Disclaimer: Chapter one.
First list of the convention! The five words and phrases from it are used throughout the chapter. If you want, you could find the list on The Muse Bunny and go along looking for where I used them.
The next day, I was greeted with an even stranger dish for dinner: horned, blue lobster that looked more like a humongous beetle with pincers than a shellfish. Grams smiled broadly as I looked upon it with wide, confused eyes, wondering what on earth this creature was and how I was supposed to crack it open with that weird-looking shell.
"Oh, Little Eggplant!" She shook her head laughing. "Just pull it apart from the seam down the middle. See?" She reached over the table and pried apart the shell with her own bare hands, revealing the white, steaming flesh beneath. It's aroma reached me, and my mouth instantly filled with saliva. It was really too bad that I missed her cooking it, because it smelled like she used some exotic spices this time as well.
"Fresh from the boat! This was the smallest one, so they were selling the little guy cheaper. But he's still in good condition. He was running around the kitchen quite a bit, though, so I had to put him out of his misery before you got home."
Looking back, that was a terrible lie; we'd kept shellfish alive of every kind in that kitchen without having any trouble containing them before, but I was young then and didn't know that Blue Hercules Lobster moved and acted like any other lobster. I took her word for gospel and proceeded to tuck a napkin in my collar.
That lobster was absolutely delicious. Perhaps I took good food for granted then because Grams was such a wonderful cook, but I still remember that particular dinner very well, down to the tangy, savory butter sauce with finely ground nutmeg that I soaked up from my plate with a roll. After having my fill, I got up and put on my snow boots and coat, saying goodbye. I was going to go see Gauzi.
"All right, Zeffie. Be careful, now."
I gave a little start when she said that; despite how dangerous the pier is supposed to be, she never gave a warning before when I went off by myself. But she didn't offer any more when I looked back at her, so I wrote it off and went on my way.
An hour went by of me stamping through the snow alone (making shapes and figures in it along the way) before I was finally able to find Gauzi. He was huddled behind a snow mound as if he was playing hide-and-seek or keeping cover for a snowball fight. His head poked over like he was trying to get a look at his opponent. I thought about strolling up and greeting him, but if he was hiding from another kid, I didn't want to give away his position. I sneaked right up beside him. "Hey, Gauzi."
Gauzi nearly jumped out of his skin and over the snow mound when I spoke, and had to cover his own mouth so that he wouldn't shout out. He looked over at me in total surprise that turned into a mix of relief and anger. "Zeff!" he hissed. "Don't sneak up on me like that, will ya'?"
"Who're ya' hiding from?" I whispered back.
He frowned worriedly and gestured over the snow. I poked my head up and saw two men having a conversation; a burlier, shorter man and a tall, stick-like one. The stick held some pad under his arm. The bearish man chewed on the tip of his stubbed cigar angrily while he growled on in his speech.
"As I was saying, this sort of thing is impossible without…" The stick man stopped abruptly. "Colden… Are you chewing? You know I hate chewers."
Colden growled around his cigar. "Lay off, Clyde. This business makes me nervous. It's not like I'm chewing tobacco."
"You very much are chewing tobacco," Clyde responded with his snooty, ineffectual tone. "Those over-expensive and aromatically-offensive cigars of yours are wrapped tobacco leaves."
"I mean I'm not hocking it up everywhere. You need to get over your spit-phobia, Clyde."
"It is not a 'spit phobia'," he responded, but didn't offer any further comment. They went still for a moment before he took a glance at his watch. "Ah, I think enough time has passed. Let's go visit on our dear friend Torzi, shall we?"
I looked over to Gauzi, surprised by what I just heard. "What did he just say?"
"Shh!" he spat at me.
Colden grinned a wide, vicious smile and tossed away his smoldering cigar stub into some dirty slush. It went out with a fizzle. "Yeah, I think your right. Let's go." The two men started to leave. Gauzi got up to shadow them, and I was forced to follow Gauzi. They led us to one of the large, dilapidated buildings that used to be a respectable hotel before bigger and better hotels opened up farther from the docks and the fish smell. As we trailed them in, we both felt a profound sense of dread, accentuated when we saw Gauzi pick up a crowbar from a table and whack it in his other hand a few times, chuckling to himself.
Gauzi swallowed hard and whispered, "Uh, Z-Zeff?"
"What?"
"W-we aren't going to… ya' know…"
"Know what?"
"We won't be skipping off into the sunset anytime soon, will we?"
I looked at him with profound confusion. "Huh?"
"You know…" he made a cutting motion on his neck accompanied with the chhhlck! sound.
"Stupid!" I hissed, shaking in fear but fronting anger at his mistake on an already idiotic euphemism, "It's 'riding off into the sunset' you know!" I shook my head. "Why are we following them? How do they know your dad?"
"I dunno. I saw 'im talk with them before, but I didn't listen in. He's been missing since last night and I didn't know where he was. But I heard them talking about him before you showed up and thought maybe they knew something so I followed." He frowned. "I think… I think I shouldn't 'a done that, now. I shouldn't 'a gotten ya' into it, either."
Maybe I should have been upset at Gauzi for dragging me into it, but it was exciting, even if I was shivering in my shoes. "Don't worry about it. We have to find your dad, right?" The two men started walking again, and we continued to follow. After a bit of a walk, they came to the door for the stairs, strangely locked. Clyde unlocked it and gestured Colden to go in ahead. Colden stomped without patience into the stairwell and, from what we could tell from our vantage point, down the stairs. Clyde followed in and locked the door behind him.
"Now what are we gonna do?" Gauzi whined, "We can't go home yet!"
"We'll have to find another way." I started looking around for another door to the stairwell, but Gauzi found something first; an old laundry chute. There was one thing wrong with it, though.
"There's a hole at the top!" I said, "We'll plummet down who knows how far!"
"I can get over it," he said. He was tall enough to stretch over it, unlike myself. "Then I'll help you. Okay?"
"No way!" I shook my head. "I'm finding a different way!"
"Suit yourself. I'm gonna go this way." With that, he went in.
It didn't take much searching before I discovered another opening in the walls; it had a feather duster, some odd sink dishes, and an old spray bottle in it. A rope was handing down the middle, strung through two holes. I couldn't see the back for the darkness in the building, so I crawled in, thinking it was just another laundry chute, but in better repair.
The floor gave out under me and I plummeted down into the basement shrieking. The rope zipped past my cheek as I went, and I fell back into the wall to avoid getting a painful rope burn on my face, then guarded my head with my arms from the flying dishes. The little chamber I was in landed more softly than I expected, but all the odd cleaning objects slammed about the space and myself. I panicked and yelled for help.
A few seconds later, I heard Gauzi's voice on the other side of what I thought was a wall. "Zeff?"
"Gauzi! Help!"
A pause. "Don't scare me Zeff! Why don't you come out of where you're hiding?"
"…because I'm trapped in an elevator, that's why." I growled in exasperation. Of course, I didn't know it was called a dumbwaiter at the time, but I doubt Gauzi did, either, so knowing wouldn't have helped him find me.
The description did well enough, anyway. "OH!" The door slid up into the wall, and Gauzi was rewarded with the sight of myself wearing a feather duster on my head and a black eye from a soap dish. He helped me out, asked if I was okay, and led me to an opposite part of the basement. We quickly found voices wafting through the otherwise still halls and storage rooms and followed them to an area full of random junk, water tanks, and odd assortments of (mostly broken) hotel furniture.
The two men were there with Gauzi's dad, Torzi. Torzi was blindfolded and tied to a chair. We hid behind a tank and leaned our ears in to listen.
"Sometimes you can be quite a pain." Clyde made a sigh. "Do you know how crucial it is that the authorities don't find out about what we've been doing? If you keep using the same boat for delivery as you do for fishing, they're going to take notice."
"The delivery boat is out of commission again," Torzi moaned. "I can't use it."
Colden huffed in anger and slammed his crowbar on the leg of Torzi's chair, making him jump in his binds. "Don't play around, Torzi! Doing shit like that will get us caught!"
"Calm yourself, Colden," Clyde lightly chastised.
"To hell with that!" Colden pulled out a gun from his coat and drew it on Torzi, pointing it against his head. There was a click, and a silence. "Damn useless piece of junk!"
Clyde didn't appear surprised, or at all perturbed by Colden's behavior. "I told you the spring on the firing pin needed replaced. Listen more often."
Colden muttered angrily and started taking apart the gun to get to the firing pin. There must have still been some strength in that coil, because a metal helix flew out from his hands and rolled over to us, right at our feet. I was seized with fear, and so was Gauzi as he threw his arms around me and whimpered. The burly man cursed loudly and was about to follow after it when Clyde stopped him.
"You'll never find it down here with this bad light and all this junk. I told you it needed replacing anyway. Leave it."
Colden grumbled some more. The stick man ignored it and pulled out a small sketch book. "Now, Torzi, I'm going to draw out a new route for you. Take this until you get the other boat fixed. I don't want to have to tie you up for a day away from your dependent son again, and I'm sure you don't want Colden to aim a working pistol at your head. Understood?"
"...Yessir. Crystal clear." His voice sounded like his throat was extremely dry.
"Good." He drew what he needed to quickly and ripped the paper from the sketch book. Colden unbound the man. "Now, you will need to be briefed on this new shipment that you're taking over. The person that usually runs it will run your old one, and I want you to explain to each other, in as few words as possible, of course. I'll introduce you myself…" Clyde continued. "Will I see you tomorrow?"
"Yessir," Torzi said and swallowed hard, eyes free from the blindfold now. He rubbed his wide wrists with his hands. They were bruised.
"Very good! I'd hate to lose a good earner such as yourself. I think we're done here, Mr. Colden. Let's let Mr. Torzi walk himself home. His little boy must be worried."
If there was anything else to the conversation, we missed it. We had to leave immediately; Gauzi had to run and get home before his father realized we were gone. We agreed to keep the whole thing a secret. His father, nor my grandmother, could ever know that we saw that whole exchange, and we'd get in trouble for being somewhere we shouldn't anyway. On top of that, we concluded that maybe the stick man wouldn't mind if he found us out, but the large one certainly didn't look like the forgiving type. We didn't think "Colden" would sit still knowing a couple of kids spied in on their activities.
I walked home slowly after I left Gauzi; I was still shaking and I didn't want Grams to see and ask questions. Along the way, I saw a strange, blue beetle that looked suspiciously like the lobster dinner I had earlier that evening. It was skittering and burrowing in the one pure spot of white snow among all the dirty slosh in the road. This struck me as very strange—a bug like that in the cold—and the puzzle cleared my mind of my fearful adventure. I followed after it and chased it through the snow until it finally shook the wet off its wings and flew away to the rooftops. In good spirits, I returned home shortly after.
"I'm home!" I called, kicking off my muddied snow boots.
Grams' good-natured voice came from the kitchen. "I was wondering when you'd be back, you rascal eggplant! Where have you been?"
I pried off my coat, now soaked from melted snow. "I saw a beetle that looked like the lobster just now, so I followed it!" This I said immediately since it was the first thing honestly on my mind. I followed her voice and saw that she was warming her hands in water over the stove again. "Grams, why don't you wear gloves if your hands are so cold?"
She laughed. "It's more than the cold, dear. My hands are hurting a little with the arthritis. I guess that's what I get for abusing them, right? The winter cold just doesn't help."
"Oh. Okay." The answer wasn't really satisfying but I wasn't going to question it. Besides, she had marshmallow cookies all ready for me for when I got home, and I inhaled them with childish greed. How easily distracted we are in our youth!
