The Call of Distant Shores (3 page)

“Hey!
 
Take it easy!”

Linda was there then, sitting on the edge of my bed.
 
She’d changed clothes, and she was smiling.

“What happened?” I asked.
 
“Your father?

“Everything is fine,” she said.
 
“You were wonderful.”

I sat up a bit straighter, shook my head, regretted it, and frowned. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and staggered to my feet.
 
I realized in that instant that I was only wearing boxers, but I wasn’t in the mood to worry over it.
 
If she was there, she’d probably been there when I was brought in – as likely as not she’d stripped me.
 
I left my room, and I heard her following close behind.

“Really,” she said.
 
“Everything is fine.”

I hurried to the back door, flung it open, and stepped out onto the back steps.
 
Then I stopped and stood very still, staring.
 
I felt Linda’s hands rest on my shoulder.
 
I started to shrug them off, but couldn’t find the strength.

“How?” I asked.

The back lot was empty.
 
The trough stood right where it had been, but it was empty.
 
There was a light misting of white powder on the ground, and there were heavy tire tracks, as if a truck had been backed down the alley and in on top of the ground when it was wet.
 
The statues were gone.
 
All of them.
 
There was no sign that anything odd had happened.
 
The hose lay on the ground like a dead snake, and no one was in sight.
 
There was a large pile of canvas bags piled against the wall beside the back of Linda’s apartment.
 
Small mounds of white powder had leaked from the torn corners of a few.

“What is that?” I asked, uncertain what else to say.

“Mortar,” she said.
 
“It’s mortar.
 
Daddy will have to go back to work soon.”

I turned to stare at her.
 
She didn’t take her hands off of my shoulders.
 
We were very close.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” I said.
 
“He almost died.
 
We
almost died.
 
What were those things?
 
Why were they in that spiral, and what happened with the mortar, and the water? Jesus, I…”

Linda leaned in and kissed me full on the lips.
 
The scent I’d been unable to identify wafted around me – something with a hint of trees and the ocean.
 
Something damp, but compelling. I tried to speak.
 
I really did.
 
I tried to pull away and ask again about that horrible spiral, those crustacean monstrosities crumbling,
chittering
, rushing in around the back lot toward the center where…what?

I felt Linda’s hands slide beneath my shirt, and I made a last attempt to push her away.
 
I saw her father’s face, the wild terror in his eyes as the white powder sloughed off the largest of the lobster things and they lurched inward over their smaller brethren, scrabbling inward toward that obscured center.
 
How small had the innermost statues been? What would have happened if those larger ones had forced their way to the center? Where were the statues now?

I remembered the truck tracks.
 
I thought about the trough, and the bags of mortar.

“What about the faucet?” I gasped.

Linda paused for just a second.
 
She pulled back, and her smile widened.

“We sent for a plumber,” she said.
 
“Daddy is paying.
 
I told him…you’d be busy.”

Keeping the tenants happy is my job, and it was obvious that only one thing was going to work at that particular moment.
 
I intended to go back to the rear of the building to inspect the faucet.
 
I meant to check out that mortar and the tire tracks, and see what I could find out about my psycho Maine tenants…but somehow it seemed less important than my new business connections.

I spent a lot of time with Linda after that day, and with her father.
 
I met the drivers of the truck, strange pale men with heavy New England accents who showed up like clockwork once every three months.
 
There was a lot of work to be done, keeping the apartments in good repair, and working out back.
 
The spiral had to remain complete, after all, and mortar isn’t an easy medium – even if you have a latent artistic streak.

Someday I’ll walk the spiral to its center and see where it leads.
 
I feel drawn to it. For now, I’m happy with Linda.
 
She’s a bit of a tart, but she’s very affectionate.
 
I even get up early on Saturdays.
 
After all, as building superintendent, I set my own schedule.

The flick of a thumb, bright sparks and the faded Zippo lighter with the Grateful Dead emblem emblazoned across its front, came to life.
 
The scent of lighter fluid mingled with Sandalwood and hemp.
 
Shadows slid along the floor, wavering and dancing as long slender fingers raised the lighter, bringing the flame to rest beneath a dangling metal ball.
 
The ball was perforated, an old tea ball – an infuser, Art had called it – dangling from a silver chain, suspended about a foot beneath an arching wrought iron frame.
 
Beneath it, glittering and green, sat a glass, half-full of a liquid too odd in coloration to be taken seriously.
 
Art had a name for the liquid, as well.
 
He called it
Flubber
.

Leaning in close, long dark hair dangling over her wrist, Belle watched the ball intently, holding the flame to its base.
 
The heat from the lighter set the chain in motion, buffeting it ever-so-slightly as the point where flame met metal grew hotter.
 
Or maybe it was her breath.
 
It didn't matter – not as long as the pendulous motion didn't carry the ball beyond the boundaries of the glass beneath it.

The sickly sweet stench of burnt sugar wafted across the room like the aftermath of a bad caramel, but Belle paid it no notice.
 
She watched the ball spin in lazy arcs over the glass, and, at last, the sizzle of thick brown liquid as the sugar inside melted and slipped through the infuser.
 
Dripping.

Art watched, though not as closely as Belle.
 
He sat back in an overstuffed faux leather armchair with one hand curled around a bottle of beer, and the other held up and to the side.
 
He held a slender pipe between thumb and forefinger, angled carefully away from his face, as if anything could have prevented smoke from burning his eyes in a room so full of fumes.
 
Incense.
 
Tobacco.
 
The hash that was charring to ash in his small bowl.
 
The sugar in the infuser, dripping, each drop splashing into the green liquid beneath with an odd sizzle as heat met room-temperature liquid.

Art had played a game much like this with his high school buddies.
 
A baggie, a glass of water, and flame.
 
The dripping, molten plastic made a distinctive sound when it hit the cold liquid.
 
ZILCH!
 
He heard that sound now, drifting through memory as he brought the pipe to his lips again.

In the glass beneath the infuser, the green shifted with each
zilching
drop, growing more amber – less
flubber
.
 
Art grinned at the thought.
 
He imagined the glass rising and floating about the room as Belle, irritated, grabbed for it with long fingernails, trying to keep it from spilling.

"It'll never get off the ground," he said to no one in particular.
 
Belle either didn't or wouldn't hear him, and no one else was in the room.
 
The image of Robin Williams, tiny fists pounding against the inside of the glass as the molten sugar dropped around his head like lava and the glass drifting toward the ceiling momentarily captured his attention, and he snorted, barely containing the laugh.
 
Barely containing the last hit off the pipe.
 
No smoke wasted.

Belle had been at it for hours.
 
Hell, she'd been at it for fucking
days
– maybe her whole life.
 
Chasing the green.
 
To Art she looked like some sort of demented alchemist trying to will her lead into gold.

"It's just a fucking drink," he said at last, irritated by her inattention to anything but the glass. He watched a few moments longer, the silence echoing more loudly as the sound of his own voice faded, ignored.
 
He stood, downed the rest of his lukewarm beer in a single swallow and slammed the bottle on the table.

Belle turned to him for just a second, tilting her head at an inquisitive angle, her eyes deep in some other place.
 
Fevered.

"It's just a fucking drink."
 
Art repeated.
 
He turned away and slipped out through a set of green plastic beaded curtains that separated the room they were in from the dingy kitchen.

Belle turned back to the glass.
 
On the floor to her left a spiral notebook lay open near the center.
 
A pen lay atop the pages where lines were carefully filled with letters and numbers.
 
Many of these were rubbed out, erased, or, in a single instance, scribbled over with such force that the page had torn.
 
There were stains on the page as well.
 
In the dim light, they might have been from tears, or the dripping of sweat
–
the condensation from a bottle of beer
–
or the deep green, shifting-toward-amber liquid in the glass.

1885 - France - Incomplete

.025 kilograms of dried wormwood

.05 kilograms of anise

.05 kilograms of fennel

.95 liters of 85 percent ethanol

.45 liters of water

.001 kilogram of Roman wormwood

.001 kilogram of hyssop

5 grams of lemon balm

(All original numbers divided by 100)

Let the mixture steep for at least 12 hours in the pot of a double boiler. Add water and apply heat; collect distillate. To approximately half the distillate, add Roman wormwood, hyssop and lemon balm, all of which have been dried and finely divided. Extract at a moderate temperature, then siphon off the liquor, filter, and reunite with the remaining distillate. Dilute with water to produce approximately 1 liter of absinthe with a final alcohol concentration of 74 percent by volume. AND – SOMETHING – FUCKING – ELSE ...

The lettering grew deep and frustrated at this point, slashing across the lined paper at angry angles
.
 
Words were scrawled, then marked out and replaced with other words, also marked out.
 
In the center of the page, about three lines beneath the recipe itself and underlined so deeply the page was scored, the word Peppermint remained.
 
Alone, of a small battlefield of herbs and obscure terms, Peppermint survived.

Belle leaned closer over the glass.
 
She'd removed the flame from the tea infuser and was watching the liquid intently.
 
Where globs of molten sugar had struck, whirling tendrils of yellowish hue spun down into the thick liquid.
 
Belle's hair dangled dangerously close, interwoven with several feathers and a small chain of beads.
 
Her eyes glittered – green eyes so dark they hinted of black. Her tongue slid back and forth across her teeth, touching the cheeks on either side, then swirling.

Belle waited until the peppermint in her mouth had faded to such a thin wafer it threatened to melt over her lips and disappear, then she bent quickly and slipped her tongue into the absinthe, letting the ghost of the mint slide into the green depths.
 
Her eyes closed, just for an instant, as she made contact with that slick, wet surface, then she drew back.
 
Peppermint.
 
Ghosts and hints in books she'd spent long hours poring over hinted that this was the secret.
 
She'd been told it soothed the stomach.
 
She'd been told that slid round and round a lover's cock with the tongue, it could bring hallucinations.
 
She'd been told it belonged in the Absinthe - told by voices long dead, preserved on parchments and the leaves of tattered books.
 
Recipes penciled into the margins of notebooks and tucked into unlikely hiding in diaries and family bibles.