"I would think it unwise to accuse one's barber of thievery while in this position." Male. Melancholy, but with some comfort in it, so a person who could locate the joy in sadness, the key to which was the understanding that it did not have to reside in the self. Already this was valuable information. He sounded more mortal than Ruthven, than my Wanda for that matter.
"Consider it rescinded if you truly mean me no harm. I can feel your skill, but I'm getting very frustrated. All I wished to do was shave myself. First Wanda took over and now you. I see the significance of course, now that it's too late. You're invested in the ritual of the shave; that's where your power is, yes? You know when it's being done, who's doing it?"
"Long have I known when people were at their most vulnerable," was his answer, and he shaved all the while. I feared he was practiced just to finish it quicker, to allow the dead to look their best.
There were more details, and suddenly I recalled them, whether by wit or association with him was unclear. An old ghost story: the specter-barber. It was some muddled moralistic thing about a fellow visiting a haunted castle only to encounter a ghost who invited him to sit down for a shave. He allowed it, and in turn offered the same service to the ghost, in so doing freeing it from some curse or other. Perhaps this fellow was the inspiration? At least a few tall tales of furry cryptic beasts stalking the woods came from my Wanda's furs, as she often reminded me. If the hands of the specter-barber were on me, then at least one other person had survived the shave long enough to tell the tale.
"What is your name?" He paused. Very few asked, it seemed. Too preoccupied with their own lives I imagine. On the blade went, without so much as an impression to indicate it had stopped.
"Devorgoil Oblivion Goblinry."
"Out of the three I've met that makes three mouthfuls. Is Devor acceptable?"
"Call me whatever you'd like. Just don't turn around; I don't want to cut you."
"What is it I can do for you Devor?"
"Just listen. My sister... she's so possessive, isn't she? Always hoarding her things in that coat of hers, never sharing. She has her reasons. While she's loyal to a fault I think you'll find she's far from the most reasonable of us. I'm not out to take or break her toys. Tilt your head forward please. Thank you.
She's really going for godhood, isn't she? I'm impressed. It takes a... let's say Napoleonic mind to manage it all. I've no interest myself, in the work that is. The benefits, those would be lovely. My greatest ambition is to count this place as a retreat, where I could rest and restore myself when need be, let another pair of Cain's eyes keep watch while mine rest."
The sea ducks were not disturbed by his presence. With my now tilted head I could see through the slats to their olivine bills drifting by underneath. Perhaps they actually were supervising, and telling me this fellow was on the level.
"Wanda would need to approve of such a welcome mat, but I have no objections."
"People talk to their barbers, me especially," Devorgoil said as he bent and dipped the razor in the cup. I caught a scent in his hair: crusty bread, malt, charcoal, steam. In catching people at their most vulnerable he must've always been awash in the drunken air after a feast, the sleepy smoke trails about a dying campfire, and naked hot soaks in copper tubs. "I'd like to buy my welcome with information, as it comes to me, delivered by you so as to offend my poor anxious sister less."
"And you have an opening offer?" He sighed, clearly thought over his words. Wanda would never show me such uncertainty.
"I do, but she isn't going to like it, and I don't want that hostility to land on me. Will you do your best to protect me from her?"
"I confess I have absolutely no idea what that would entail," I said, which he must've known. Beyond a charitable phrasing I had no power in the situation.
"Just a statement of effort would be enough for me to share it with you."
"Very well. I will make an effort. You have the word of Severin Pelts née Molochi. What do you offer Quarantown?"
"Catching people at their most vulnerable means that sometimes violence is afoot. Often I'm too late, or in time only to hear their last bloody words. I clean them up, make them presentable, and give them a proper burial.
I've left a trail of one-man funerals in my wake, pardon the pun, which means I'm moving just ahead of another trail, and from these gory breadcrumbs I have deduced who is responsible. Another sister of mine. Of ours. Whether or not you've legally wed Wanda we're all family now."
Toweled dry. No razor glint. Both Devorgoil's hands were on my shoulders, his somber grip communicating something new with all ten digits. It was unclear whether I was being massaged or lightly wrung, like worry taken out on a twisted handkerchief. His touch bled through my robe, put me at ease. The only apprehensive thorns came from imagining Wanda's reaction when I relayed all these details. She would demand them all.
"This trail led you here?"
"I was already on my way, but yes," the heir said. Somehow I knew he was staring off into the woods, perhaps at the ultimate magnetic north: the personality of my Wanda.
"Who is this sister of ours? And what does she want from us?" I had to swallow some fear. Already I had seen what Ruthven did just in the process of taking a train. Enslavement. Chains linking the globs of blood in their veins. Now that Quarantown was settled, wounds would have to be deeper to get anything done.
"Her mouthful, aside from those she covets, is Goriana Perjury Consumption. The baby of us, born last, always trying to catch up and screaming at us for not slowing down. Wanda has no patience, and Goriana has less than that.
Now they will have to meet though, as Wanda can't just strike out further afield. She must defend this place. So I came to warn you! And if you survive this you can hopefully play host to me as compensation for the early word."
"I'll do you one better and play host right now," I said, springing the only kind of trap a man like me could, constructed from branches of kindness and a net of jabbered interest-taking. Mr. Goblinry caught me at my most vulnerable, so I reversed the procedure on him at his most relaxed. He thought he was safe with a job well done, completely unaware I intended to pamper him right back.
Mortals like me stiffen up in the aura of an heir of Cain, but I was used to it now, and could swim through the air they emitted breast stroke or butterfly. It took him by surprise when I quickly stood and circled around, grabbing his shoulders and directing him into the chair.
"Hand over that razor Devor. It's not yours, or mine for that matter." Dumbfounded, at least I should like to think so, he held it up for me to take and open once more. This was how the specter-barber stories went. The thankless service phantom granted a boon when finally treated with the respect he gave, his only financial resource in the afterlife.
In all likelihood no heir of Abel had ever been so forward with him, reaching out to touch rather than cringing from it. By the time the quaint notion had settled on him, like a cat clawing a bed into his lap, I already had him lathered up. A glance down revealed so many green duck bills, like painted nails, now swimming in a circle under the nexus of his demi-divinity.
Haste prevented me from getting the clearest look at his face in the switch, but I found it as I swept away the lather and stubble, like an explorer clearing brush. Of course he was a beautiful man. Eyes of blue. Cleft chin. A wide and deep face like an open bible, one bookmark lock of hair hanging low on his brow.
His clothing was not so outwardly flashy as Wanda's, but they still told me more of the man. Blues layered on grays. Sadness over acceptance. He dressed to match the gravestones he erected. It also looked like something was missing from his ensemble, an outermost layer. Not like he had forgotten it. Instead as if he had perpetually just taken it off, to give himself room to breathe, like an artist trying to adjust to the rapidly cooling jitters after the final brush stroke.
I could never love any creature as much as I love Wanda, but it was simple to see the difference in their natures. She was forceful so she could take what she wanted in any situation, no matter how long the odds, while her brother Oblivion instead curated his scenes, his vantage points. Never did he need to display power, appearing only to those already brought low or caught stark naked or bleeding their final wishes into the soil. They would just give him things, whether begging for his help or just awed at the closest thing to an angel they would ever see, so much so he might convince them they were on the doorstep of heaven.
People had altogether tried to give him too much; that's what I gathered. He was tired of it, and hopefully refreshed by the respectful transaction of our mutual shave. If he was, he used it to restore his placid demeanor and get back to those particularly probing Cain questions, the ones only asked if they knew at least part of the answer.
"I could've warned you sooner, but you never seemed in danger enough for me to try. Not so much as a trip over a run in the rug so that I could catch you. Wanda has kept her eye on you... even when shaving?"
"Yes she has," I admitted, seeing no point in denying what he knew. "Obviously she did not want us to meet, not like this anyhow. And I will not be telling her that I'm more afraid of what I'll say to her than what I'm saying to you right now. She already has me, while all you could possibly do is kill me."
"The end result of that would be Quarantown abandoned," he said, almost laughing, but I sensed he didn't do that much, "and me on the run from her. Her vengeance would see at least one of us dead."
"There's more we could discuss," I said as I dipped the blade into the cup for the final time. The ducks were dispersing, unlikely to be random. "But seeing as I've finished no one has a blade to their jugular any longer. Are you already returning to whence you came?"
As answer he stood, toweled himself off and set the item carefully on the chair. With wide arms, a surprising gaping yawn of a gesture, like being swallowed by the night, he embraced me tightly. I think this was to give me a very close look into his eyes, so that I might see some more of his character, which I did.
Wanda talked of the world serpent, and what it has shown her line, but I remained unclear on whether or not she had ridden it herself, or any other heirs after the man Cain. Sometimes she spoke of it as a matter of inheritance, others as a trial she endured. Either way there must be a degree of variance in its effect. How far into the void had each heir seen?
From his pupils I guessed Devor had penetrated deeper into that inky abyss of frozen wisdom than my Wanda. What exactly gave that impression I couldn't say, but it stirred in me some wondering. Was this a ride I could take? Wanda called the heirs of Abel children of reflection, who looked in where the heirs of Cain looked out. Devor could perhaps do both, indirectly, looking into me and seeing what I saw in myself.
"Welcome to the family," he whispered in my ear, like a curse, but one he merely diagnosed, inflicted by another. His arms loosened as his corporeal form did the same, so by the time I couldn't feel him he had vanished.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Returning the evidence swiftly did not matter, for Wanda would know much of what transpired the moment she saw the lack of stubble on my face. More likely she would smell the lather and blade oil on me first, so that the next time I saw her her face would already be contorted by rage.
So my primary concern became where I wished to suffer a dressing-down. Naturally our bedroom came to mind. Those untouched by an heir of Cain might interpret my reaction and my skittish planning as fear that Wanda would attack me physically, or demean and belittle me into submission. I did fear, quite a lot, but neither of those things.
It was a fear of incompatibility, of a rift that could grow between us should we make too many plans with the other in the dark. Wanda could tear me to shreds, but would only ever do so with my permission, and I'd have to giver her a second permission for her to enjoy it.
No, her anger would stem from the same fear, admitted or not. In the process of being overprotective she was keeping me ill-informed, and in the impatience of not being heeded I was lashing out, inevitably licking myself with the whip as surely as if I wandered beyond our borders to contract Throng's delirium.
"Severin!" she snapped like a bear trap after throwing open the bedroom door. What had wafted off me and under its crack had upset her, sent her furs bristling as if they were attached. The door would have slammed against the wall, but a sleeve that didn't contain her arm folded around the knob and kept it from doing so. That way no sound could startle me and I could focus on feeling the entire gust she generated simply by entering the room. It left my hair disheveled.
Before I could answer her she pulled out our razor and held it up like something alien, making perplexed faces, less effective in shaming me than they could have been since she couldn't wipe the fury clean before installing the faux confusion.
"I could've sworn this was the razor you used to shave, but now that your face is clean, it's clear this must be something else! Something still tells me it is meant for you, so it could be a dart, and you the board!" She made a show of spinning and throwing it, trying to convince me she did not have flawless aim.
It hissed by my ear, and I felt it. Technically it did cut, but separated only the thinnest layer of already inert skin from the lobe. No blood, nor dewdrop of crimson, but felt. The blade stuck in the wall behind me, waggling on its tang. Silence can be used to assert oneself, as I demonstrated just then by not flinching and not averting my eyes.
I let her calm some. Once she heard her own breathing, recognized its ragged sound as the only one in the entire house, she let her shoulders slump, though it was barely perceptible under the sable mounds piled atop them.
"Did he hurt you?" she asked, as defeated as I'd ever seen her. On her face was an expression that suggested in the competition of life she could perhaps be convinced to acknowledge the slight technical possibility that someone else might take a turn, and, if the world was ending, score a point.
"Yes... his manners were so shockingly good that I fell and hit my head. When I awoke he'd stolen my mustache!" Now I was the one failing to control myself; there was no need to strike that tone the same way she struck the wall with the razor. Best to moderate quickly. "He didn't make so much as a threat."
"My brother's presence in my home is an automatic threat," she insisted. It was clear she wanted to close the gap, grab me, check for wounds, but she begrudgingly respected the civility she knew I prized enough to not smother me like an animal and lick the foreign smells off me. "If he got to you that means... it means..."
"-That I was vulnerable?"
"That I failed," she said, growling at something I couldn't identify. "If I can't keep him away from you, how am I going to deter the others? They'll eat you alive, and stop the moment you're dead, so that I come across only the bits they played with on the plate." Her green eyes looked white hot, steam cyclones overpowering turbines underneath.
"Devorgoil told me one of those others is Goriana Perjury Consumption." Mentioning that name was premature, I recognized when her mood shifted from bad to teetering on the edge of sanity. If my Wanda was rabid she knew how to swallow the foam before it reached the lips.
"Why did he mention her!?"
"That was the meat of the situation, not my innards. He stopped by just to tell us that he has no designs on Quarantown... other than as a place to hang his hat and rest his feet."
"Don't know as I've ever seen him take more than five steps," Wanda spat, "vaporating everywhere as he does."
"And he didn't wish to impose either, bringing with him a peace offering, the first of many I'm sure. At precisely zero haggling over price, he warned me that your sister Goriana was on her way here." At this I could see my goddess's focus entirely shift, from one heir to another. After that moment it was as if Devorgoil didn't exist, and the sister existed all too much: under our rugs, in our cupboards, stuffed in our chimney, and singing a siren song from within our drains.
"I should've known," she admonished herself, surging about the room, checking corners for her influence, though all the pillow-flinging and curtain-ripping was simply implied. I could see she was doing the mental equivalent, perceiving the room in a handful of ways I could not, growing her claws so they punctured various veils of perception. "Ruthven muscling in on my train threw me off. I assumed none of the others would try until my suspicions fully died down, but of course Goriana will not wait. If she ever has a plan it was merely passed to her through a membrane of nightmares."
"She has some power over dreams?" I asked to remind her that I was eager for information. At least some would have to be gifted to me now, lest I blunder into another situation where an heir of Cain was likely to materialize; perhaps next time would be while I sat on the pot.
"My youngest sister has whatever faculties her victims have, as long as they last inside of her."
"Inside!?" I repeated, aghast. At least Lord Ruthven had the decency to take the blood he wanted out of the body and into himself discreetly. Fitting I suppose, that someone with the name Consumption would not be so refined in their table manners. "Are you the only heir that doesn't partake in some form of cannibalism?"
"It's not cannibalism," she said with a wave of her hand, as if the whole subject was no more concern than a housefly, "seeing as Cain and Abel are not of the same kind. And she does not eat them... not in any traditional sense." Wanda took a good many silent moments, shuffling closer to me as they stretched, until deciding to lock me in place with one hand on each elbow so that I felt like a book about to be squeezed into too narrow a space on the shelf.
"Goriana does not have agents," she eventually explained, impressing upon me with the scalpel tip of her pupils. "She has no trust, paranoid as she is from our mother's abandoning of her."
"And of yours it seems." It was like I hadn't spoken. A second later I wasn't sure I had. Was this the same power ever-exerted over me so that I could not remember my time or place? If so it was being used to shush me, which was a misuse. We'd never openly put a name to its purpose, but if we both didn't know it we didn't have the relationship we claimed.
"She will not let anything she makes hers escape, and the only way to ensure that is to incorporate it, all of it, into her body. The Abel-bodied she lusts after are drawn in with an innocent appearance, with bombs of effervescent affection.
They are told she can take away all their stresses and responsibilities, which she can. That they will be protected, which is also true. Protected from everything but her. Once she has them ensnared they are consumed bodily, integrated into her... membranous spatial lining."
"Her what!?"
"We can make whatever we want, depending on how much we put our minds and bodies to it," she said, of her lineage. "And what my sister wanted was a pocket, one she could not lose, where she could keep all her belongings. Knitted and sewn it was from her own flesh, kept about her rather than inside exactly.
She can step into it, like a room, make it her surroundings, but it is also her interior. She is the museum and the gallery, experiencing her charges as she observes them. Once consumed they are hopelessly lost, inextricable from her lining, set adrift in the maelstrom of dreams, fully at the mercy of their own subconscious weather, as that is not something she seeks to manage.
As they dream, as they nightmare, their physical form slowly atrophies and degenerates, their ultimate fate nothing more than a molehill cyst on the pocked interior of Goriana's hyper-spherical canvas, take it months, years, or a lifetime."
"And you were concerned about Devor!?"
"Devor? Don't use such an affectionate name for him," she ordered, forgetting him again with a swiftness that made me wonder if someone could twiddle pieces off her memory like putty as she did with mine. "If my sister is coming she can have only one goal: the consumption of my Severin. She thinks that once she has you within her confines I'll never be able to leave her side."
"Alright," I said, swallowing my fears, though the idea of swallowing anything at that time was most unsettling, as any action involving the body is when it's broken down into a series of steps: spasms, twitches, pulses, and puckers. "What are we to do about her?"
"We shall do nothing. You will stay put, exactly where you are told," Wanda informed me. She served me a kiss, like a legal summons, putting some of her breath in me as a spy, to give me that toasted-lung sensation of anxiety when I did something of which I knew she would not approve. "I will strengthen our perimeter even more, targeting her signatures specifically. Her tantrums will have no power at all if she can't get through my fencing."
"Devorgoil did," I reminded, but in a sullen and defeated tone to make clear I had no illusions about winning an argument with an heir of Cain. Talking to her just then of the people of her town, and how the last thing we needed was more absenteeism, I knew would be fruitless. The scent of her siblings had her frothing.
To indicate my willingness to follow, even down an utterly wrong path, I went to the wall and removed the stuck razor, folding the blade away and tucking it into the front of her coat. Making sure it landed in a pocket was not necessary, as the coat simply accepted it, passing it along into its depths with a silken grip.
"You will at least make time for our shave?" I requested. "I can't do my job without looking my best."
"Like I said, we can make whatever we want."
The next few days passed in entirely predictable doldrums, though my sourness was kept hidden from the people I visited and further cataloged. Wanda gave me a shave, as she saw fit, early in the morning, before the sun had driven away the opaque blues of night entirely, but after that she vanished into the forest until late in the evening.
The intensification of her efforts had effects throughout the town, despite being concentrated on the borders she had dug out with her claws. My new friends told me what they noticed in idle conversation, and how I wished I could just tell them none of these phenomena were idle at all. We were all in the burrow of a god, with a wet floor sinking deeper into fate.
Birds were observed turning away in droves midair. It was my guess that while Wanda had a great many birds among her familiars, these were migratory, foreigners as it were, and they heeded the invisible warnings she had left out, each extending far into the sky like a bonfire's smoke column.
Porter mentioned in passing an unusual situation in which he felt a breeze early in the day, after stepping outside, and felt one again in another part of town a few hours later that struck him as having 'an identical whisper and character', notable only because he'd never experienced such a thing before. From that I extrapolated that even something like a light wind could be made into a spy of hers: an invisible serpent flicking its tongue as it weaved between all the houses on its patrol.
My eyes were sharpened, on the lookout for more such anomalies, which is why I was probably the only one who noticed that blankets of moss were moving across the outlying stones of Quarantown absurdly fast. It was like watching continents take shape on the map. The foot of the moss must be very sensitive, able to detect the slightest chip in any stone kicked by a trespassing foot, but without eyes they had to wander across the spot to actually take notice and send a letter on our friend the snaking breeze to be delivered to my Wanda.
All these precautions did nothing to address the town itself however, only its perimeter. Our permeable bubble was hardened into iron, staling the air, darkening a sunlit sky, which was not an easy atmosphere for our residents to interpret. Most of them kept saying 'it looks like rain', wincing a moment later because they knew it not to be true. They didn't know what it looked like.
At the time it seemed Wanda's oppressive security was to account for the worsening shut-in behavior, and no one suffered more than the already-asocial Foster cousins. Normally they went to our market every other day to buy a plucked hanging duck or some such thing, presumably for their suppers.
A week passed where they didn't, my own unwitting spies informed me. So what were they eating? They had no garden on their property, and they didn't luncheon socially. My Wanda had a dark effect on my warm stewing personality, I realized, when I entertained the thought that one of the cousins was perhaps eating the other.
If that was the case the disturbed man would certainly need some company, before the cell or the noose, to remind him what life looked like and return to him some illuminated perspective. I knew I would be unwanted, but I resolved to check on them regardless. As an excuse I brought along a bag stuffed with tailoring supplies, the pretense being that I was growing bored without an established job in town and I was going around offering to do simple clothing repair.
The day was as good as it could have been, given the stifling wool cloak pulled over us. My shave was fresh, Wanda's breath was still in my chest like a hot drink at the back of my throat, and there wasn't so much as a mud puddle on my way to the Foster home. Before I knocked, I stopped and listened.