Scarecrow's Key

Chapter Three

Linker lived on the fifth floor of the disused east wing of the palace. Long ago there had been an infestation of cowmites and the entire floor had been sprayed with poison and roped off. Linker moved in almost immediately after the exterminators had left, claiming immunity to the poison. It never occurred to anyone that Linker might have let the cowmites in just to clear the floor for himself.

Ambrose couldn’t help noticed strange, little details about the place as he and DG made their way towards Linker’s room. One leg of each chair was painted with green stripes, for instance, and there were small pots of round river stones sitting on each windowsill.

DG knocked tentatively on the double doors of the largest suite on the floor, originally meant as a guest room. It was only just grand enough for a member of the lowest lower gentry, which was why no one minded all that much when Linker took over.

The door on the left opened a crack and Ambrose could only make out a beady hazel eye staring out of the gloom.

“What?” Linker hissed.

“Er…hi, Linker.” DG said, trying to peer into the room above his head. “How are you?”

“I’ve just had a haircut.” Linker replied, opening the door about a fraction of an inch wider.

Ambrose smiled encouragingly. “So…you’re doing pretty good, then?”

“Yes.” Linker opened the door all the way.

Linker wasn’t just odd, he was odd-looking. His face seemed to appear at once ancient and childlike, with eyes that looked a tad too small for his face and eyebrows that looked too big. He had a short, scraggly beard and close-cropped hair that didn’t seem to be any particular color at all, a sort of grey-brown-black-blonde-tawny-red. Linker never wore shoes, but his feet were so filthy that from a distance he appeared to be wearing black slippers. He had perfect teeth. His clothing was dingy, but clean, and the whole outfit was so badly mismatched, being comprised of various bits of whatever-he-could-find, that it almost seemed to blend together perfectly in a big mishmash of disorder.

Linker was hard to define.

“We need your help.” DG once again procured the key and handed it over. “Do you know what this key unlocks?”

Linker held the key less than an inch from his face, and stared at it crosseyed. “…Maybe. Either the brass room or the tarnished room…maybe the room of threes…or the tasseled room.”

DG glared at Ambrose and leaned close to him. “Just what kind of fox is he weird like?”

“I’m partial to Fennecs,” Linker supplied without looking away from the key, or seeming at all offended.

DG blinked, then leaned close enough that her chin was resting on Ambrose’s shoulder and whispered. “How the hell did he hear me?”

“I have ears on both sides, Dorothea Gayl.” Still holding the key up like a rapier, Linker took off down the corridor. He walked funny, like he kept almost falling forward but then a black foot would shoot out just in time.

Ambrose and DG exchanged looks before following him.

Linker opened a door down the hall and held it open while Ambrose and DG cautiously stepped inside. It was an old office, every available surface covered with things made of brass. Empty mirror frames, ornament boxes, door hinges, statuettes that once adorned mantels and trophy cases all over the palace, now gathered dust here in the disused hall reigned over by Linker.

“Where did you get all of these?” DG asked as she walked tentatively down a row of tall brass umbrella stands.

“Found them.” Linker picked up a fat jewelry case and tried the key in the lock. The key didn’t turn, so Linker put the box down and went on.

Ambrose bent over a low table to inspect a pair of sewing scissors. He distinctly remembered overhearing Emmeline talking to another laundry girl about having lost her favorite pair of scissors. She had been quite distressed at the time.

“Did you steal them?” He asked sharply.

Linker fixed him with a baleful glare. “I’m not a stealer. I’m a finder. I find things that get lost and keep them in order so they don’t get lost again.”

Ambrose picked up the scissors and held them up. “Just where did you find these?”

“The Laundress Emmeline Qliqe dropped them on the stairs. Tried to call her back, but she ran away. I thought she’d want them back, so I kept them safe for her. She hasn’t come for them yet.”

Ambrose narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but decided to let the argument drop. He slid the scissors into his pocket. “I’ll give them back next time I see her.”

Linker shrugged and turned to try the key in an abandoned padlock. The Finder was offended, but he still had the manners to pretend not to notice when the Princess leaned close to the Chief Advisor and whispered, in a shrill mockery of the laundress’s voice, “Is that a pair of scissors in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”, nor when the Advisor elbowed her in the ribs.

When it was established that the Brass Room did not hold the lock to which belonged the key, Linker led them up the hall to a much smaller room filled with things festooned with decorative tassels. These were mostly cushions, articles of clothing, and lampshades, but there were a few chests sporting locks. The key unlocked none of them, so our party journeyed to the Room of Threes, filled with things sporting three prongs. Mostly candelabras, nothing with a lock. Onward to the Tarnished Room. Many boxes, lots of jewelry, crates and crates full of old silverware, nothing to match the key.

Back out in the corridor, Linker tapped the key against his bearded chin and frowned.

“Tricky, this trinket.” He mused. “ Where say did you find it?”

“Emmeline found it in my coat pocket.” Ambrose supplied. When Linker raised his eyebrows, the Advisor quickly added. “When she was mending it.”

Linker tilted his head, then walked to the window. On the sill sat another pot full of stones, but this one had a difference from the others. Out of the center of the stones poked a tiny green plant-sprout. Linker stroked the thick green skin of the plant and gazed outside at the red-sparkling lake.

“I find things,” he said at length. “All I have shown you is lost. Perhaps, you are searching for a thing that is exactly where it is supposed to be.”

DG sighed in frustration. “Well, we don’t know where that is either!”

Linker turned just enough to regard DG from the corner of one eye. “You forgot?”

“Yes,” DG said. “The key goes to something of mine, but I can’t remember what.”

Linker turned fully, revealing a bright smile. “Why did you not say so? You have lost a memory, and I find lost things. Come.”

Linker turned and hurried into the last room at the back of the hall. When he opened the door to let DG and Ambrose inside, they saw that it was an enormous library. Linker rushed into the room and threw open the curtains. The tall windows faced east, so the full glare of the setting sun did not set the library ablaze as it had the ballroom, but still there was enough pale golden light to illuminate the room.

Ambrose approached a bookshelf and examined the titles written along the spines of the heavy, leather-bound books.

Year of the Delighted Owl, Vernal Equinox-Summer Solstice

Year of the Duck, Autumnal Equinox-Winter Solstice

Year of the Slightly Rotten Teacake, Vernal Equinox-Summer Solstice

“Datebooks,” He murmured to himself.

“Correct, Ambrose Approaching.” Linker walked swiftly along the shelves, running his fingers up and down the spines of books as he searched for the proper tome. “I’m a Finder. Lavender Gayl told Linker to keep lost things, and I do. I keep lost objects and lost memories. I see, I know, I have all that is forgotten.”

Linker approached DG and dropped several thick volumes into her arms. “These are all six annuals of your life before Azkadellia Gayl murdered you. Search these.”

DG was a little shocked at the matter-of-fact way Linker spoke of the crime her sister had committed. Truthfully, she was also a little bit impressed. People usually skirted around it.

“Thank you, Mr. Linker.” She said.

Linker pressed the key into DG’s hand. “You may look. I will go.”

With that, Linker turned and strode out of the Memory Room.

For nearly an hour, DG and Ambrose sat on the floor of the Memory Room, flicking through the books. It was astounding, nearly every detail of every day was recorded in Linker’s cramped scrawl.

“Ooh, listen to this.” DG wiggled her rear and cleared her throat importantly as she held up Year of the Broken Candle, Autumnal Equinox-Winter Solstice. “’Oktobhur 8-Lord Ambrose Approaching had a visitor, a Miss Leonna Vimp.’ What’s all this about?”

Ambrose closed Year of the Clam, Vernal Equinox-Summer Solstice with a loud snap that sent a cloud of dust puffing up into the air. “That is absolutely none of your business, or Linker’s. I could really give your mother an earful, hiring some shut-in loony to spy on everyone in the palace. It’s an invasion of people’s privacy.”

DG merely chuckled. “Man, I’ll bet the bitches-in-waiting would love to get their little hands on these. It’d be like Sneaky-Twofaced-Gossip Christmas.”

“Just remember why we’re here in the first place.” Ambrose wearily picked up Year of the Very Pointy Rabbit, Vernal Equinox-Summer Solstice and began to skim the first pages.

“Hey, look at this!”

Ambrose exhaled loudly through his nostrils. “DG, please, I’ve had enough gossip for today-“

“No, I’ve found something!” DG knee-walked over to Ambrose and plunked down beside him, pushing the open book into his lap. She pointed at the entry under Mayye 13.

‘Princess Dorothea Gayl’s birthday. Princess Azkadellia Gayl presented her sister with a music box decorated with a brass frame and white silk paneling. The Princess Dorothea Gayl was later seen hiding the gift underneath a stone pagoda in the seventh garden.’

“Do you think this is it?” Ambrose asked excitedly.

In response, DG pulled and Ambrose to his feet and took off running through the door and out of the Hall of Lost Things.

There was nothing left of the second sun but a fading stripe of pink on the horizon when DG and Ambrose passed beneath the vine-coated arch at the entrance of the seventh garden. Already a group of pages were traveling along the pebbled paths, lighting lanterns that filled the garden with a muted bluish glow.

The seventh garden was farthest from the palace building, and did not receive as much maintenance as the other six. It was comprised mainly of thickly-knit vine trees and wild berry bushes, with a stone bench or statue thrown in here or there only to be reclaimed by moss and branches.

DG’s boots crunched wetly on the pebbles as she walked swiftly into the center of the garden with her skirts hiked up. The last of the pages shot the two of them a suspicious glare as he exited the garden. Ambrose nearly snorted. Awfully uppity for someone who just wandered around turning lights on and off all day.

“It’s in here, somewhere.” DG looked around, frowning.

“Good luck finding it.” Ambrose sighed and dropped onto a vine-choked tree stump right beneath a lantern. “This garden’s more overgrown than my Great Aunt Immogene’s underarms.”

“TMI, Glitch.” DG dropped to her knees in front of a promising-looking moss-covered lump and began to dig.

After unearthing a small granite cherub, DG moved on to a second lump at the edge of a flowerbed. Ambrose glanced nervously into the surrounding trees. One heard talk of courtiers who wandered too near the edge of the grounds at dark and getting snatched by beasts. Rock tigers, Groatles, hungry packs of elves. Of course, any rational adult knew that these were just horror stories invented to keep the adolescent palace staff from sneaking off into the bushes with one another, but Ambrose couldn’t help hearing a Groatle’s hoof in every twig snap and hiss of the wind.

“Maybe we should come back tomorrow, during the day.” He suggested.

“Not when we’re this close.” DG stood up and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a dark streak of soil.

“DG, you’re tired. The music box won’t scamper away in the night.”

The Princess growled in frustration and began to pace back and forth in front of her friend. “I should be able to remember this.”

“So should I. But we’re both…” Ambrose trailed off, noticing that DG had been staring at him for the past several seconds. “Is everything alright?”

DG lunged towards him and forced his knees apart.

“Wh-what are you doing?!” He yelped.

It was here that Ambrose, in his surprise, made a movement that has yet to be defined in any human language. Something of a full-body spasm combined with that peculiar floppy thing fish do out of water, and a general flailing of the limbs. We’ll call it a spwiggle. Ambrose spwiggled with such violence that he toppled backwards into a thick growth of dockpagaggle berries. When he emerged, his entire body was so splattered with red berry juice that he looked like he had been fired upon by an entire battalion armed with pistols that shot dinner forks instead of bullets.

DG didn’t notice any of this, as she was frantically clawing at the stump Ambrose had previously been sitting on.

“DG?” Ambrose crept up next to her, cautious of a second attack.

“Help me get the vines off.” She grunted.

Obediently, Ambrose grabbed a fistful of vines and ripped it away. Together they tore away years of vegetation and muck. Little by little, a shape began to form as the vines fell away.

“You found it!” DG cried, running her hands down the stonework of the small, ornamental pagoda. She scraped away the moss at the base to uncover a dark opening, just the right size to slip something underneath.

Ambrose grabbed her wrist. “There might be snakes.”

DG growled impatiently, grabbed a stick, and jabbed it violently into the hole.

“There,” She grunted, flinging the stick into the bushes.

Clearly she would not be deterred, so Ambrose gave up. If DG got herself bitten by some poisonous beastie and died then it was her own fault, because he certainly wouldn’t be sucking any venom out of anybody.

DG slid her pale hand into the opening, and then her arm all the way up to the elbow. For a few seconds she felt around blindly, frowning and worrying the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Ambrose unconsciously laid a hand on her shoulder, tensing to pull her away at the first indication of trouble.

DG’s face suddenly changed. Just as Ambrose’s thoughts leapt back to snakes, she carefully drew her arm out of the hollow, clutching a small, square bundle wrapped in barkcloth.

“That’s it,” Ambrose unwittingly let his voice slip into a reverent whisper.

DG cradled the object in her lap and gently brushed she dirt from the protective cloth. “What if it doesn’t work any more?”

“It works,” Ambrose wavered around this certainty, not quite trusting it because he wasn’t sure where it came from, but unable to make himself ignore it. “I…think I made it.”

DG’s eyes never left the bundle, but the tilt of her eyebrows was quizzical. She slipped her thumb under one flap of the coarse fabric and unfolded it. One corner was revealed; a white silk corner with brass ornamentation. DG’s breath caught and she quickly but carefully pulled the rest of the cloth away.

The music box was small, but not too delicate for six year old hands. The silk had yellowed with age, but had not faded thanks to the shelter of the hollow and the cloth, so it was the color of buttermilk. The brass edges had dulled with neglect, but still shone weakly like the sleepy eyes of a small child who has stayed up late to wait for its father to come home.

“I made this,” Ambrose repeated. He lifted the music box up to his face and ran the pad of his thumb along the brass edge of the lid, remembering.

Only days before DG’s sixth birthday celebration, Azkadellia had snuck down to his workshop in the middle of the night. He hadn’t been asleep anyway, being able to keep at work for days on momentum alone, but he had acted greatly affronted all the same. Little DG always shrank before an adult’s disapproval, but Azkedellia had breezed about in her bunny slippers, giving him directions while he bemusedly sat and made sketches. Once the Princess had been satisfied, Ambrose gave her his spare pair of goggles and pulled another chair up to his work table. He’d had to pile books on the chair so she could see over the table, and use rubber bands to secure the adult-sized goggles to her child-sized head, but Azkadellia had puffed up importantly all the same.

Ambrose now held the result of so much toil and gentle bullying in his thin, spidery hands. DG took the key out of her pocket, inserted it in the lock, and turned it.

The music box whirred and opened to reveal a little porcelain figure of a woman in a flowing gown holding the wings of a raven in a blue tailcoat. The mechanism deep within the box clicked, and the figures began to spin slowly as a gentle, tinkling melody sounded.

DG leaned against Ambrose and lightly rested her fingertips on the silk, humming along with the music. After a while her disjointed hums blossomed into a soft lullaby sung sweetly but with hesitation, as if she was only remembering the words as she went along.

“I’m gonna be borne into soon the sky

‘Cause I’m a bird girl

And the bird girls go to Heaven

I’m a bird girl

And the bird girls can fly

Bird girls can fly…”

The music box whirred again and closed as the song ended. DG placed the key on top of the closed lid and sighed.

“That was my last birthday before…” She trailed off.

“She loves you.” Ambrose said softly. “When you girls were small, she thought the suns rose and set on you, and she still does. Azke-D’s just...frightened.”

DG sighed again and butted her head against his shoulder affectionately. “You were so good to us when we were children.”

“I was scared of you. The two of you were smarter than me, and you knew it.”

“No one’s smarter than you, Glitch.” DG stood up and brushed off her skirts, though she needn’t have bothered. She was absolutely filthy, and the dress was ruined.

This particular fact did not escape Ambrose’s notice. He got to his feet, still holding the music box, and looked his friend up and down with a growing smirk.

“You look like a mud-squirrel,” He chortled.

DG stuck out her tongue childishly and started trying to dig a dirt clod out of her bodice.

It was at this moment than an unexpected and comically ill-timed thing happened. There was a mighty swish and a clatter of pebbles, the unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked, and a shouted expletive.

“Hello, Cain.” Ambrose said brightly, turning around and staring down the barrel of the former Tin Man’s revolver. “You could hurt somebody with that, you know.”

Wyatt Cain rolled his eyes and stowed his gun in its hostler. “I knew it would be something like this. Well, not quite like this…”

The Captain of the Palace Guard surveyed the scene with unsurprised exasperation. There was the Scientist, looking like he’d been mauled by something then dragged through a hedge backward, and the Princess, covered in dirt and with her arm jammed halfway down her bodice.

DG yanked her arm out and threw away a handful of soil, coughing in embarrassment. “We were just-“

Cain held up his hands. “I don’t even want to know.”

“Let me guess,” DG muttered. “Mummy got scared and sent you to hunt me down like a wild animal?”

“I bet they weren’t expecting you to actually look like one when they found you.” Ambrose giggled.

DG and Cain both shot him identical glares. Ambrose merely waved them away and dismissively asked if their mothers had ever told them that their faces would stick that way. He then received a good thump upside the head for his trouble. As Ambrose followed DG and Cain back through the six gardens towards the castle, the two of them bickering quietly amongst themselves, he noted the amount of damage people seemed to keep doing to his head, and wondered if it might behoove him to invest in a helmet.

DG had been hauled off by a battalion of maids to be properly bathed and dressed for dinner. Cain had been warmly thanked and congratulated, then ushered off to the study of the Queen’s consort, Mr. Ahamo, to have a brandy and talk about mannish things. This left Ambrose, tired and filthy but nonetheless satisfied with the afternoon’s venture, to amble back to his apartments with the music box tucked under his arm and a promise to DG to restore it to the best of his ability.

It was such a lovely night, though, that the scientist thought he might take the long way home, past the servant’s quarters. As he passed through the little enclosed courtyard, under crisscrossing clotheslines hung with the blue and brown staff uniforms, he happened to notice a small pot of night-blooming whitebell flowers. Ambrose moved closer to the plant so as to inspect the blossoms, when, coincidence of coincidences, he found that right beside him was the door to Emmeline’s room.

It would certainly be impolite to pass through without stopping in to say hello, wouldn’t it?

When Emmeline answered the door, Ambrose saw that she was already in her nightie and bathrobe and that her hair was freed from its usual tight bun and floated around her head in an amorphous cloud of blonde frizz. He also noticed her round face slip from a look of hospitable cheerfulness into one of disbelieving horror.

“AMBROSE!” She yowled.

Ambrose tilted his head. This was not going quite as planned. “Er…”

“What happened?!”

“Um…”

Before Ambrose could even begin to form a coherent though, Emmeline grabbed him by the lapels, yanked him bodily into the room, and shoved him down onto the bed. Here Ambrose perked up a bit, because things were starting to get back on track, but then the paralyzing bewilderment returned when Emmeline ran into the washroom and emerged laden with bandages.

It was here Ambrose thought to look down at himself, and remembered that he was coated with the sticky red residue of the dockpagaggle berries, which incidentally did look quite a bit like fresh blood.

“Oh, no…” Ambrose laughed. “I’m…It’s only berry juice. I fell into a bush.”

Emmeline heaved a sigh and dropped the medical equipment into a nearby chair, then placed a hand on her chest. “Lawks, sir! You scared the life out of me.”

“Not my original intention, I assure you.” Ambrose grinned, then realized he’d forgotten what his original intention was. Er…

Oh, yes! Ambrose leaned to the side and took the little brass pair of scissors out of his pocket, then held it out to Emmeline. “I thought you might like these back.”

Emmeline’s round, pink face lit up and she darted forward to reverently pluck the scissors from Ambrose’s offering palm. “Faeries above! Where did you find these?”

“It’s a long story.” Ambrose took that moment to admire Emmeline’s bathrobe. It was delightfully pink and frilly. It was so endearingly girlish, along with the abundance of plushy toys on the bed and the doilies covering every available surface.

Emmeline cradled the scissors against her bounteous chest, absentmindedly tracing the palace crest engraved on one gleaming blade. She looked at him, an improper and glorious smile hiding behind her expression of fixed politeness like the sun behind a flimsy cloud.

“I’ve got time.”

The End

And there’s our warm, fuzzy conclusion. I’d like to mention that the song from the music box is called ‘Bird Gerhl’ and it is by Antony and the Johnsons.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Glambrose forever!

-Zippy