P. S. Moonshy slept every night with Marx under the pillow. It was uncomfortable, but he did it, as a mark of respect. He was sleeping now. Badly.
So, in the neighbouring house, was that other possessor of meaningful initials, Ignatius Quasimodo Gribb.
Elfrida Gribb, being a prig, was filled with a faint nausea as she turned on to the Cobble-way and approached the Elbaroom. She could tolerate it no more than she could Madame Jocasta’s hell-hole; and if she had a complaint to level at her sleeping husband, it was that in his all-embracing love for the town where he had made his home, he could find no place for a condemnation of those two mansions of corruption.
It was, then, an ill-assorted quartet that found itself outside the Elbaroom… Virgil Jones, all of a shamble, slouching beside Flapping Eagle, squinting into the mist; the man called Stone crouching up the cobbled way; and the pale woman astride her pliant donkey.
Elfrida’s eyes met Flapping Eagle’s. She caught her breath.
Blink.
XXXIII Outside the Elbaroom
HOW LONG is an interlude in being? The blink had gone -or so it felt to those who experienced it-almost before it had had time to happen; and yet it had happened, and Elfrida shivered with the chill. She found herself thinking hard about Ignatius, holding his face in her mind’s eye, making him solid enough to clutch. Elsewhere, Jocasta and Media continued their practice with unwonted ferocity; and in the Elbaroom, Flann O’Toole put down the table he had been about to hurl and retreated behind his bar, where his Alsatian bitch stared up at him in confused silence.
– Virgil? asked Flapping Eagle; but Virgil Jones shook his head, uncomprehending. -Some sort of blackout, he said. We must be tired.
– But both of us, Virgil? At the same time?
Virgil shook his head again. -I don’t know, he said, his voice grating on Flapping Eagle’s jangled nerves.
– Let’s go in, said Flapping Eagle. We may as well try and find beds.
Elfrida had heard the name Virgil. Surely not, she thought, surely Mr Jones has not returned? And yet one of the figures in the doorway had a distinct air of Virgil Jones about it. The other… his companion… the one who had stared at her… the face… no, it was the mist and her imagination. He was a stranger. The feather, that proved it. He was a stranger.
One thing is now certain, Elfrida told herself. Whatever hopes of sleep I entertained are in utter disarray. Perhaps the night would be best used in arriving at a solution of this mystery.
Flapping Eagle and Virgil had gone into the Elbaroom.
Elfrida dismounted, and pulling her shawl tightly about her, she stole to the wall of the Elbaroom, to stand between the door and window.
For the first time in her life, Mrs Gribb was deliberately eavesdropping.
XXXIV Inside the Elbaroom
THE SILENCE SPREAD with them as they walked through the long, narrow room. It was as though they exuded some invisible, deadening substance to kill words on people’s lips and stifle movements at their source. It was also a magnetic substance, since the eyes of the numbed were capable only of following the two walking men. Quiet was an alien condition here; the entry of Virgil and Flapping Eagle had somehow altered the element in which these late revellers habitually had their being. Under the shock, too, Flapping Eagle sensed the presence of something more slippery, more dangerous, less predictable in its effects: the emotion of the prison guard whose escaped charge has just returned to his captors of his own free will, or that of the lion faced with a suicidal Christian. Puzzlingly, this emotion seemed to be directed at both of them. Not for the first or last time, Flapping Eagle was consumed with curiosity about his companion’s past. Moreover, though, he was shocked by the looks, almost of recognition, he was receiving himself. And subsequently he found himself-equally confusingly-utterly ignored. As though he shouldn’t have been there, and all present wished he weren’t.
Once they know me, he reassured himself, they will not be hostile. In the face of the blank hush of the Elba-room, it was perhaps an overly optimistic thought.
Noise returned to the bar as abruptly as it had left; and with it, every eye snapped away from the two newcomers. It was an unnerving reversal; they might not have existed as the denizens of the drinking-house exploded into an effusion of speech.
Hunter was gazing at One-Track Peckenpaw with a desperate interest.
– Tell me, he said, a shade too earnestly, about your hunting techniques.
Peckenpaw burst into a voluble speech about trap-laying, stalking, shooting and survival in the wild. All trace of boredom was gone from the Two-Time Kid’s features, replaced by a new-found passion for the hunt. One-Track himself had rarely been so passionate; he spoke of his past as though his life depended on it.
Meanwhile Flann O’Toole seemed to have collapsed completely. He stood, eyes squeezed shut, fists drumming on the bar-top, repeating monotonously: -Holy Mary Mother of God I swear I’ll never drink again. Holy Mary Mother of God I swear I’ll never…
He broke off to be sick into a bucket under the bar.
– Jesu Maria, he groaned.
It was at this point that O’Toole’s Alsatian did an unexpected thing. Worming her way past her vomiting master and under the bar, she launched herself at Virgil Jones, tail wagging, tongue licking, to give the returning man his first taste of welcome. O’Toole looked up, grey-faced; his eyes widened.
– Certainly I don’t believe it, he said. But then the dog always liked him; being closer to animals than human beings he always had a way with ’em. ’Tis Virgil Jones himself an no miasma. Jones the Dig. The grave fool is returned.
Eyes slowly drifted back across the room to Virgil and Flapping Eagle and the big friendly animal leaping about them as they stood stock-still halfway along the bar, next to Peckenpaw and the Two-Time Kid. Flapping Eagle watched the eyes and saw them run through a fast series of expressions. Disbelief first, to echo O’Toole; then wonderment; and finally relief.
– Wal, said Peckenpaw. Jones and a stranger. He gave the word a heavy emphasis.
– Well, well, said Two-Time, two times. Jones and a stranger.
And there were other similar exclamations along the length of the room. Gradually, joviality returned to the night.
Flann O’Toole came out from behind the bar, recovering fast, his ebullience already restored. There was a smile on his face that looked friendly. Looked friendly, Flapping Eagle warned himself. Looking isn’t being.
– His friend, bellowed One-Track Peckenpaw obviously, got a feather in his hair. Reminds me when I scalped an Indian chief. (Laughs, cheers, boos.)
And that sparked a memory in Flapping Eagle. Not of an experience, but of a history. He knew what their arrival reminded him of: old films in the fleapit at Phoenix, illicitly visited. The Redskin enters the Saloon. The boys make fun of him before shooting him. We don’t dig Redskins in this town. We dig holes.
– Dog, said Flann O’Toole to the bitch, be in order. The rebuke heightened Flapping Eagle’s growing qualms, but there was still that pleasant-looking smile carving its way across O’Toole’s face. The Alsatian skulked away behind the bar.
Flann O’Toole’s hands: great hams hanging at the ends of his arms. Strangler’s hands, thought Flapping Eagle. He would remember that thought at another time and place. At the moment they were spread in a gesture of friendship.
– Virgil, boomed O’Toole. Virgil me lad. Is it you it is?
His left hand flashed forward and pinched Virgil mightily on the arm. He had been standing immobile for some time now. Flapping Eagle saw the pain fly across his face and vanish again. His eyes were vacant.