Last week I posted a piece on the NBTC website at Nagspeake.com about the Funicular Railway in the Slope. In it I basically accused four men a century or so ago of plotting murder to cover up something that happened at one of the city’s most exclusive, mostly-annual events, the Shutter Club’s Sepia Ball. The four men were a former mayor of Nagspeake, a railroad magnate, the son of the man who developed the district known as the Slope, and the visible half of the mail-order principality known as Deacon and Morvengarde. It’s not the first time I’ve posted about something toeing the “iffy” line around here, but it is the first time it’s brought a knock on my door at home rather than at the NBTC offices. Or rather, a death-rattle from my doorbell. So I put on an insulated glove that I keep by the intercom buzzer for just this purpose (the wiring in my building is, shall we say, intermittently deadly), and shouted “hello” into the resulting static.

Somebody at the other end of the intercom said something back that sounded a lot like Balthazar Morton–but given the static and the dim possibility that the person on the other end was being electrocuted even as he or she attempted to identify him/herself, I was pretty sure I had misheard the name and my visitor probably wasn’t actually the current Mayor of the city. Still, I shouted a warning to step away from the intercom and buzzed the visitor into the building, hoping he was wearing gloves to dull the shock that’s pretty much a guarantee any time anybody touches the front doorknob. Then I waited for my visitor to hike up the stairs to my seventh-floor flat. I waited a really long time, and I admit that I waited most of that time with my eye glued to the peephole. It isn’t that I think the Mayor’s a bad guy, but you can’t live in this town without becoming something of a conspiracy theorist. Plus, Morton’s got a family link to Deacon and Morvengarde, and I think if I ever turn up on their radar, it’s not going to be as a fan. And I live in probably the easiest part of town for making people disappear. So I was just being, you know, a little careful.

After what seemed like enough time for anybody to get to my floor, even with frequent breaks for hydration, I cracked the door open and peered onto my landing. Nobody. I listened; you can always hear people before they get to this landing, thanks to some miracle of accoustics and the fact that usually they’re breathing pretty hard by the time they get a couple flights up. I couldn’t hear a thing. Then I noticed an envelope sitting neatly on the doormat. Deep plum-colored paper embossed with the seal of the city of Nagspeake: a lantern surrounded by a tendril of iron. I kicked the envelope inside, slammed the door, and locked it, half-expecting to hear the thudding of, I don’t know, arrows, or a hail of bullets, raining against it. I don’t know why. Too many spy thrillers on tv this week or something. Not to keep you in suspense, inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, with a question and a location printed on it. The location was SEPIA SANDS, SUNSET. The question was: How much do you want to know?

I’m not making this up. I guess if you’re going to run a city like this, you have to have an overblown sense of the dramatic.

Sepia Sands Park

This is Sepia Sands. It’s a park and wildlife preserve at the north end of Bayside, the district made up mostly of vacationers renting beach homes on the Magothy Bay, and it’s made up of basically a single gargantuan, shifting dune that’s constantly trying to creep across Bay Byway to re-unite itself with the beach frontage. Sepia Sands is a popular tourist destination, particularly at sunset, when everybody hikes up to the summit to get a glimpse of the sun setting over the westward-curling arm of the Spitegash River. I hear sometimes the right sunset turns the whole length of the river red as blood all the way to where it meets the Magothy, but I’ve never seen it happen. What I did figure I could count on, it being a beautiful, clear and unseasonably warmish November day, is that there would be about a million people on the dunes at sunset. Whatever my mysterious correspondent was up to, he or she had chosen a very public place at a time when I was guaranteed a crowd to blend into if I wanted. So I went.

There’s another weird feature of Sepia Sands, beyond the supposed occasional view of a river running red with blood. Being the beachy-vacation place it is, Bayside has about fifteen mini-golf courses scattered along the length of its main thoroughfare, and at one point some maniac built one on the dune side of Bay Byway, in the proverbial shadow of Sepia Sands. It was a fairy-tale themed course called the Sepia Sands Chip-n-Putt Emporium, and from what I can put together it lasted about ten years before the owners gave up trying to hold back the inexorable creep of the dune.  All that’s left these days is the top of what looks like a castle, and more or less of it is visible year by year depending on what the dunes themselves are up to. I like a good sunset, but I like a creepy, half-buried castle even more; plus basically anybody who’s going up to watch the sunset has to walk past the Castle, so I figured it would be a perfect place to wait. When I got to the castle, though, somebody was already there and looking a lot like he was waiting for someone, too.

I walked up and tried to look like I was just interested in the castle while I attempted to study the fellow unobtrusively. I don’t care how often people in novels claim to do this. It’s bloody difficult. I got an impression of tall and gaunt, but that’s kind of my default sinister impression.

“This used to be the ticket booth of the Chip-n-Putt Emporium,” the stranger said. Which gave me the excuse to look at him, and damned if it wasn’t the Mayor of Nagspeake. Oh, he’d tried to disguise himself with a big pair of horn glasses and a novelty-shop mustache and eyebrows, but it was Balthazar Morton himself, all right. “When I was about ten I came here for a birthday party,” he added.

“That’s nice,” I said, and stuck my hand out with the envelope in it. “Did the invitations look like this, at all?”

Morton smiled and nodded toward the top of the dune. “Let’s go. We’ll miss the sunset.”

So up we hiked, Morton with a dusty trenchcoat billowing out behind him and the fake mustache threatening to blow away at any time, and me trying to keep an eye out for any evidence that this was some kind of set-up.  At the top of the first of the hills that made up the giant dune, the Mayor stopped and nodded back in the direction we’d come. “It never gets old, this view.”

“What are we doing here, Your Honor?”

“Call me Julius. You’re the one who wrote about the Funicular?”

“Um. Yes?”

“And who threatened to call D&M on Augie Flyre?”

“Hang on, I didn’t threaten anybody–”

“And who wrote that thing about the punk in the Bazaar?”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“And something trying to link the hanged man at St. Horace Rye to the Shutter Club?”

I probably should’ve been flattered that he’d read any of my stuff, but then, this was the highest-ranking officer in the city, so he’d probably just delegated it to some intern and asked for bullet points. “Why are we here, sir?”

Morton sighed and took off the glasses to clean them. I took the opportunity for another quick look around, half-expecting to see the tweedy guards that police the Shutter Club grounds appearing from behind the nearest clump of scrubby, windblown bushes. “We’re here so I can tell you a few things,” the Mayor said at last. “You can decide what to do with them.” He put his glasses back on and looked at something off to our right. It could’ve been the Funicular, the Shutter Club Mansion, the cupola of St. Horace Rye, the smoking chimneys of Slaughterhouse Row, or the distant gleam at the top of Whilforber Hill that I knew marked the terminus of the railroad.  From where we stood, we could see all of them. “Tomorrow I’m leaving the city,” he added. “It won’t matter to me anymore.”

Knock me over with a feather. The Mayor was skipping town. Holy shit.

I waited as patiently as I could while Balthazar Morton made up his mind to go through with whatever he was proposing to go through with. “You know about the castle,” he said at length. “Do you know what else is left under there?”

I looked at the sift of sand around the remains of the castle. It seemed to me now that there were rises and depressions I hadn’t noticed, but then those same features might or might not be there in a week. “I can’t tell if what I’m looking at is something below, or just the dune,” I said.

Morton grinned behind the fake mustache. “It’s both. The whole golf course is still under there, you know.” He pointed a short distance from the half-buried castle. “That’s where the shoe was…you know, there was an old woman who lived in a shoe? More of a boot, really…and there, that was the tuffet, and the owners always had some girl hired to sit there and eat a bowl of something until this big mechanical spider came up and scared her off. Par four, if I recall,” he said thoughtfully. “The spider was a little unpredictable.”  Sensing me about to ask again what the hell was going on, he gave me another weird mustachioed smile and pointed up the dune to a batch of scrub about a quarter mile away. “And right under there’s the Little Red Riding Hood House. In fact, that tree’s growing right out of the chimney. Go look yourself, sometime. Know where the fairy tale displays came from? They were the scale models for the big ones at FantasyTowne.” FantasyTowne being a fairy tale-themed amusement park that closed years before I moved here. The elders at the NBTC talk about it in tones of  hushed wonder. I’ve actually considered breaking in–respectfully–and taking some pictures, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Meanwhile the Mayor was looking at me as if it should mean something to me that the displays at the Chip-n-Putt were prototypes for FantasyTowne. “If there’s a significance, I’m ashamed to say I don’t follow.”

He gave me a slightly disappointed look. “You know, you can order a custom mini-golf course from Deacon and Morvengarde,” he said casually. “Just like you can order an Alice in Wonderland teacup ride, or a railway station, or a stained glass window. The days are long gone, when you could get yourself into trouble if you didn’t get those things from D&M, but some would say that’s only because Julius Honorius Deacon insisted on diversifying his company’s business.”

A horrible thought crossed my mind. “Why’d you say to call you Julius before?”

The Mayor laughed grimly. “Because I thought in this getup I looked a little like Groucho Marx. Settle down. Look, here’s the point: there’s a body in the Red Riding Hood House. It was put there the week the owner of the Chip-n-Putt gave up the course for lost.”

“Who is it?” I was trying like mad to figure who might’ve gone missing at the same time the Chip-n-Putt went kaput, but the stupid impossibility of putting together chronologies when you can only guess at when they happened kept me from making any immediate connections.

“It’s one of three people; more than that, your guess is as good as mine,” Morton said, fiddling with his left eyebrow, which had begun to peel away in the wind. “Depending on who it is, though, you have three different potential versions of the exposee of your career.”

I’m not a reporter. I’m not a reporter! When are people going to–nevermind.

“When did Lowell Skellansen go missing?” I asked, thinking hard. Skellansen was the artist who rendered the Shutter Club’s stained glass, and who I speculated might’ve been the man who was hung out in front of St. Horace Rye.

“It might be Lowell Skellansen,” the Mayor agreed with a little smile, as if proud of my wild guessing. “Or it might be Julius Honorius Deacon.”

“Deacon? Why on earth would–” But Morton was giving me a grin that conveyed something like, if you think that’s crazy…  “Skellansen, Deacon…or…?”

Balthazar Morton held his grin for what I can only describe as a dramatic pause, then said, “Owen Ilford.”

“Bullshit,” I said reflexively. “Bullshit!”

“May I die right here,” Morton said, “if I’m lying. Of course, it’s only a 33.33 percent chance…but it could be.”

“Ilford had to have died like fifty years ago!” If he ever existed. I chose not to add that part.

“Exactly. Or just a little less than fifty years.”

Damn Nagspeake chronologies. “So what you’re saying is–”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m telling you, if you really want to know the truth behind all these wild accusations you hint at in your writing, you’ll find out who’s wearing Granny’s nightgown. The key to the city’s there.” Morton straightened his trenchcoat and brushed some sand from the front. Our interview was at an end. “But you didn’t get it from me. Or if you did, you got it from me three days from now. I ought to be halfway to Bell Hill by then.”

I nodded. He stuck out a hand, and I shook it. With a quirk of one fake eyebrow, the Mayor of Nagspeake started down the dune toward Bay Byway. I waited, the last threads of red sun casting attenuated shadows of deep dark. When the gunshot sounded, I flung myself down out of instinct and wound up tumbling down the sandy slope directly into one of those pockets of black shadow that held the fallen body of Balthazar Morton, ravaged beyond repair by what looked like a blast of buckshot.

By then the entire dune was a sandstorm of fleeing bodies. It was too late to do anything for the Mayor. I made sure I had his letter safe in my pocket, then I got up and I ran. I reached Bay Byway and managed to shove my way onto one of the Byway shuttle buses. Through the green-tinted window I thought I spotted the silhouette of a tweed-suited figure in a bowler hat stalking down the dune toward the fallen man.

What I can’t figure out is this: why did the Mayor’s assassin wait until we had finished our meeting before shooting? Something tells me it doesn’t take the Shutter Club guards that long to find their targets, which means I was meant to see the Mayor die, and meant to understand that I was, for some reason, spared. Annabelle is refreshing my gin-and-more-gin cocktail, and I’m tired of speculating. Somewhere under a mountain of sand is a body that will point me on my way to answers–at least, according to another dead man of my acquaintance. I will just have to see what that body has to tell me, and take it from there.

In my defense, about twenty-two people have suggested I write about the Terminus since I moved here. It’s something of a favorite local story, one that both entertains and does civic duty these days, as it’s often trotted out by dissatisfied citizens to demonstrate the audacity of yesteryear, and how we’re just a bunch of whiny buggers nowadays. (Also in this category fall the Righteous Murder stories, but I’m still too new in town for the majority of Nagspeakers I meet to bring those up in polite conversation.) Figuring the Chief Conductor of the Magothy Terminus would be, if anything, even more excited at the prospect of talking about this favorite bit of Old Nagspeake history, I made my first order of business to seek out Augustus Flyre.

“I got nothing to say to you reporters.”  It was not the welcome I expected. My protestations of non-reporterhood fell on deaf ears (or rather one deaf ear and one that just wasn’t interested). “Don’t care, don’t know, don’t bother me. I got nothing to say. You reporters are trouble.” “Okay, Mr. Flyre, but I’m not a reporter. Wilmer Cobblebridge sent me from the NBTC. He said to ask you about the Magothy Hill story.”

It turns out Willie Cobblebridge and Augustus Flyre aren’t as close as Willie thinks–Willie thinks they’re bridge pals and Mr. Flyre thinks that’s less important than the fact that Willie took a girl to his senior prom that he had no business dating because she had broken Flyre’s heart in grammar school. Evidently he quietly, secretly hates Willie and only plays bridge with him because he loves bridge so much. So my introduction didn’t get me much in the way of points with him.

As Chief Conductor, Augustus Flyre (Willie calls him Augie but the second I laid eyes on him I knew this man would wish ill on me in every way he could think of if I presumed to call him Augie) has three basic responsibilities. 1) He runs the Magothy Terminus itself and acts as a liaison between the city of Nagspeake and the owners and operators of the Magothy and Whilforber rail line (which includes scheduling, ticketing, safety, and various other things that were fired off at me like verbal bullets too fast for human hands to record); 2) he runs the Iron Pony Museum, a railway history attraction on the Terminus grounds; and 3) he manages the local fulfillment of Deacon and Morvengarde catalogue orders because they all arrive by railway shipment. He has one full-time employee, a bicycle messenger named Linus Mirrock; for larger orders, of which there are many, he hires local freight agencies. Between the three jobs he is, as he explained to me, “too goddamned busy to waste time with goddamned reporters.”

I don’t know what finally made him agree to talk to me. It might just have been the fact that I kept showing up, but I suspect it was something else: the turning point came when I finally suggested maybe I’d just contact Deacon and Morvengarde directly ((by every account I’d heard, of course, the Terminus itself was ordered from D&M, who, not being located in Nagspeake, presumably keep actual permanent records without burning them every twenty-five years).  Mr. Flyre blanched. “Why would you do that?” The question sounded genuine, and tinged with a little bit of concern, if not actual fear. “Because I figure they keep actual permanent records without burning them every twenty-five years,” I said. “Come back tomorrow,” Flyre said after a long pause. “Lunchtime.” Then he disappeared without further specifics, so I showed up at 12 only to endure ten minutes of lecturing because Flyre actually takes his lunch at four p.m. on the cafe car of the Bayside Brougham, which has a one-hour layover at the Magothy Terminus every day between three-thirty and four-thirty. Evidently the cafe server on the Brougham makes (and here I quote Mr. Flyre) “the only perfect John Collins”. (I said, “You mean a Tom Collins?” and Flyre said, “I do not.”) So, with four hours to kill I walked the unpaved cowpath from the Terminus to St. Whit’s Asylum (which is another story) and back in time to present myself precisely at 4 p.m. only to find out the three-thirty train was running late. It actually wasn’t until five p.m. that we sat down on the old wooden stools at the tiled bar in the dining car of the Bayside Brougham so that Augustus Flyre could rip into me again.

“You reporters all think you have a right. You think you have some kind of…some kind of right,” Flyre muttered as he watched the gaunt bartender pouring his perfect Collins. Somewhere in here is when he flung the nosy Parker accusation, which I maintain was unnecessary under the circumstances. “Look,” I said, “there’s plenty of people who want to talk to me about the Terminus.” I’d pretty much given up insisting I wasn’t a reporter. “What’s the deal? Why are you the only person in Nagspeake who doesn’t?” Then I caught him scoffing at the gin gimlet the bartender set down in front of me (which turned out to be exceptional, matched only by the ones made with Annabelle Bechamel’s heirloom gin) and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s being scoffed at for my drinking habits. “And why don’t you want me to call Deacon and Morvengarde?”

Blanch. Flyre retreated into his glass muttering something about his good ear and stop mumbling.

Here’s what I already knew. The big controversy about the Magothy Terminus is that supposedly it was ordered by the town of Magothy Hill, meant to be delivered and installed in Magothy Hill, and the night after it arrived in Magothy Hill, it disappeared. Poof. It turned up a week later (it, or a railway terminus exactly like it down to the cast-iron and carnival glass sign proclaiming it to be MAGOTHY STATION) thirty miles east of its intended destination, at the top of Whilforber Hill just outside of Nagspeake. What nobody seems to know is how it got there. In Magothy Hill, the story goes that it was simply delivered to the wrong location, an easy mistake to make in 1905 when Magothy Hill was a very small town and hardly on the map. Why didn’t they correct the situation? Because, said Ted Bilton, deputy mayor of Magothy Hill, it had already been built, and certainly I didn’t think you could just go and move a railway terminus, lock, stock, and barrel, after it had been built?…Well…did I?

Of course I did, because it was a more interesting idea, which is possibly the biggest indication that I have spent way too long in Nagspeake already. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Bilton that, though. Instead I got him to tell me how one went about ordering a railway station back in the day. It started out sounding a lot like ordering from Sears, Roebuck and Company: then, as now, Deacon and Morvengarde catalogue sells additional catalogues of plans for houses and other buildings. You could order the catalogues of plans for free, and for a small sum (back then it was fifty cents) you could then receive the plans for the structure of your choice. Your fifty cents were credited toward the purchase of building materials, which you also ordered from D&M. This is where it stopped sounding like Sears, Roebuck; the cost of your building materials included the services of a Certified Deacon and Morvengarde Architect and Builder Emeritus, who showed up along with the 20-40 thousand house pieces that needed to be put together. The A.B.E. handled all the subcontracting necessary to complete the house, and guaranteed the future homeowner the lowest possible prices on services–”by force, if necessary,” Mr. Bilton said. What did that mean? “It’s Deacon and Morvengarde, so I assume it means exactly what it sounds like,” Bilton said. “I’m quoting directly from the customer service promises in the catalogue.”

This is probably as good a place as any to remind readers who might’ve forgotten that Deacon and Morvengarde has always had a stellar customer service record but not always a sterling reputation among competitors or subcontractors…or basically anyone who isn’t a customer. Yet another good reason to turn to D&M, trusted since time immemorial, for all your needs. Every single one. Or else. Somewhere in here I started to formulate my new theory, and it was this theory that made me suggest to Augustus Flyre that I might call D&M. But back to the Bayside Brougham.

“It’s simple, of course. Whichever town got the rail terminus was going to survive. Whichever one didn’t was going to wind up like Magothy Hill,” Flyre said. (Magothy Hill is just fine, by the way; it’s hardly a dead town.) So why couldn’t Nagspeake just have ordered its own station? “Question of timing. Same time this was happening, railroads were popping up everywhere, and the stations that were built earlier had a better chance of being connection points in the grid that was developing, as opposed to stops along the way to those points.” So–not to beat around the bush–did Nagspeake steal the Magothy Hill station? Flyre gave me a withering look. “Of course it did. Why else is the station called ‘Magothy’ rather than ‘Nagspeake?’ I suppose you want to know how they did it,” he grumbled. I did. “Thing was built in five parts that came together clamshell-like. All of ‘em were built on some kind of skids so you could position ‘em right. So one night a group of fellows rode a couple dozen horses and mules down to Magothy Hill, cut all the power lines to the town so’s it all went dark, and just hitched the station up, in its pieces, to the pack animals and tugged it away over here to Whilforber Hill. Satisfied?” The last word was shot at me like a snarl. And of course, I wasn’t–this was the same story I’d heard from everybody and I’d been expecting some deeper look from Augustus Flyre.

“Mr. Flyre, I already knew all that,” I said. “Everybody knows all that. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something new, something nobody else knows.” I took a stab in the dark. “Like how Deacon and Morvengarde was involved.”

That did it. Only this time, Flyre didn’t blanch, didn’t retreat into his glass, didn’t say anything for a long moment. He turned to the bartender and asked him to leave. When we were more or less alone, Augustus Flyre leaned in close and spoke in the nastiest whisper I’ve ever heard. “Listen. I don’t know who you are, or who sent you, and I don’t care who that idiot Wilmer Cobblebridge thinks you are, either. I haven’t kept my mouth shut for my whole life just to start vomiting answers up for you, whoever you are. Call Deacon and Morvengarde. I don’t care. Get Marcus Aurelius Deacon himself on the phone, for all I care, and see what he says. But you better be ready to watch your back for the rest of your life. And you better tell him you got nothing from me but what you already knew, or I’ll be one of the ones coming after you.”

Whoa.

I don’t know what I started protesting first, but in the end it didn’t matter. Augustus Flyre was finished with me.

After a few minutes the gaunt bartender came back and made Flyre another Collins. He pointedly did not refresh my gimlet. I left shortly after that. During the entire walk back to the platform where the funicular railway takes you back down to the slope, I had the uncanny feeling if I looked over my shoulder, Augustus Flyre would be standing on the platform, staring daggers into my back.

To be continued.

(From 16 September, 2008)