books, both elderly hardbacks and shiny-new soft-covers, stacked in every available gap.

In one corner a pile of bricks supported an electric hotplate and a pot of soup, bubbling and slowly steaming, whose smell reminded Baron’s stomach that he hadn’t eaten since last night.

When he was half-way into the walking space, the taller Loveman turned around and looked at him over her spectacles.

“All right, let’s see the color of your money.”

“Certainly, Miss …?”

“Oh no, you’re not getting our personal names that easy! You know what we do, and we know who you are, and let’s leave it at that. And now, the submission, please?”

Baron reached into his right pocket and drew out the handful of new gold coins. The original he had stowed safely in the left pocket, after he had checked the place carefully for holes or weaknesses.

“I have seven to offer you.” He held them out. She took the coins and divided them up with the other Loveman. They weighed them in their hands, bit them, unveiled a tiny window a foot long at street level, and examined them in the sunlight. Finally, the ladies looked satisfied.

“And your terms?” the shorter asked, gathering the gold into one hand.

Baron knew the terms would have to be tempting for them to accept, even now. Still, he needed information, and, almost as much, some money he could spend. No regular shop would give him anything, dressed as he was and looking as he did, not even for gold.

“For each piece exchanged, a dollar and the answer to a question,” he said. “Is it a bargain?”

“Yes,” said the taller triumphantly. “And that was your first question.”

The shorter dropped a coin smugly into a nearby brass jar, that might have been set there for that very purpose. It rang like a bell as it hit bottom. The taller handed over an old wrinkled bill from somewhere out of the folds of her dress. 

Baron bit his tongue. It may have been a cheat, but at least the deal was struck now, and they were bound to answer. He’d have to be careful.

“Somebody has obviously been targeting people like us,” he ventured. “Do you know who it is?”

The taller Loveman smiled.

“We are gratified to answer your question promptly.”

“No, we don’t,” said the other. Another coin clanged into the jar and another dollar produced. 

Baron ground his teeth behind smiling lips and took the bill. He went on pleasantly.

“Do you know anything about this … this attacking force?”

The Lovemans looked at each other.

“It’s hidden. And powerful.”

“More powerful than us.”

“It’s destroyed others.”

“We were just able to flee.”

“And that’s all.”

Clang. A dollar. 

“What is my safest course of action?”

“Oh, that’s simple, for someone of your level. Run away. Get out of town altogether. Scram. Accelerate out of problems.”

The other lady chuckled.

“Or failing that, try never having been born.” Clang.

“I suppose it’s a little late for that,” Baron mused.

“Yes, it is.” Clang.  

“Now, wait just a minute!” he protested. “That was completely rhetorical!”

“I’m sorry, we accept any questions, however phrased.”

“If you have any complaints, feel free to contact our service department, who will explain that it’s tough turkey for you, bub.”

“Oh, very well.” Baron thought a minute, smoothing his pointed mustache. He looked up at the Lovemans. “Would I have any chance of success if I took the most dangerous course of action?”

“Hah!” The ladies burst out guffawing at first, but after a moment it looked like an unexpected thought struck them, and they glanced at each other in speculative surprise.

“Almost zero likelihood of success.”

“Teeny-tiny little chance of victory.”

They looked at him appraisingly. Clang. A dollar. 

Baron accepted the money and tidied it into the pile in his hand. He shifted the bill of his wretched scavenged cap, then stroked his chin. He held up the wad.

“What would be the best place in town that I could spend the money you give me?”

Whether they might have felt some compassion at last or maybe because they could suddenly see Baron as a chance to get rid of their own problems without danger to themselves, for the first time they seemed to take his question seriously. Their eyes glazed over, nearly crossing with concentration as they consulted what knowledge and insight they had. They snapped out of it with a gasp.

“The Vintage Clothing Warehouse,” said the taller.

“Corner of Fifth and Mercy Street,” said the shorter.

“Don’t know why, don’t know what.”

“But that’s the place.” Clang. A dollar.

Baron bowed, stiffly but politely.

“Very good. And now, I’ll wish you ladies good day.” He turned to leave.

“Wait! Wait!”

The shorter Loveman held out the last gold coin.

“You still have one question left!”

Baron grinned.

“You may keep it, on account. Until my next visit.” He bowed again.

“You can’t do that!”

“It’s an obligation!”

“What if you never return!”

“Which is likely!”

“It will nag us forever!”

“Don’t leave us hanging, bro!”

Baron paused before he vanished through the curtain.

“Then you’d better send your best wishes with me, my dear Misses Loveman. Till we meet again, you lovely ladies.”

His smile lingered for a moment, then he was gone, headed back up into the daylight world.

Fifth and Mercy was not too far away, just where the respectable part of the city started to blend into the poorer districts. The store had indeed been an old warehouse, but if its contents had ever been vintage, it was from a sour, arid year. The stock looked like it had been made up out of the unsellable dregs of a hundred Good Will bins, the worst that soiled vinyl, polyester, and Naugahyde had to offer. The attendant barely turned his head from the hanging television as Baron entered. There was nothing here worth stealing, and no help to give anyone who was desperate enough to buy. There was nothing for sale that was over a dollar.

Baron wondered what could possibly be here for him. There seemed to be nothing that would be an upgrade even for his wildly mismatched outfit. He began to ramble through the aisles, examining the racks randomly as he passed. There was only one other customer in the store, a thin little Hispanic woman with iron-gray hair, going through the selection of blouses. Every time she reached the end of the row, she would shuffle back to the beginning and start going over it again patiently, as if a new item might have sprung up miraculously in the meantime. After a bit, Baron started feeling for her.

Maybe I should get out of town, he thought dejectedly. Use the money to hop a bus, and ride as far away as possible. Accelerate out of problems.

And then he found the coat.

It had kinked an elbow out from its row and caught his eye. He pushed away its greasy corduroy companions and pulled it from its tomb. It was a long apple-red pleather monstrosity of semi-military design, dripping with loops and epaulets and belts and fake pockets. It could only have been produced as the reign of disco had been passing into the childhood of glam and would have certainly satisfied neither. But something about it struck a chord deep in his heart.

Yes. This was the way to go. To step forward with his freak flag flying, as they used to say, whatever happened. This was why the Lovemans had sent him here. He draped the coat over one arm.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, he stepped eagerly from department to shabby department. A dingy, frilly tuxedo shirt. A scuffed and skinny pair of knee-high black boots. A cheap pair each of socks and underwear from a picked-over bin of Guatemalan imports, fifty cents each. A baggy pair of saddle pants.

That left one dollar more. He drifted through the aisles, the chemical smell of harsh, cut-rate soap rising around him like rank incense. There was something yet, he was sure of it. It was only when he had given up and drifted toward the changing rooms that he saw it, in an unlocked glass display case near the check-out counter.

There, amid other odds and ends, were three battered dummy heads. Hanging crookedly on top of one was a ruffled, white, Andy-Warhol style wig.

The attendant looked over briefly as Baron rumbled the door of the case open, grabbed the fake hair, and rumbled it shut again. The clerk raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and went back to his TV show. Baron ducked into the changing rooms.

He meticulously removed his gold piece and money, then stripped completely out of his borrowed clothing, wiped himself down with it, and abandoned it all, down even to his stained boxers. Baron examined his body.

The knife wounds had closed, leaving only a crusty red line. His bruises were tender but already fading to green. Even his nose seemed to have recovered its hawk-like protrusion, though puffy around his eyes. Baron smiled wryly and thanked his unusually hardy nature. It had seen him through quite a lot. Perhaps it would see him through this.

He tore open the new underwear and socks, and pulled them on, the cheap fabric tearing and unravelling a bit even as he did. He put on his impromptu ensemble piece by piece as if arming for battle, put the red coat on over it all, clapped the white wig over his rusty red hair, and stepped back to survey himself in the mirror.

All in all, it was an incongruous figure that looked back at him, especially by modern standards. But Baron was strangely satisfied. He felt something like himself again for the first time in a long time, since even before this mysterious attack. His pointed black moustache kinked up in a smile, a strange contrast to the silvery wig. There was a twinkle in his eye that hadn’t been there for many a day. He scooped up his gold coin, hid it away, and exited, paper money in hand.

The clerk jumped at his sudden, energetic appearance. He gawked at Baron as if he had just appeared out of a magician’s box, to replace the drab scraggly customer who had gone in.

Baron approached the counter.

“Wig,” he said pointing at each item as he named them. “Coat. Shirt. Pants. Boots. Socks and underwear.” He held out the rumpled bills. “Six dollars. I’ll wear them out.”

The man accepted them in bewilderment and began to count them automatically. Baron headed for the exit.

“Wait!” the clerk called after him. “What about tax?”

Baron stopped, door handle in his fist.

“I left a shirt and some pants in the changing room. You can have those. Au revoir!” He waved a jaunty salute and was out the door.

Out on the street he noticed that the sun was starting to set, throwing long shadows from the skyscrapers and creating valleys of deepening obscurity. He instinctively knew that, whether he wanted to now or not, there was no time to flee. He squared his shoulders. Very well. So be it.

He sauntered along, head held high, smiling foxily even in the face of passing strangers who stared in wonder at his outlandish get-up. Baron didn’t care. The game was afoot, peril was soon to be at its highest, and his wits would no doubt have to be applied to the maximum. He was feeling hungry, sharp, and happy. Whatever happened, he was pretty sure all his troubles would be over by tomorrow. He plucked an old mop handle out of a passing garbage can and started twirling it like a baton as he went.

He reached an intersection of the city streets, red and green lights winking on and off like demonic eyes. The buildings around were dark ominous hulks run aground in the belly of night. He looked left and right, and ahead before him. He listened to his feet, and his feet seemed to tell him, straight on. The light changed and he marched forward down the emptying streets.

As he strode ahead, white wig gleaming in the gathering dark, he reviewed his history, considering it might soon be over. Many times, Baron had yielded to the irresistible urge to tell people about his life and adventures, and they had always called him a liar. It galled, but he understood; these sort of things that happened to him just didn’t happen to ordinary people. He squared his shoulders and went advancing into the night to meet his destiny. Whatever it was, it was sure to be incredible.

 

                        -First Draft, Finished 4 PM, 4/4/2019

Notes

I always meant to go on and write a real end to this story, where Baron meets the ancient evil that has adapted itself to modern ways, twisting and corrupting them further for its own plans, cleaning away all other old powers as nuisances and rivals, almost as a game. Baron would (somehow) defeat it, or at least send it into retreat. It was that Somehow that always gave me problems. But, in a way, this was not a bad way to end it.

The accompanying illustration is Dulle Griet, by Peter Breugel. That winking Hell Mouth on the left was a sort of inspiration for the visionary landscape at the end of the tale. It was also the inspiration for a poem I wrote (now lost) called Mad Meg, about a crazy old washerwoman who stormed Hell and "rescued her husband's broiling soul/ and fished it out with a washing pole." 

I believe this is my (to date) most Neil Gaiman-ish writing. Not that I meant it to be. As John once noted, "There is some really gritty, nasty stuff here."