Posted 24 September 2008 - 11:54 PM
Chapter 1, in which Mara contemplates her life on a dark and stormy night
The Nightcrawler Tavern was the kind of place sensible folk tried to avoid, and with good reason.
First of all, the structure was a nightmare of engineering. Lopsided, filthy, and perpetually swarming with mosquitoes, it looked ready to collapse at any moment. The tavern’s location didn’t help much either. It squatted in what once had been – and what certainly should have stayed – an old sewage pit on the corner of town.
The walkway leading up to the decrepit entrance was nothing more than a smeared trail of mud, and the knocker on the door was – well, a pair of knockers. Which, to be honest, was a comparatively tasteful addition to the overwhelming persona of lewd raunchiness that surrounded the place. Anyone brave enough to walk past would be assailed by a cacophony of screams, cat calls, and impressively creative profanities. An especially lucky passerby might have the added privilege of being smacked in the head by a rogue whiskey bottle.
Naturally, the management prided itself on the Nightcrawler’s distinctive image. It was, as they so eloquently put it, an establishment that “catered to the needs of a special crowd” – and from roughly 6 in the afternoon until 4 in the morning, the most nefarious scumbags in town reveled in squalid, morally reprehensible, hooch-scented paradise.
In short, it was not the sort of place one would expect to find a Queen.
Yet there I was, seated at a rickety table in the corner of the room, feeling soulless and cold as I sipped a tonic and observed my fellow countrymen participating in the time-honored tradition of drunken debauchery. As I sat there, staring down at my reflection in the gleaming liquid, I thought back on my life and on the events that had gotten me into this mess.
Mara my girl, I mused tiredly, you have sunk as low as low can be.
I twirled my glass absently, suddenly conscious of the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find one good thing in all of creation to dwell upon. All I could think of was the hundred or so other things I would rather be doing at 9:52 on a Friday evening other than sitting in this hellhole, casting anxious glances over my shoulder. So, to take my mind off the situation at hand, I concentrated on projecting a sizzling, 2 meter radius cloud of festering distemper into the space around my table.
Now, don’t get the wrong idea about me. I wasn't always a bitter, socially dubious, emotionally downcast nutcase who spent her time hiding out in the dodgiest joint in a no-name village on the edge of the map. I didn’t always have black circles under my eyes.
I hadn’t always slept with a gun.
In fact, you might say I started out rather normally. I was born Mara Ess, the eldest daughter of Catherine and William Ess, natives of the coastal and unimaginatively named town of Seaport. My Dad made fishing lures, and my Mom, who was born in another part of the country, brought in extra money by teaching the traditional dances of her homeland to the affluent children of Seaport. On weekdays I attended school, where I excelled in pretty much every imaginable subject. On weekends my father took us out on his boat, and we caught fish by the bucketful.
This cycle seemed to repeat endlessly, one season fading into the next. It was a time measured in sights, smells, and sounds, where everything was simplicity and sunshine.
But the world, it seems, cannot tolerate human happiness for very long. When I was 9 years old, my father left. He simply went out to sea one morning and never came back. I still don’t know what happened to him, even to this day. Maybe he’s alive out there somewhere, maybe he’s not. I may never know. That, I think, is what’s hardest.
With my father gone, our life plunged into tailspin of grief, anguish, and poverty. As my mother struggled to make ends meet, I poured myself into my studies with an intensity that would have put the snobbiest scholar to shame. Someday, I thought, I will be able to change things. This is how I can do it. Someday I’ll have enough power to make a difference in the world.
In time, my academic success buoyed my mother’s spirits, and things began to look up. It seemed that – with lots of hard work – life might regain some semblance of normalcy again.
Then, about two years after my father’s disappearance, Mom met Red. Red was a town leader – wealthy, popular, and well-known. Red’s brother was Seaport’s only lawyer, and their father had connections with all the powerful people in town. Red told my Mom that a woman as beautiful as she was didn’t deserve to be alone. And to a lonely, emotionally bereft, and financially struggling widow, he was a dream come true. It wasn’t long before my mother was expecting another child, and she and Red married on a windy day in late autumn.
The next few years went by in a blur – my half brother was born, and my Mom sold her house and moved in with Red. Through it all, something nagged at the back of my brain, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I always felt like a stranger in my own home. Or rather, Red felt like a stranger in my home. My brother wasn’t really mine. My mother wasn’t mine anymore either. I withdrew.
When Red started coming home drunk, I slunk away and hid in my room. When he told Mom how worthless she was, how worthless I was, I covered my ears. When he hit her, I cried hot tears into my pillow. Every time Red left the house, I begged my mother to leave. I begged her to save my brother, to save me, to save herself. But she was determined to save her marriage instead. Desperate for help, I told the pastor of our town church. He told me to pray. I confided in my teachers at school. They did nothing. I went to the local sheriff, but he didn’t believe me. He was friends with Red.
There are some things in this world that you can never forget, no matter how hard you try. As for me, I will never be able to forget the growing feeling of desperation that seized my body as the days went on. Like an animating force, it filled me and guided me; it moved my limbs like an amorphous puppeteer. It consumed me, and it defined me. Each hour I felt myself growing more breathless, more panicked, as I hung in suspense at the edge of some metaphorical precipice. All I knew was that something terrible was going happen, and soon.
And it did, one Tuesday night in early June. I came home from my nightly reverie on the beach to find my mother, bruised and battered almost beyond recognition, lying on the kitchen floor. I ran to her, numb with shock and horror. I saw the outline of the room reflected in the pool of her blood; its scent mingled with that of alcohol inside my nostrils. I heard the faint tinkle of Red smashing glass in the bedroom upstairs. Suddenly the solution – the solution to it all – washed over me in a wave of icy clarity. With an air of nightmarish calm, I walked over to the mantelpiece and took down Red’s hunting gun. Quietly, deliberately, I loaded it.
I heard stumbling footsteps behind me, and I whirled to find Red leaning against the doorframe, smiling at me in a way that sent chills up my spine.
“Gonna put ‘er outta ‘er misery?” he hiccupped cheerfully, gesturing at my mother’s tangled form on the kitchen floor.
My mind was so cold it ached, and my limbs seemed to move in slow motion.
“No,” I replied firmly, raising the gun. “I’m going to put you out of yours.”
I never even heard the gun go off. I only heard my little brother crying in some distant room of the house.
If the world were fair, that would have been the end of it. Red would have died, and my mother would have inherited his estate. Instead, a neighbor heard the gunshot and called the sheriff. When he showed up at my doorstep, I was standing over two bodies with a loaded gun.
The next morning, I woke up in a jail cell, the town doctor’s sympathetic face staring down at me. He shook his head sadly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was only able to save Red. There was nothing I could do for your mother.”
The core of ice that had begun to form inside of me solidified. I lunged at the bars, snarling at him through the rusty spaces.
“You saved that monster, but not my mother? YOU SAVED HIM!? YOU SAVED HIM AND NOT HER??!!!”
A week later, I felt like a ghost at my own trial. When Red hobbled up to take the stand, his arm bound up tight in a sling, my blood ran cold. The prosecuting lawyer – Red’s brother – spun the whole story to make Red into the victim and me into the villain. I listened in growing disbelief to their twisted version of events. My “lawyer”, who proved to be an utterly incompetent, sexist moron, did little to help. He called on my teachers to testify on my behalf, but when Red’s brother cross-examined them, I came across I as a workaholic nut job on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
So it wasn’t surprising when the jury, who for the most part consisted of Red’s friends and colleagues, came back with a guilty verdict. Red’s father pushed for the maximum sentence, and it was granted. Seaport, a town that in the past had been plagued by pirates, thieves, and warfare, took no survivors when it came to martial law. I was given the death penalty.
In the days leading up to my execution, I was consumed by a single, endlessly repeating thought: if only I had aimed one inch to the left.
On the night before the hanging, I woke up from a dead sleep to find the doctor once again standing over me. This time, however, he hadn’t come to apologize. He handed me the keys to the prison door, a small wallet full of money, and a canteen of water. He never explained himself. He simply turned around and disappeared into the darkness. I didn’t waste any time pondering his motives. I was outta there.
Strangely, escaping from prison wasn’t at all like I had imagined. It was as easy and uneventful as unlocking the door, walking down the hall, and strolling out into the fresh night air. Just like that, I was free. Casting a regretful glance back at the town that had been my home, I stole out to sea on the nearest boat. I didn’t even think of my little brother. He was lost to me.
In the weeks and months that followed, I spent my time on the run. Red, in an unprecedented show of far-reaching drama, had sent out notices to all the nearby towns with my description. Luckily, he was too much of a cheapskate to offer a reward, or some good citizen might have been tempted to take matters into their own hands. And while it was certainly helpful to NOT have the entire populace out to get me, it didn’t mitigate the fact that pretty much every law enforcement agent in lower Neutronia was just waiting for the chance to pounce on my sorry hide.
As a result, I couldn’t find proper work anywhere. I made a little money here and there, passing myself off as a traveling storyteller. For a time I worked slinging mud for a deaf potter in Deviantarshire, but that came to an abrupt end when his kiln exploded and burnt his shop to the ground. Soon after, I heard news of a bloody conflict that had been spreading across the countryside. Word had it that it would be coming to Deviantarshire next. Not wanting to die in Neutronia’s latest round of pointless warfare, I sought higher ground. Well, in a figurative sense.
I ended up in what cynics might refer to as “the armpit of Neutronia” – and what optimists don’t refer to at all. Nobody would bother raiding such a deplorable dung heap of human refuse, or at least that’s what I reasoned. I would be safe …relatively speaking.
And that, you see, is how I ended up in the Nightcrawler Tavern, at what was by that time 10:10pm on a Friday night, surrounded by all the charm of a snake infested bullpen.
And now for the million dollar question. How on Earth did I, Mara Ess, the character currently feeling sorry for herself in that despicably fetid hellhole, wind up as Queen of all Neutronia?
It started with a laugh.
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Hope you liked it! Sorry if there were some verb tense issues, I wrote this kinda fast.
