Disco Barndance Masquerade - Entrée
Treats of Hot-air Pursuit
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On one side of the barn - where the music thumped ever on, and the dancers moved without cease - there stood closed, one especially large paddock door. A construction of flaking paint and loose fit, it sagged sadly on its hinges. The rainbow lights flashed in the seam between door and wall. A loose-looking bolt of wood on the exterior made a show of securing the door from the animal dancers’ escape. It might have delayed a scrawny, horse masked dancer. An actual horse with any will could have sundered the lock with a quarter-hearted kick.
Door, bolt, and hinges suddenly exploded off the barn in a dusty mushroom cloud. A pistoned strut of iron in the shape of a webbed foot surged through the dust in the act of kicking down the flimsy wood. The foot landed on the ground with a shudder and a squeal of un-oiled metal. From within the cloud came the popping noise of an old dragon engine; machine-existence wakened for the first time in epochs. In a flurry of dispersed dust, a rusty steam swan screeched through the broken paddock. It stumbled for the dark line of the forest, carrying in its cab Honeydew and Mr. Grey.
Mr. Grey tugged sharp on his set of reins to dodge a collision with one of the trees. He turned and took one last look at the barn. Behind them the lights, and the singing croon of, “Burn baby burn,” faded away.
Honeydew said, “This loose bird o’ bolts won’t hold long.”
Mr. Grey returned to the helm. He said, “But we’re piloting well together. This way, we’ll lose the finders without trouble.”
The two shared a good rhythm with their ride, despite the swan’s beat-up state. As the darkness and branches of the boscage folded over them once more, both had time for a last glance at the barn. Mr. Grey saw the broken door lying in the grass. Honeydew saw the lights dancing through the dusty opening. Both felt a sad pang.
Mr. Grey said, “I’m going to make sure we grabbed everything.” He reached for the buckle of his violin coffin. Honeydew took both sets of reins. She veered around a dense wall of twisted roots massing between two trees. Mr. Grey unbuckled the lid, found his violin tucked safely. He set the coffin back on the rattling floor, and turned to his suitcase. Then he thought of the travel visa - tucked into the coffin’s top pocket. He unzipped it, reached inside, and found it empty.
Their visa was gone.
Mr. Grey darted his hand toward his suitcase, though he knew he hadn’t put the visa there. At the same time, Honeydew saw the motion. She shouted over the screeching rust of the swan. “Everything okay?”
“Well-” said Mr. Grey slowly. He didn’t want to ruin their rhythm.
He spoke too slowly. New sounds arose at their rear. Another dragon engine’s growl. A long steam hiss. Mr. Grey and Honeydew turned.
The forest had stolen the barn light from their view, and their own popping and whacking course through the dense foliage drowned any music. Hovering above the wood, however, next to a moon which had chosen to be full, they saw a dark sky-shape, covering a patch of the stars.
More like two shapes, Mr. Grey noticed; moving as one, both dark in the night. The topmost was like an inverted teardrop, with a flat bottom. Directly under it - under the air balloon, Mr. Grey realized - hovered the cup-like shadow of a gondola. A strange ledge jutted into the night from the gondola’s side; a drawbridge? Two torso-outlines stood over the rim of the cup. Even with their distance, and the half-obscurity of the forest, and the jostling of the swan, Blackjaw and Slake’s dark spectacles glinted by the wan moon.
Slake’s wine pierced like an owl’s shriek above the trees. “Dearest Mr. Grey! Loveliest Honeydew! Why so set against a pair of finders with intentions high? Why so keen on poverty?”
“Not thinking straight,” Blackjaw’s voice growled over the woods.
“Our professional advice-”
“-given free-”
“-is that you turn round. End this senseless hotfoot. Come along easily. You’ll find the Queen’s jurisdiction, and Queen’s Law, belong to the finders this lovely night. And all nights to come! But they might be yours, if only you’d show a will for the teensiest bit of signage.”
Mr. Grey and Honeydew had only half-attended their course; and managed well. A shudder in their swan grabbed their attention instantly away from the finders. They turned forward; just in time to pitch over the edge of a glen.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew grabbed the reins. They twisted. They pulled. They just maneuvered their jalopy into a breakneck, plodding stomp down the grade. The branches and heavy fruits drummed like stones against the metal canopy. The swan tripped - nearly tumbled - over one thick root just before a tall ridge in the forest floor. Honeydew tilted all the way back in her torn-leather seat, and brought their swan into a ballerina-like pirouette.
With dancing and stumbling and the crackle of branches, they carried their swan down the slope on its feet. The ground evened into a low valley. They breathed for the first time in many tock. Another breath - the steam one of Blackjaw and Slake’s dragon-driven balloon - hissed behind them. Honeydew said, “I’ll handle them myself if you’re scared. My shoulders against them?” she clicked confidently. “I say good odds.”
Mr. Grey thought of their visa, possibly in the hands of some five-finger-discounter back at the barn. He almost accepted Honeydew’s proposal. But then Mr. Grey pictured that scene to himself; filled in the image. A scuffle. Shouldering. Honeydew hurt, staunching bites and scratches. Blackjaw and Slake battered, even though they themselves had never resorted to battery; only coercion and blackmail. Mr. Grey pictured, easily, the forest floor of old leaves and needles, wet with blood.
He thought long on this image. Honeydew took her eyes off the path for a tock and flicked them at him. He finally said, “We should keep trying to outpilot the finders.”
“In this old bird? No chance. They’ll catch us. Then we’d have to handle them anyway. Let’s just fix Blackjaw and Slake now.”
“Every stop is a chance for Jodee too. Besides, I had another - watch out, big root - another idea about the Swan. You’d have to pilot by yourself for a stretch.”
For a tock their swan chugged steadily through the canopy; up hills, down valleys, over ditches thrice the size of the one Mr. Grey had jumped in Wine Medo. Another hiss of the finder’s balloon rent the sky. Honeydew click-sighed. “Fine. Give me the reins.”
Honeydew took both leather leads of the swan, one in each hand. Mr. Grey said, “You’ll need to keep it even.” With the practiced hands of girlhood experience, Honeydew shaped the pace of their rusty swan. She brought their clunker into the smooth hobble of an active old woman. Over roots, by apple-laden boughs, across brooks and hollows and slopes of many grades, she steered them evenly. The box of their old swan held steady.
Meanwhile, Mr. Grey faced the finders. Their balloon vanished every so often behind the branches of some taller tree, only to reappear closer than before. Mr. Grey cranked back the retractable canopy of their ride with a grinding of rusted gears. Then he stood very still, and held his arms in a stiff T-pose. His anchor shawl ran taught before him, nearly as statue-ish as Mr. Grey himself. His eyes fixed on the pursuing balloon.
A crow fluttered off a nearby tree, and perched on his extended arm.
A second joined.
More crows came, flocking to the statue. They perched, not only on Mr. Grey, but all across the steady metal of the steam-swan’s box. Soon a murder of beady eyes and crooning caws massed atop the plodding swan. The crows lent an organic plumage to the mechanical bird; a coat of real, midnight feathers.
By now the finders’ balloon hovered overtop the pair. Honeydew hadn’t seen the point of gathering the birds. Over their cawing, she said, “So what’s your plan?”
“I’d… hoped to camouflage us. With the feathers,” answered Mr. Grey. He moved his mouth as little as possible so as not to disturb the flock. “Against the dark woods. It seems to have failed.”
Honeydew twisted the reigns and brought them in a smooth lilt around a copse of corn-trees. “They can track us by sound. The rusty squealing. The crow-caws.”
“Drat.”
A pop from the engine sent a plume drifting from their ride. It startled a half-dozen of the gathered crows, who winged the air just left of the finders’ balloon. Blackjaw and Slake called down another bout of proposals. Their smiles gleamed overhead. They sank toward the swan. Honeydew said, “Think of something new, fast. This swan won’t go much longer. Or, let me handle the finders.”
Mr. Grey had thought of something fast. He dropped his arms.
Immediately the murder erupted in a cawing, feathery cloud. The crows rose into the sky, like a mushroom of smoke from the clanking swan engine. The finders’ balloon just above them took the birdstrike full on, like a grapeshot blast.
There was a pop; a sputter. Mr. Grey saw Blackjaw and Slake’s balloon whizz suddenly high and backward. It flew away from the swan. in a deflating, silly-straw spin, shrinking into the space between the stars. With a last bark and a final whine, just audible over the guttural jaunt of their engine, the finders’ balloon vanished into the leafy horizon.
Honeydew said, “Not bad.” She got half-a-click of approval out, before a grinding from their ride cut her short. The piston-strut legs came to a full halt, with both webbed feet planted firmly on the rooty forest floor. Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s momentum threw them against the front rail. A plume of coal-smoke surged from the exhaust-pipes. The bird sagged, deflating much like a balloon itself. Their cab screeched as it sank to earth.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew grabbed their luggage. They stepped, coughing, from the smoking and popping machine. They turned and watched as the metal swan gave one last sputter of artificial, avian existence. Then it fell silent. The wild rustling and animal noises of a nighttime forest closed in.
“That went alright,” said Mr. Grey.
“Alright,” agreed Honeydew. “Though I wish this thing had lived longer. A long walk back to the barn.”
Mr. Grey had his hands full, but he still brought his suitcase arm halfway to his ticker-pocket, out of habit. After a pause, he said, “Our visa’s gone.”
“What?”
“I checked the coffin, but it’s not there. Maybe it’s at the barn?” Mr. Grey wanted to press on in the quest for Jodee, and didn’t think he’d accomplish that by returning to the dance. But the visa might be back there, and he felt obligated to search.
“If you’d just let me-” Honeydew began with a snarl. She swished a hand to cut herself short. “Forget it. Let's head back. We’ll check the ground along the way. You dropped it in the escape, I’m sure.”
At that moment, they heard a guttural, primeval, booming roar. A roar to cow The Wind. A roar to shudder the trees; not only the branches, but the trunks too. A roar which seemed even to writhe the roots in the earth. A roar, from the direction of the barn.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew looked at each other. “Dragon,” they said in unison; meaning the biological kind.
They turned, and crept away from the swan.
Away from the barn.
Deeper into the woods.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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