The Order of Odd-Fish (20 page)

“But how could she fool us into thinking she’s two different people?” said Ian.

“Because she’s an actress! She even practically told us her name! It’s the oldest cliché in the book. Unscramble the letters of Duddler Yarue. This is the girl from
Teenage Ichthala
!”

Ian gasped.
“Audrey Durdle?”

“Right, you’ve got me. I knew I’d get caught sooner or later.”

Jo and Ian turned, confounded. Audrey Durdle—for it was she—opened her eyes, nursing the lump on her head. “Nick” was gone, and so was “Lady Agnes” Audrey’s real voice was husky and low, as if she had a slight cold, without a trace of Nick’s boyish drawl or Lady Agnes’s deathly croak. Even her eyes were different—not feeble like Lady Agnes’s, or bright and hard like Nick’s, but sleepily mischievous.

“I’m actually glad you found me out. I don’t know how many more fake quests I had in me, you know?” Audrey smiled uncertainly at Jo and Ian, as if hoping that they’d appreciate the joke, and a little nervous that they wouldn’t.

Jo said, “I’ve seen you on
Teenage Ichthala,
but seeing you here—”

“Oh,
please
don’t talk about that show,” said Audrey, wincing. “I am
so sick
of it. I wish I’d never taken that role. All anyone wants to talk about are those idiotic Ichthala myths. The show bores me to death. The only way I have any fun or meet people is by making up these fake quests.”

Ian snapped out of his astonishment.

“You wanted to…to
have fun
?” he said angrily. “You wanted to
meet people
? We are squires of the Odd-Fish, not your toys to play with! We could’ve been doing other quests! Real ones!”

Audrey had looked shyly hopeful, but all at once she froze in embarrassment.

“Ian, don’t be petty,” said Jo quickly.

“No, he’s right. I guess I was wasting your time.” Audrey looked away. “I didn’t call you at first because I was tired of doing this Lady Agnes thing. But then one day I was shooting in East Squeamings when you two ran through the set, chased by all those Wormbeards and the police, and I thought,
Here are two people I want to meet
.”

Ian said, “That was not exactly our finest hour.”

“I don’t care,” said Audrey. “I just want to see your lodge. I want to meet the other squires.”

Jo whistled. “If we took you to the lodge, Nora’s head would explode.”

“Who’s Nora?” said Audrey. “What’s wrong with her head?”

“She’s a
Teenage Ichthala
fanatic,” said Ian. “If she met you, she’d tie you down and slap you until you’d told her every last thing about that show.”

Audrey hesitated, then finally said, “But…can I really come?”

“Of course,” said Jo. She looked over at Ian.

“I’d be glad to have you,” said Ian.

For the first time, Audrey smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

Audrey walked with Jo and Ian back to the Odd-Fish lodge. It was a beautiful night, and the city felt young and new; all of Eldritch City glimmered around them as they walked and talked. Jo felt something fragile, as if she was on the verge of something that was all the better because she didn’t know exactly what it was. The streets were invitingly dark and the lights seemed fresh and bold: glaring lights over the boulevards, lonely lights in apartment windows, garish lights in the shops, the red flash of a lit match, the buttery glow of the moon. Jo looked from Ian to Audrey and back again as they talked and walked, their faces passing in and out of the light. They took the long way home.

J
O
and Audrey became fast friends. Audrey dropped by the lodge often, usually in some new disguise: one day she was a stuttering deliveryman, the next a hapless tourist, and once she fooled everyone into thinking she was Sir Festus. Audrey had a seemingly inexhaustible collection of false whiskers, men’s clothes from thirty years ago, and fat suits.

At first the other squires didn’t believe Audrey was really
the
Audrey Durdle; only after she reluctantly acted the Ichthala part, with its peculiar voice and mannerisms, did everyone shout with recognition and crowd around her in wonder. Audrey also admitted she was the “Lady Agnes” who had sent them on so many ridiculous quests. Some of the squires were furious at first, but Audrey was too charming for anyone to be angry with her for long.

Then there was Nora. When they’d first met, Nora had said, trying to stay calm, “So, is it really true that the Belgian Prankster wrote
Teenage Ichthala
?”

“Oh, he’s the one who wrote that crap?” said Audrey. “I just read whatever they give me.”

Nora flinched, slightly daunted, but pressed on. “Still, you can’t deny that the nefarious plans of the Silent Sisters are foretold in your show! Doesn’t that scare you?”

“You don’t seriously
believe
that Silent Sisters nonsense?” said Audrey, surprised. “That’s just fantasy, you know.”

The expression that came over Nora was like watching two speeding trains collide. Her face went from incomprehension to shock, pity, and then barely restrained contempt in a matter of seconds. “Well, of all the—whatever,” said Nora, and for a few days treated Audrey coolly.

Audrey hadn’t meant to be rude; to make up for it, she gave Nora the scripts for all the episodes of
Teenage Ichthala
that hadn’t been released yet. “We finished filming the series last week,” said Audrey. “So I don’t need them anymore, anyway.”

At first Nora was elated and threw her arms around Audrey, but then she suddenly pulled away, gasping, “Wait—did you say
Teenage Ichthala
is ending?”

“Yeah, we wrapped it all up last week,” said Audrey. “Those are the last eight episodes.”

Nora looked as though she had been stabbed. Clutching the piles of scripts to her chest, she whispered, “Excuse me…I’ve got…a lot of work to do….”

After that day, Nora was rarely seen anywhere but at the café around the corner from the lodge, where she pored over the scripts obsessively, scrawling notes in the margins, constructing bewildering charts of arrows and boxes and labels. Sometimes Jo would ask her what she was doing, but Nora would only answer, “No time. I’ll tell you later. It’s all here, Jo—
everything,
” and then go back to her notes, trembling with excitement.

Jo’s life became more interesting with Audrey around. Audrey breezed through the lodge as though she owned the place, opening doors and exploring places that Jo hadn’t even guessed existed. Sometimes they were caught straying into forbidden rooms, but if a knight scolded them, Audrey’s face would go blank, as though the knight were speaking a foreign language. When the knight was gone, Audrey would go back to doing whatever she pleased.

One forbidden room was Dame Myra’s greenhouse, a glass fortress on the roof of the lodge full of freakish plants either nearly extinct or the unhappy results of Dame Myra’s crossbreeding experiments. The squires stayed away from the greenhouse. Rumor was that a couple of years ago, Dame Myra’s squire had carelessly brushed against a shrub, and a few days later, leaves grew all over his body; a month later, his skin became bark-like; finally, his feet sprouted roots. There was nothing to be done. He was discreetly planted outside the city and not spoken of much anymore. Dame Myra hadn’t had a squire since.

So when Jo and Audrey sneaked into the greenhouse, they crept very cautiously down the aisles of plants, careful not to touch the bizarre flowers and weeds. A clump of chartreuse moss muttered scathing insults as they passed; a writhing, hanging lump reached out oily vines, desperate for affection; deliriously colored butterflies as big as Jo’s head fluttered all around, and the air felt warm and heavy with moist smells.

Audrey prodded a large, fleshy mass. “Jo, what’s this plant?”

“That’s not a plant. That’s Dame Myra.”

Audrey frowned. “Well, how odd.”

Dame Myra sighed, got up, and trudged away to water some beeping crystal-like flowers on the other side of the greenhouse. Audrey followed, chattering casually at her. Dame Myra seemed alarmed that anyone would talk to her and kept casting confused glances back at Jo. Amazingly, Jo and Audrey never got in trouble for this or anything else they did; there was an air of innocent privilege about Audrey that somehow excused her.

One afternoon Audrey and Jo picked the lock to Dame Delia’s secret dissection lab, and they spent hours examining dozens of Dame Delia’s dead monsters. A huge spider was still spread on the dissection table, its underbelly opened up to expose its colorful guts; other creatures floated in barrels, hung from the ceiling, or were squashed away in drawers; still others were sliced into sheets and bound like books. Audrey stole what looked like a furry starfish and hid it in Ian’s bed, and that night Ian’s roar of shock woke up the entire lodge, and Audrey and Jo had to bite their pillows to muffle their hysterical giggling. (This was part of Audrey and Jo’s campaign to torture Ian until he got rid of his mustache. When he finally shaved it off, Audrey organized a small funeral for it.)

Sir Oliver’s astronomical observatory wasn’t off-limits, but the squires and even the knights stayed away lest they disturb the great man at his work. But when Jo and Audrey knocked on his door, Sir Oliver opened it with relief and invited them in for a tour.

“You came just in time,” said Sir Oliver. “My dithering isn’t what it used to be. It’s become harder and harder to fritter away the entire day.”

Sir Oliver showed them around his observatory, packed with telescopes, star charts, and whirring machines. “I don’t know the first thing about astronomy!” Sir Oliver admitted cheerfully. “As a result, I’ve done some first-rate dithering in here. You see, I keep all the equipment broken, so I can fiddle with it for hours.”

Jo asked, “If all you do is dither, how do you manage to do anything useful?”

“Useful…?” said Sir Oliver, as if this was a new word to him.

“Like when you found the lodge and brought it back?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sir Oliver brightly. “But I do know that when I was young, I noticed that the more I wanted something, the less likely it was that I’d get it. Therefore, it stood to reason that the
less
I wanted something, the
more
likely it was that I’d get it. The lesson is clear: if I have a problem, I ignore it—but I ignore it in an advanced, sophisticated way. Sooner or later the problem usually solves itself. Such is dithering.”

“How did you learn how to dither?” said Audrey.

“Practice,” said Sir Oliver gravely. “For twenty years I lived in my mother’s basement and did nothing at all. It is not a training to be undertaken lightly.”

Jo loved exploring with Audrey, but it was on her own that she found her favorite thing in the lodge. One evening, while creeping through the crawl spaces, she discovered a peephole to Sir Alasdair’s and Dame Isabel’s bedroom. It was only nine o’clock, but the Coveneys were already in their matching pajamas, reading in separate beds.

Jo saw Sir Alasdair had a sly look; he said something to Dame Isabel that Jo couldn’t hear, and they both excitedly kicked off their sheets and ran over to something that looked like a homemade organ, an ungainly engine connected by hundreds of wires and rubber tubes to an oak cabinet of labeled bottles. Another tube connected the cabinet to a gas mask.

Sir Alasdair sat at the keyboard, Dame Isabel strapped on the gas mask, and after adjusting some switches and dials, Sir Alasdair started to play the organ. Jo didn’t hear any music, but Dame Isabel began dancing in a wild, looping jig, one hand waving around frantically, the other clutching her gas mask, huffing and snorting with gusto.

The next day Jo and Audrey sneaked into the Coveneys’ room to investigate. They discovered the machine was a
smells organ
—each key on the keyboard, when pressed, caused a different smell to spray into the gas mask. They also found handwritten sheet music, Sir Alasdair’s attempts to write the very first “Symphony for the Nose.”

Jo and Audrey spent a happy afternoon abusing the smells organ. One of Jo’s smell-songs started with a trill of leather, seaweed, and popcorn, then climbed scales of soap, hot sand, and burning hair, and finally burst in a flourish of rose, blood, and wet dog. Audrey played arpeggios of steak, cigar, boy sweat, hair spray, and horses, and then noodled with nutmeg, ozone, and lemon. Jo discovered a sublime chord of autumn leaves, banana pie, morning breath, and cilantro.

Then they heard Sir Alasdair clumping up the stairs. They escaped just in time. But the next day the Coveneys’ door had a new lock, and this time it was too hard to pick.

But sometimes, late at night, Jo would sneak in the crawl space and peek again into the Coveneys’ room. And occasionally she would see Sir Alasdair grunting as he played the organ, and Dame Isabel pressing the gas mask to her face, waving her free arm in the air, staggering in jerky ecstasy. Jo didn’t know why she liked to watch this. It was embarrassing and strange. But it was also the picture of happiness. She watched it hungrily.

On Tuesdays the squires met at a café near the lodge. It was a dingy, nameless place, its walls yellowed with decades of smoke and stains; an ornery dog skulked under the tables, biting ankles, and the food was godawful, but Jo felt at home here. It reminded her of her old café back in Dust Creek. It even had a similar smell, of cigarettes, burnt coffee, and grease.

The squires held weekly meetings at the café to help each other figure out what their specialties would be. To become an Odd-Fish knight, a squire had to invent a new specialty for the Appendix and write an original article about it. This caused some worry among the squires, for after a thousand years of Odd-Fish history, almost all the good ideas had already been done. All the squires were here, as well as Audrey, who was curious to see what an Odd-Fish squires’ meeting was like.

Today was Nora’s turn to present her theories about
Teenage Ichthala.
Her corner booth was dripping with loose papers, convoluted diagrams, and scrawled-upon napkins; she was standing on her chair, her swirly, snaky black hair even more hyperactive than usual and her lip trembling, as she got ready to speak.

Jo sipped her coffee apprehensively. After their first morning in Eldritch City, Aunt Lily had explained little about the Ichthala. Her answers to Jo’s questions were so vague it almost seemed as if she was holding something back. But almost everyone in Eldritch City was like this. It was as if even to mention the Hazelwoods or the Ichthala were in bad taste. This left Nora, as fanatical and paranoid as she was, as one of Jo’s few sources of information.

“I’ve finally got it,” said Nora, waving Audrey’s scripts around. “I’ve got it—the truth, the secret, everything. It had been there all along, all in these scripts! It just needed to be dug up, brushed off, translated,
solved.
What I’ve found may be invisible to the layman—”

“Or sane people,” said Ian.

“—but I’ve discovered a subtle code running through all these
Teenage Ichthala
episodes. As you all remember—and Ian conveniently ignores—lots of stuff that happens on the show ends up happening in real life. But there are
other
prophecies, too horrible to be explicitly described, hinted at in these coded messages.”

At this Jo pricked up her ears. She hadn’t heard this one before. She put down her coffee.

“From these scripts, I can predict what the Ichthala will do in the next couple of months.” Nora paused. “And what the Belgian Prankster will do
to her.
”

Jo bit her lip. For weeks she had managed, if not completely to put the Ichthala out of her mind, at least to distract herself out of thinking about it too much. The more time that passed, the more she was convinced it all had to be a mistake—that her birth was simply misunderstood.