by a writer on September 12, XX18
A city is built upon its own history, time and time again. Sometimes this history supports the future, other times the city is trying to bury its past. Buildings, shops, homes, schools, churches, and more, the growth of any city is one that is hungry for space and place. What would happen if the land’s true owner were to appear and claim the grounds for itself? What would the citizens do if this happened without their knowledge? In between the cracks of civil life and the mortar lines of ignorance and folly...
CHAPTER
1
Cracks
I had the pleasure of determining the dispute between two brothers forever locked in familial conflict. They were known to the whole town as the Duvet Brothers, always covering things up. Needless to say, it was a steady job and provided a unique set of tales to be shared with my trusted advisors over a bottle of holiday wine.
The eldest Duvet had the rights to the family estate on the West end, a building of extreme size and historical significance. It was the supposed site that housed the first settlers of our city, some say almost 2 millennia ago, perhaps more if you look past the resetting of our earthly clocks. Nevertheless, the estate was not the center of the city, yet certainly the center of the brother’s dispute, trying to determine the true owner of it, wills and leases aside.
For the youngest Duvet had a sort of passion, some would say, while others may call it an obsession, of ensuring the house remains in tip-top condition, from roof to foundation, complete with a trim of the finest Peruvian Obsidian stone. These acts give light to the notion that the youthful Duvet was the sole owner of the home and in his diligence to clean the glass, trim the hedges, and fill the forming gaps between the red brick exterior walls, gave him a certain prideful ownership, and thus say, over the construction, the land and its course of action or use.
Many would say the house was an eyesore, should one manage a glimpse of it, for it was shrouded by generations of thick foliage and plant life, meters wide and mountains tall. Surrounded by a matching brick wall and wrought-iron gate, the manor had been set slightly elevated in the center of this ring of protection, poking out from the tops of the trees and protective barriers.
Others would call it a work of art, its historical construction a testament to a taste gone by, seemingly timeless yet ancient, with thin, tall towers at the corners and one large, central glass-domed roof, ordained and connected by buttresses and arches made of an equally dark translucent material. These architectural assets are strikingly accented by the midnight black obsidian lines that connect the deep red bricks that form the manor’s walls. From the wide-open, grilleless windows on the face of each wall, looking like gaping maws during the unlit dusk, filled with voiceless throats yelling into the oncoming dark cosmos of the night. The construction seemed more like it was looking at you, than you gazing upon it. The fleeting feeling of a pulse throbbing with each shimmer or glimmer in those dark obsidian veins.
It was in this fortress that the eldest Duvet lived, or some would whisper, brood, even as his younger brother toiled on making the place just right. The eldest Duvet would seem to occupy his mind on the dealings of the family, handed down to him, or some rumored, onto him, from the line of grandfathers before him. Never one for politics, the family’s workings were never public yet impacted the city greatly, from building new docks at the pier for exotic imports, to paving the roads during the time of the great revolution, perhaps for the revolution. We all benefited when the Duvet’s decided to have their hands in city development. No one questioned why… or what side the family fell on.
The most recent outburst from the family was one that caught the whole city by surprise. People were actually beginning to forget about the Duvets, nevermind predicting they would become headline news over the matter of $80. So I was called to step in and negotiate the closure between the youngest Duvet and a local dock worker whose claim that the eldest shorted him the very matter after the completion of a recent job.
This dock worker was easily made happy, and most people didn’t bother with his story, claiming that the recent import he hand delivered to the Duvet Manor was more than sealant for the simple cracks in the failing walls. His job was simple, $80 to bring the recent crates off of the Ethiopian oceanliner, making its quarterly scheduled delivery of wood, materials, exotic fruits and the like. Surely no one would pay any attention to the half dozen or so crates of nondescript crates tucked away in the hold for none other than the Duvet Manor. It just so happens that the youngest Duvet requested the quiet work of this seaside faring man, yet his promise was cut short after losing his last dollar on a gambling bet turned sour. It’s remarkable how the wealthiest of families can produce such a downtrodden kin who would beg for the simplest of solutions.
For fear of his older brother retaliating and cutting the deal short, the youngest went back on his agreement with the worker. Well, the worker wouldn’t go home empty handed and decided to take a crate as payment for his work. Not a moment after he crossed through the thick outer walls with crate under arm, did the youngest decide to retaliate in a fit of rage and defense. The worker was brutalized to a purple pulp, who would have thought the youngest to have such vigor, strength, or persistence. The youngest would share with me that it was a rash decision, but one that had to be made in an instant, given the severity of the moment. You see, it was the dawn of the harvest festival and it was critical, as he would share, that the manor’s walls be reinforced by the time the new moon set on its bricks that evening. If he were short of one crate of materials, he could not finish his task.
He told me with such fiery intensity and speed, I could not even stop for a moment to doubt his lengthy description. His eyes took on the size and blaze of a countryman’s bonfire and his speech was fraught with foam and punctuated staccato. Not only as a client would I believe him, but for the sake of his own care did I agree to every word he said. I just wished the matter resolved. Apparently the worker’s undoing brought the instance to the attention of the oceanliner’s captain. It seemed he wanted to double check his cargo list and discovered that these crates were nowhere to be found.
As a man of the law, I had to negotiate the matter for the youngest Duvet, and the best I could muster was a price already beyond what the youngest could afford. A crate of stones would have to suffice, otherwise the whole lot would be confiscated and their owner jailed for illegal smuggling across international lines. Clearly, to pay our way was the only way out of this one.
This was only the beginning as the youngest Duvet, already in hot water for lashing out at the innocent worker retaliated even further at my proposal of cash or stones for the captain. It was either, involve his brother or relinquish some of his precious stones. The matter was easily driving him mad, since his relationships with both of them were splitting apart.
CHAPTER
2
Mortar
Little did I realize what sort of predicament this choice would create. For the youngest Duvet had other plans to reacquire his precious stones, without or without my guidance. I would be called in after the matter, and I wished at no other time for a vacation from this sullen city, the sight was unseemly and precursed by no other smell but the most foul of stench. It seemed that the youngest Duvet had it in him to lure the captain, in possession of his stones, to an alleyway no more wide than the crate itself in which the youngest Duvet managed to afix a large barrel of corrosive fluid, used in the processing of stone, clay, granite and other hard material to make a thick paste applied to bricks or the like. Nevermind the power this substance had over tender flesh and hollow bone. The sight was a stew of digits and teeth, swimming in a swirl of blood and bile. What he expected me to do was beyond my power, but nevertheless, he retrieved his crate, or what was left of it, and most importantly, the stones within.
I would later realize that the captain’s position in the shipping organization he was affiliated with would easily accept his disappearance as a timely arrival of a long term problem of drinking, gambling, and having fallen off the ship’s edge once or twice in recent past port anchors. Luckily for the youngest Duvet, and more so for me and clean-up duties. I would say that the captain’s new resting place was a suitable spot in our ever darkening city, and daily smelling alleys.
In order to fully ensure the Duvet estate was neat and orderly, I begged another trip to the estate, despite the nagging feeling in my knuckles that warned me otherwise. If not for the clear moss-greening skies of an oncoming evening, signaling a fair and calm night, I would have sworn a storm was about to break beyond the docks, giving me these ill begotten manual pains. I should have heeded the pain otherwise.
At the estate, I was expecting to be greeted by the Eldest Duvet, at either the external gates or the door of the ghastly manor, yet, they were both open enough for me to slip on through, as if they were expecting a casual visitor, or a helpless curious townsfolk to wander onto the estate. Unluckily enough for me, I had the displeasure of engaging the estate and the two brothers in some sort of gladiatorial combat.
The state of the interior halls were unlike any state I’ve witnessed in the past, tables upturned, chairs smashed to splinters, paintings shredded to fine strips of oil, canvas, and an unidentifiable neon-maroon sludge that pulsed from some unknown lightsource within, bioluminescent? Radioactivity? Perhaps a more harmless party trick? Eitherway, the place did not seem fit for a ball, nor were the two men in it dressed for the occasion.
They fought with the eternal rage of centuries, as if channeling some sort of grudge, or feud between two ancient tribes, forever locked at odds. I could only make out the wild cries of passion in between blows, smashes, swipes, and slashes, whatever they could get their hands on became a lethal weapon. I couldn’t tell who was the attacker and who was the defender, and neither cared about the very manor they each called ‘home’.
What held me there for as long as it did, I’ll never know, nor would I think I would ever want to know, especially when they laid eyes on me and the tenor of their brawl changed in pitch and tone. Suddenly, I became the very object of interest, and unlike their blows against one another, their manner and gesture towards me became that of awe and wonder, as if I held some sort of title or position over the two. With what little breath I had to clear the air with, they would have none of it from their esteemed guest, and I was to accept their grace and pleasure with some sort of welcomed smile. Yet, despite everything that screamed in my knuckles, I was ready for their gift.
What happens beyond this is only parsed together through fragmented memories and seared in nightmares, like a shattered mirror over a roaring fire at the bottom of a well.
I was the one they served, I was the one they displayed their work to, I was the one that became judge, jury and executioner of their fate, as if this was the case all along, aside from the tasks granted to me as a man of the law. This was far more deeper and rooted in the very building they called home. They lead me through the twisted halls of the manor, showcasing with glee the fissures and ruptures within the very walls of the mansion that were patched with hardened, pulsating maroon mortar. The very substance of which was made right before my eyes.
The brothers Duvet demonstrated the process in which the youngest would take the recently acquired stones, submerge them in a viscous liquid contained within a large metal tub, hover over them, producing a sound from within his own throat and mouth that, I feel, no biological organ or formation could generate. And then, after what feel like a pulsating eternity, an oozing mass of this vicious compound coagulated right before my eyes. The manifestation of sciences beyond our world.
TO BE
CONTINUED
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