A Hell of a Tale

Addie hurried through the still-foggy morning streets towards the harbor, following the thick brine on the air. She’d overslept, which was rare enough in a house full of noises like hers—but today, of all days! She gritted her teeth and hustled on.

Only when she turned the corner onto Dodson Street, with its falling slope and rolling cobble, did she allow herself to slow. She could see the quay now and, thankfully, she wasn’t so late as she’d feared. Only familiar faces, the same dedicated readers. She waved to Mrs. Henshaw, the washerwoman, who waved back and gestured that she was holding a spot for them both. Their camaraderie had grown strong over this print run.

“Morning, young Addie,” said Mr. Dischock as she came to his window. He always called her ‘young Addie,’ as though there was an older one to whom she was in constant comparison. 

“Good morning, Mr. Dischock. Two currant buns and a cider, please.”

“Excited about that new chapter, I see,” he commented as he bustled behind the counter.

“The last one! We finally get to see how it ends.”

“Now, if my old missus was still alive, rest her soul, she’d have some words about an impressionable young woman like yourself getting caught up in those stories and what-not. But since she’s no longer,” he added with a wink, “I must say it’s good to see a reader in you.”

There was something wrong with Mr. Dischock’s eye, there was. It didn’t fit, exactly, with the rest of his face, let alone with its ostensible twin. Addie tried never to stare too closely, often looking at his ear instead. The wrong eye pulsed and occasionally even lunged, insofar as an eyeball could be said to lunge. It made Addie think of a trapped animal and sometimes she imagined what terrible something Mr. Dischock might’ve stolen it from, once upon a once.

Still, despite the man’s abnormal visage, he was kind and she had been taught to offer kindness in return. “Thank you, Mr. Dischock. Reading ignites something in my mind. Why, I can believe I’m just about anywhere or anything when I’m reading.”

Mr. Dischock laughed, a phlegmy and unpleasant sound. “Yes, I suppose that’s what my old missus would’ve disliked about it. Never understood why anybody would be looking elsewhere when there was so much to be done under her own two feet, she’d say.” He reached under the counter and quickly flashed a bound tome—the same Harrow Lonagan book he’d been reading since the previous month, and the month before that—and he winked again. “But I don’t mind a dream or two, myself.”

They had developed a comfortable script over the last year: as he worked his way through Lonagan’s last book and Addie through the latest, she spent a few minutes discussing whatever plot development he’d just come across.

“Would you like me to bring you my copy of this new installment when I’m through?” she asked, as she always did.

“Oh, no, no; I always wait for the collected. Easier on the digestion, I find, to know that there’s an ending already set down. This waiting is a game for the young, or the young at heart!”

She slid coins across the counter and left the window with a sprightly step, despite that strange eye following her. The harbor had begun to fill as the sun burned away the last of the fog, but she was able to make it to Mrs. Henshaw’s side without any struggle.

“Morning, dearie,” Mrs. Henshaw said, taking one of the proffered buns.

“Morning, Mrs. H. How are we today?”

The old woman frowned and began a list of complaints. While they were nominally different each month, they were more like variations on a theme that Addie now knew so well she could’ve predicted with reasonable accuracy whatever the older woman would say next. Disappointment in Our Jason (or more specifically Our Jason’s Missus), some weather-related ailment, the price of one pantry item or another…

Addie smiled kindly, tutted when it seemed called for, murmured commiseratively when she got her cues, and otherwise let herself bask in the sun and the salt air.

It was rare that she got to spend a morning in such leisure as this. It felt extraordinary even now, after over a year of it, that their modest seaside burg would be the designated arrival port for the latest serial from the great Harrow Lonagan—and, just as extraordinary, that her parents had agreed that she could have this one day per month to her own devices. 

Her mother had been a bit fretful about her going out unaccompanied, but her step-father had shushed her firmly and spoke with an uncharacteristic glee about the family’s great fortune that Addie should be a part of the honor being bestowed upon their town. It had made her uncomfortable at the time, his sudden encouragement after years of scoffing disdain. She had taken to leaving before he was awake, before any of them were awake. She wanted this day to truly be hers.

Mrs. Henshaw’s litany was interrupted by a rumble in the crowd somewhere to their left, up Dock Street. They both turned and spied a curious trio loitering to the edges of the crowd: the Maizel twins, agents for one publishing house, and Thaddeus Cobbon, the agent for the rival house. Addie never could keep straight which of them worked for Hoegbotton and which for FL&G, but she was captivated by their glamor and swagger. They shone, the three of them, brighter than anyone in this town and Addie believed that was brought about not by their hailing from the big city, but rather their proximity to literature. They looked like characters out of adventure tales because, in many respects, they were.

For while Addie diligently read her Lonagan and the other novelists whose work crept into the stalls at the newsagent, of course, she also read the paper nearly every morning when her stepfather was finished with it, before it was torn up for the fire or sacking or what-have-you. The lengths to which publishers went in their attempts to outdo one another had as much adventure as any serial—why, just last week, there had been a particularly salacious story about the lengths to which Thaddeus Cobbon had gone to secure the memoirs of a suddenly-deceased governor of some province on the other side of the ocean. And the Maisel twins often popped up at the edges of stories of political intrigue, or reports from the thermo-skirmishes, or even the society page. It all seemed so grandiose to Addie, so much bigger than she could almost believe.

Her reverie snapped as a man stumbled into her, mumbling under his breath and reeking of spirits, both the alcoholic and incorporeal kind. “Excuse me,” she said politely but with teeth, as she brought her hand in front of her face, as though to prevent any further scent from troubling her. 

“Ezekiel Stanwith!” chided Mrs. Henshaw, firmly interposing herself between them and the drunkard. “You’ll do me the favor of standing farther off before you put us off our breakfast. What your father would say…”

Zeke’s smile somehow slurred too. “My father can … pfft.” But he did take a few steps away, where he then took up an imaginary boxing match with a post box.

“He seems worse,” Addie said.

“That poor boy has seen some things, pet. It is a wonder he’s still walking in the sun.”

A delightful chill tickled Addie’s spine. “You don’t mean—”

Mrs. Henshaw swatted at her. “No, no. I’ll tell you again, there’s no such thing as vampires.” She scowled down at her knitting and spoke to it as though it was a participant in the conversation. “Should’ve never let her read Vandrick, I said. Impressionable young mind, I said. Anything could leave a mark on it.”

“Unlike your old mind, which rather needs a chisel?” Addie teased.

Mrs. Henshaw smiled graciously enough, but would brook no further jollity. She returned to her knitting for a time, before asking after Addie’s family.

“They are well enough, ma’am.” 

A sharp look up from the knitting, then back. “Don’t mince words with me, Adeline.”

Addie summoned up her courage, although she still stepped carefully as she spoke, as though her thoughts might fall out from under her at any time. “The girls are fine, and my brother is the apple of nearly everyone’s eye.”

The older woman eyed Addie carefully. “Babies often are. No green-eyed envy in you, now, is there? An almost-grown woman like yourself?”

“No, no—Mrs. Henshaw, the baby is a delight. But I’m worried for him. And for my mother.”

“Worried how, girl?”

Addie made a few furtive low glances at the people around them, as though she feared being overheard. “He gets angrier of a night, now. Since the baby came, even though it has been months.”

Mrs. Henshaw buttoned her lip. “I know he isn’t your father in blood, but he’s the head of your family. He brought you your siblings, saved your mother and you from the poorhouse. And while he is perhaps not the—”

A clamor rounding the corner interrupted their conversation. They both turned and the sight prompted a frown from both Addie and Mrs. Henshaw: a rotund clergyman, bursting from his tight cassock like an over-leavened loaf, was passing Mr. Dischock’s bakery with his aim set on the assemblage at the harbor.

He was ringing his bell and shouting things like “Repent! Repent!” and “Your souls, your souls are in danger!” Although his words were carried on waves of spittle, there was an air of resignation about his posture as he approached the waiting readers.

He had spent the better part of the past year, since his appointment to their parish, coming down here on delivery days to try to scare them with tales of fire and brimstone, of violence and sedition—all true, all brought on (or so he said) by the inky pages they’d soon have in their possession. Addie thought these ravings from the priest would make even Mr. Lonagan himself shake his head in disbelief.

“Good morning, Father!” called Mrs. Henshaw and Addie in a scornful, teasing chorus.

The Father, despite having been staring right at them, startled back a step before he redoubled his stride. With the bell being rung in their faces, it was difficult to hear exactly what he was saying, but Addie believed it to be something about their wicked and, by virtue of their sex, inherently seductive ways.

“What’s that you say, you geezer?” called Thaddeus Cobbon, the publishing man, from where he leaned against the brick wall, cleaning his fingernails with a knife. Addie had never been quite so close to him, hadn’t noticed his approach. ”Nobody can hear you over that infernal racket.”

“Infernal?!” sputtered the priest, although he seemed to have taken the note about the bell. “How dare you, sir!”

“Shove your dare up your apse, Father,” twinkled Eugenia Maisel, who had also sauntered over with her brother. This kicked off a sparking exchange between priest and publishing agent, full of colorful language that put a blush on Addie’s already-red cheeks.

Mrs. Henshaw glowered at the scene, annoyed both by the priest and by the interruption from Eugenia, of whom she emphatically did not approve. She began to enumerate Eugenia’s failings to Addie—that she dressed in pants and a vest, that she drank openly, that she carried a knife, and so on. “The girl’s a witch to boot,” she eventually concluded.

As if there isn’t a bit of witching done just about every day in every pantry in the country, Addie thought but did not say. As if it weren’t something admirable, a woman of her own means. As if drinking openly was any better or worse, more or less polite, than poorly sneaking sips from a flask that one ‘secreted’ amongst one’s copious bosoms.

She couldn’t understand why a person would want to be Mrs. Henshaw when they could be Eugenia Maisel. Naturally, it was difficult to discuss this with Mrs. Henshaw, and she never dreamed of being able to discuss it with even someone vaguely like Eugenia Maisel. How big the wide world seemed, in these moments where her small life brushed up against it. 

Finally, Jack Maisel sighed from under his hat, which was tipped low over his face as though he were trying to nap against that lamppost. “Oh, give it a rest, Euge,” he said.

“How about you all give it a rest!” shouted someone from a window above them. “Some of us have lives we ‘ave to be about! Can’t be loitering for a story!”

The assembled group, even the priest and the drunk, spun to glare at the intrusion and the window slammed shut quickly, so as to avoid any projectiles that may otherwise find their way over the sill. “It’s like they’re new in town or something,” Mrs. Henshaw muttered, loud enough to provoke a snorting chuckle of agreement from Thaddeus Cobbon.

The priest seized the opportunity provided by the lull to make one last sally at the crowd. “You are all God’s children, and I will not rest until I know that you have been saved!”

“Saved you a copy of the serial, more like,” someone called out, and this time there was quite a bit of laughter.

Addie turned to look over her shoulder and realized that the crowd had grown well beyond where she’d ever seen it before. There had been tell over the last week that all the inns were full up, that a Certain Kind of Person had come to be here for the ship’s arrival. She didn’t understand what kind of person that meant, only that there were of a certain kind. She wondered if it would be obvious, were she to run into one. “My, it’s a busy one today,” she said by way of pulling at Mrs. Henshaw’s attention.

“Oh, half of these skulkers are probably here in case another scuffle breaks out.” Mrs. Henshaw huffed and began to pack away her yarn. “This lot would stop to watch a house on fire before they’d go help.”

But Addie could hear names and plot points in the susurrus around them. Even if they were of a different social strata, they were readers like her. In the bustle, she could see elegant couples in finery, a pack of scrabbling urchins, dockworkers, farmhands, and bankers alike. All of them, joined by some unseen power, brought together here by its insistent pull.

A young man jostled in alongside Addie and Mrs. Henshaw. He shot a too-practiced grin at Addie, attempting rakish and landing somewhere around manic. “So, d’you think they’ll recover the stone?” he asked.

“Do we know you, sir?” Mrs. Henshaw clucked.

But Addie, emboldened by the still-lingering Eugenia Maisel, who had flashed her a wink from a long-lashed blue eye, answered. “Oh, I hope so. What else could the ending be?”

“What if the Duke gets there first?”

This proved to be too enticing a hook for Mrs. Henshaw to ignore. “The Duke? I think, my boy, if you read the last two months again, you’ll see that the Duke is really Ellicot in disguise. So why would it matter if the Duke got there first?”

A bespectacled older man with a well-trimmed pointy beard leaned in. “An interesting hypothesis, although I don’t know that it’s textually supported. Might I hear more of your theories, miss…?”

“It’s Mrs.,” growled the married Henshaw. “It’s like a bloody carnival out here and YOU WATCH your hands if you don’t want to lose ‘em!” she snapped suddenly, spinning on a youth who was misguidedly making an assault on her bag. ”You steal from me, I’m marching right over to that Van Der Meer house and Mr. Van Der Meer will certainly see me in straightaway — and then you’ll be right up the creek, won’t’cha?”

The older man, uncowed by Mrs. Henshaw’s swirling violence and perhaps sensing that the Mr. Henshaw to whom she was wed had been dead for some time, remarked on this and began to blather about how he, too, knew the Van Der Meers but was it perhaps the younger who she knew as it would surprise him indeed if she knew the older and…

Addie drifted a half-step away, finding herself in perfect alignment to see the ship as it hove into view. She straightened, as though it were important she be impressive in its shadow. It always floated in at greater speed than she would’ve imagined safe, a speed that always caught her breath in excitement and a little fear.

But it bumped home with practiced ease. The gangway was cast over and a lithe fellow leapt the rail with two stacks of tightly wrapped papers under his arms. “Would anybody here be looking for the final installment of the most chilling, thrilling, harrowing, dangerous story ever allowed to press?” he called, a booming voice ringing out of such a small body.

The crowd around Addie cheered and she felt her own shout raised in harmony.

As he approached, two more men folded out of the shadows, shadows that remained despite the day’s bright sun, and met the hawker. They each took a bundle and, with a knife, cut the ties.

“Give it to me!” cried someone and, with that, the crowd surged forward. 

The hawker jumped nimbly onto the windowsill of the pub on the corner, one arm holding the gutter while the other slung copies of the final chapter out into the masses. He had an ear-splitting grin plastered across his face, like it had been stretched on a rack before being draped over his skeleton. He was waving his cap and laughing as Addie was bounced in the melée. She reached out for Mrs. Henshaw, but the older woman had plunged forward with singleminded intensity, no doubt with a knitting needle in hand for emphasis. The boy she’d been talking to was gone as well, and the crowd around her were strangers by sight.

There was much shouting and within mere moments those first bundles of the serial were gone, replaced barely in time by a second round. “If it goes on like this, we’ll manage a thousand before lunch,” Addie heard someone say and she turned to realize it was Eugenia Maisel, nearly right next to her.

She wasn’t sure if Eugenia was talking to her brother, or Thaddeus—the three of them were standing ever so gently apart from the crowd, untouched by the furor. It took a moment for Addie to realize that Eugenia had said this to her. “I know you,” the agent went on. “Seen your face, yeah? You like stories?”

“Ye-y-yes,” Addie managed. “Yes, I do.”

Thaddeus frowned with such force that it ought to’ve caused something somewhere to chime the hour. “We don’t have time for this,” he said.

Jack Maisel rolled his eyes. “It’s all happening one way or another, if we’re here or not. Why’s it matter if we see it?” 

Thaddeus didn’t reply, but turned away and started walking.

 Jack watched him for a moment, then repositioned his hat. “Right. Coming, sister?”

“In a moment.” Eugenia hadn’t broken eye contact with Addie, who felt a different kind of flush under this sudden and serious attention. “You’ve read the rest of this one, then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Aren’t you worried you won’t get a copy of the end? You’re just standing here, after all.”

Addie turned, a little forlorn, not ever having realized that missing out was a thing that could happen. She’d gotten up, she’d come to the harbor on her one free day, she’d done all of the things that all of them did every time they came here, repeating like a spell to ensure that the stories would keep coming.

As though she understood, Eugenia smiled. She reached inside her waistcoat and pulled out a rolled chapbook. “Good thing I got extras.”

Addie was so overwhelmed with excitement that she missed several things. She did not ask, for example, how Eugenia had managed to procure a copy of the book when she’d been behind the crowd this whole time. Nor did she see the uncanny way Eugenia licked her lips as Addie took hold of the serial.

And so enthralled was she with the opening paragraph that she did not notice the way the crowd turned, like milk going off over a warm night.

It was a short enough final chapter, barely worth the wait—but Addie was never the fastest reader, and she’d gotten her copy later than those who’d been first to the pile. And it was those first readers who Eugenia had distracted her from. They were the ones who, even as Addie was only turning to the opening paragraph, had sprinted to the end and found the revelations that lay there with patient malice.

Addie read breathlessly, thinking that that was how reading was supposed to be. Her attention was pulled down by the words that unrolled in such unsettling combinations beneath her eager eye.

But even the most engaged reader cannot completely ignore, say, an arterial spray that splatters the cover of the pages in their hands. Addie’s gaze was wrenched up at the intrusion, although her eyes had already blurred with unseeing, her mouth hung slack as she viewed but did not register the scene before her.

The harbor had turned into a charnel house. Someone was screaming and clawing at his mouth, fingers trying to find purchase on teeth and failing as the latter gave way. Two men had impaled each other on an iron rod and were clawing it back and forth between their torsos. A well-dressed woman was licking at the bloody throat of her companion, who leaned slumped against a wall.

Addie turned slowly, the unfinished story limp in her hands. She saw, down the street in either direction, a line of policemen. They kept their distance, although when one of the madmen broke the scrum as though to invite them to join it, the line bashed him down without a thought.

She staggered and, for the merest moment, the story’s thrall was nearly broken—but, no, it could never have been any other way for Addie. She was, though she would never know it and certainly never understand it, the ideal reader. The pull of it was too much and her gaze fell back to the pages in her hand.

When she came to the end, tidily dated and signed by the author, she let loose a blood-curdling ululation and threw her body towards the boat. She nearly made it to the water, but one of the shadowy men from the dock caught her and tossed her back. “Nice grab,” admired the smiling man, the first one who’d leapt from the boat, whose smile remained painfully large even as he spoke in softer tones. He raised his cap to the three publishing agents, who’d turned again to watch the scene from a safer distance. Eugenia blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in his direction in reply, and Thaddeus’ frown continued to clang about his face. But Jack Maisel nodded and the smiling man turned back to the boat.

The baker, Mr. Dischock with his strange eye, put down his book as the trio passed the bakery window. “Can I interest any of you three in a croissant? On the house?”

“Oh, thank you,” purred Eugenia. She spotted the book he’d been reading and her grin widened. “A discerning reader, no less! Can I bring you back a Hoegbotton—“

“—or an FL&G—“ growled Thaddeus.

“—finished, collected copy of Harrow Lonagan’s latest as payment? Fresh off the presses! It ought to be available, oh…”

Jack Maisel checked the scene before them at the harbor, then his pocket-watch. “This afternoon, I think.”

Mr. Dischock clapped his hands. “Oh, I’d be delighted. From the looks of it, it must be a hell of a tale.”