Disco Barndance Masquerade - Appetizer
Treats of a Little Song and Dance
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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A thumping drum and smooth base enchanted through the trees. Strobing rainbow light flickered between the trunks. Gentle singing - a loud voice, but almost whispery in its softness - versed across the roots. “Midnight creeps so slowly-”
Two forms moved out from the shadow of the boughs. Mr. Grey emerged like a statue sloughing off the wild overgrowth. Honeydew stalked like a wolf into a sheepfold. Together they stepped into a quadrate clearing of tall grass. From the treeline they arrived almost onto the doorstep of a brick, corn-crib style barn; shooting up half-a-dozen stories over the trees. The sliding front doors stood thrice the height of either wanderer and stood open wide. Every swinging loft-door, every paddock portal, every window round or square, gaped. The building shook - from its mossy, runic, concrete foundations to its bannered gables - with dance and song.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew peered inside. The barn thronged with dancers, every one wearing an animal’s head. Some wore cow or sow or horse masks. Some wore faces of geese and ganders. There were chickens and ducks, dogs and cats. Each mask had its own individual stylings, and there seemed no division by species. Rodent, feline, fowl, and hound mingled under a rotating, prismatic-flamelight chandelier. Some grooved and shuffled over the barn floor. Others cut a baroque buckle in the lofts. A few dipped and dived and do-si-doed across the wide wood rafters.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew stepped, maskless, into the barn. Honeydew arced her smile of approval from the spinning chandelier to the loft waltzers. She said, “Now this is taste.”
“No finger foods though,” said Mr. Grey, who scanned for servers and found none. To him, the crowd seemed rowdy. And large too; lots of strangers in masks. Still, he reflected, that could work better for their cause. He climbed his eyes up the multi-leveled stacks of rafters and lofts and dancers. “They seem jovial. We could split up, ask after Jodee, and regroup if we learn anything useful.”
Honeydew nodded once. She sprung forward and vanished among a crowd of fox-trot hustlers. Mr. Grey strode, stiff and awkward, into the dancers.
He passed before a raised wooden stage. Giant metallic-parchment letters hung from the rafters over it, and declared that the band performing was ‘The Dreamland Royal Orchestra’. The band - presumably the same - enchanted beneath this metallic banner, atop this wooden stage. A full ensemble of instruments were on display: a grooving bass, the crisp ebonies and ivories of a grand piano, brass instruments of all shapes and curves, and even a full Glory Days Chorus line of bearded men. Mr. Grey walked before this line of hairy singers just as they sang, “It’s good to be alive!” They held out their hands in unison, as if exhorting Mr. Grey to their sentiment.
One of the dancers, a woman in a paint-horse mask, tossed her elbows and shoulders - dangerously so, Mr. Grey thought - in swingy motion as she danced near him. He turned to her, cleared his throat, and said, “Pardon me.”
The lady kept her body moving in time with the singer’s voice, but she turned her horse face - fixed in a startled expression - to him. In a voice muffled by mask and music, she asked, “What’s witchin’ you buddy?”
“My name’s Mr. Grey, and…” he saw her attention veering already, so he quickly asked, “do you know Jodee Coats?”
“She a singer?”
“She’s a tourist.”
“Don’t know any tourists,” was her answer. Mr. Grey barely caught it over the heart-thudding beat of the enchantment.
“I’ve heard there’s a dragon in these woods?”
She shrugged in time with the beat. “So what?”
“Won’t all this song and dance bring it?”
She shrugged to another beat. “If it comes it comes,” came the muffled voice. She danced away. Mr. Grey just caught her last words through the music. “Forget the missed stitches; learn to love the yarn!” The woman’s horse mask flopped as she grooved to the fading song, and joined the dancing crowd.
Mr. Grey tried the same approach with several more barnstormers, all with similar outcomes. Some ignored him outright. Few were concerned about the dragon, or any kind of danger; they only wanted to dance. None knew Jodee. One dancer wearing a sheepdog mask shimmied up to Mr. Grey. He held the top buttons of his cardigan-robe open. A collection of beast faces hung from hooks on the inner lining of the robe, next to a sleeveless, bedazzled undershirt that glimmered in the chandelier. Price tags attached to the masks offered them for only a few pebbles. Mr. Grey had already seen Honeydew - distinguished by the golden-lily eyes of her robe - dancing in a mask of her own; a wolf. All the same he declined the mask vendor. The man pressed, shouting over the thumping music, “Come on buddy. Join the ball.” Mr. Grey shook his head, and swiveled to question others in the crowd.
Just then, a shudder shook the building. It started from the roof and worked its way down the rafters to the floor. The band let their instruments down. The tune faded. The animal faces looked up.
A trapdoor in the ceiling opened inward on a pulley system, and a dark, round shape sank through the open roof. Mr. Grey only half-saw the shape from his floor perspective. He noticed it docked at one of the upper lofts. The clunk of a falling bridge reverberated through the hushed whispers of the barn. Two lesser shapes skulked out of the dark, round one. They moved to a lighted upper ledge in the barn.
“Dancers bird, dancers beast, dancers with four stomachs, and dancers with two!” whined one of the dark silhouettes crouched on the top deck. “We beg you pause in this convivial air. For, my partner and I have something of… a matter in which… we wish to relate a…”
“Proclamation,” barked the other silhouette.
Even if the two silhouettes had not stood in a lurking hunch; even if the glasses they wore had not glinted over their shadow-faces; even if the closest chicken-masked and duck-masked dancers had not quivered with sudden fright; Mr. Grey would have known the voices of Blackjaw and Slake: Finders for Hire. He sighed through his nose.
“A proclamation,” went on Slake in his oily voice. “Spectacular choice of word, insightful Blackjaw. We believe you have among your number, a prospect pair. The first; an innocent young lady. Golden hair. Raised in the gentle wheelhouses of Starharbor.”
“Name’s Honeydew,” added Blackjaw.
“The second; a man of stone. A man, with nary a finance to render him aid. A man misbelieving himself free of pecuniary difficulties. A man walking among you, destitute, under the appellation of Mr. Grey.”
“Got his facts wrong.”
“We have, in our possession, a contract, bearing his name. Signed by him, certainly.”
“Impossible to prove not.”
“And under Queen’s Law, he shall find the contract quite legally binding. We have, in fact, a warrant. Now, if this-”
“Quit ruining the vibe!” cried a voice from the crowd. Instantly, the stomp and song drowned Blackjaw and Slake’s rebuttals. The band renewed their blaring tune. The masked revelers threw themselves into the dance. Mr. Grey watched Blackjaw and Slake slink along the upper stories, making for a set of steep, dusty steps leading to the dance floor.
Mr. Grey’s first impulse was; to meet the finder. To talk through whatever new justification they’d conjured under this ‘Queen’s Law’, and confront it in an open way. To decide victory by the pencil and the word machine. As he turned for the stairs leading up, however, he caught sight of Honeydew. She danced now with less enthusiasm than the animals around her; less enthusiasm than she’d shown when they arrived. Her wolf-face pointed like a hunting dog’s at the creeping finders. Mr. Grey saw her hackles rise, her shoulders point. She danced, but she was on guard.
Mr. Grey, like an oracular statue leaning over a vision pool, saw what might happen if he let Blackjaw and Slake corner him. He foresaw a confrontation, not with pencils and lowered voices, but with shoulders, shouting, and many, many watchers.
Mr. Grey changed his plan. The mask vendor had left Mr. Grey, and was throwing his sheepdog head back and forth with the rhythm of a new group. Mr. Grey tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned and said, “Change your mind?”
“What have you got?” asked Mr. Grey. The man opened his cardigan.
A moment later, Mr. Grey drummed the floor in a stiff Galop as he tried blending with the crowd. He tapped pretty well to the current song’s beat; a fast-paced drumming with lots of whistling from the band. The chorus of bearded glory days men sang, “-talkin’ ‘bout bad girls,” His motions weren’t fluid, but few noticed under the dusky, glowing, spinning chandelier. It spun, and flashed, and splashed light like mixed jams - moonberry, apricot, grape, cherry - over the beams and floors and dancers.
Mr. Grey’s eyes rolled. Here were Blackjaw and Slake, maskless, spooking a flock of girls in fowl masks. There was Honeydew, face hidden behind a wolf’s snout, sending a girl in a sheep mask hip-checking to the barn’s other end. From behind rectangular holes in his own mask, Mr. Grey kept specially-peeled eyes for any detached dancer. When he noticed such people, Mr. Grey danced stiffly and covertly over, introduced himself politely, then asked if they’d seen Jodee. His interrogations uncovered naught.
Mr. Grey began to feel this barn wasn’t the place to seek Ms. Coats.
Mr. Grey looked to the last spot he’d seen Honeydew dancing. She stood there still, waltzing among a pack of dogs. And, between Mr. Grey and her, there skulked the shadows; Blackjaw and Slake, Finders for Hire. The finders saw him. They knew him instantly by his posture. Quill and contract sprung to their hands. Honeydew followed their moves, ready to bring her shoulders to bear. The finders lurched at him. From the stage, Mr. Grey heard the piano player strike up a new tune. The singers sang a warning, “Humidity’s rising…”
Mr. Grey fled. The finders followed. He tried losing them in the dancing crowd, slipping into a trip of cultish dancers in goat masks. He beat his best caper, while the singers sang, “Barometer’s getting low.” Behind, the lights flashed against the glasses of Blackjaw and slake. The finders followed. They forced their way into the ring of goat masks with their warrant. Mr. Grey broke from the circle. He stepped; to the right and to the left; up the stairs and across the rafters. The finders followed. He grabbed the long, smoothed pole of a giant pitchfork and slid back down to the dancefloor; while the light of the chandelier dyed all around him in rainbow light; a light which - like the lights of the change of address office, or the lights of Lord Snake’s Wine Medo castle - refused to touch Mr. Grey; while the Glory Day’s line of bearded, single-shoulder-robe-wearing men chorused, “It’s raining men, amen!”
Still, the finders followed. Mr. Grey could not break their sight. With every beat, every twist, every blare of a trumpet or thrumming chord of the piano, they closed the distance. Blackjaw and Slake took care not to disturb the other dancers. They knew they couldn’t stop the party. They skulked relentlessly in pursuit of Mr. Grey, between the thronging people, like parasites through a wide membrane orifice.
As Mr. Grey passed under the spinning flames of the chandelier, inspiration struck. The chorus wound up their song with a final fading, “Amen.” Mr. Grey rushed to where he’d left his coffin by the stage. Blackjaw and Slake rushed after him. The band prepared their next piece. The crowd became a tornado of hips and elbows thrown in a frantic Cardiff Stroll. Mr. Grey slid in at the edge of the performers. As the band struck up their tune, Mr. Grey joined them with a fiddling enchantment.
I must tell you, while the rest of the band continued their thumping disco score, Mr. Grey played something like Beethoven’s 5th. The band worked with him. It wasn’t bad.
Mr. Grey’s joining of the players interrupted the chase of Blackjaw and Slake. They paused before the stage. They saw Mr. Grey of course; hard to miss the statuary fiddler in a goat mask among the trumpets and drums and bass and dancing singers. But the finders couldn’t reach Mr. Grey without stopping the music; without pitting themselves against the full waltzing, shaking, jigging, jiving, barnyard host. So, Blackjaw and Slake paused. They folded their arms and gazed at Mr. Grey. And the spinning chandelier lights flashed on their dark glasses and their pearly teeth as they waited.
The band played softer and softer. The song faded. The pianist turned his bull mask to congratulate Mr. Grey, and to politely usher him back to the crowd. Blackjaw and Slake unfolded their arms. They stalked to either side of the stage, each with a warrant copy.
Before they could go far a sudden storm of dancers – beast masks of feather and hoof - stormed over the finders. The people surged over the skulkers and pushed them back from Mr. Grey. This stampede still made a show of dance as they ran, though in reality they fled for the barn’s corners. They ran from Honeydew. Face hidden behind her wolf mask, she let her body fall into frenzy. She threw herself into a leg-kicking, stiff-arm-swinging, body-turning Charleston, discordant and inharmonious with the other dances. The masks could show no emotion, and the other partiers clapped her on, but Mr. Grey sensed an air of terror in the crowd.
With his piece finished and a moment bought, Mr. Grey jumped to where Honeydew danced, right beside his luggage and coffin. She ended her wild jig. The band struck into a new song. The crowd thinned again. Mr. Grey saw Blackjaw and Slake push forward.
Honeydew shouted over the song. “Saw you being badgered. Let’s handle with these idiots now.” She held her shoulders sharp.
Mr. Grey made a quick dart of eyes at the crowd. “We should return to finding Jodee. No one here seems to know her.”
“Come on! This place is great. We can take these two.”
“Actually, I had another plan,” he said. Technically it was true, though Mr. Grey left out he’d only thought of his plan after Honeydew stated hers.
“We can’t run. They’ll just follow in whatever vehicle they’ve got.”
“It wouldn’t be on foot. But you’d have to drive. It might be a challenge.”
After a tock, Honeydew said, “I’m listening.”
They ran for a stall in the barn. Blackjaw and Slake followed. Behind, the music chorused, “PARTY ON!”
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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