"View Holloa"

Baltimore– 1984

He knelt before the fireplace, absently poking at the char inside. He turned over a few mounds of ash; one of them held more than mere cinders. The remains of a tough piece of treated leather poked out of the pile, and letters were barely visible, seared into the animal skin.

"L... E... V... I...S."

Noirbarret mouthed the letters, smirking.

Dishes rattled in the kitchen. He got to his feet and wandered into the room. He found the woman— Martha— fumbling with cups before a whistling kettle.

"Ah, please, please, ma'am," Noirbarret cooed. He gently moved the woman out of the way. "Have a seat, please. I'll see to this."

She sat in a chair at the kitchen table, nodding sullenly.

"Th— thank you, Agent Noirbarret."

"Think nothing of it, my dear."

He put the cups down on the table and filled them with tea. The woman watched him pour, her old gray eyes quivering:

"I must admit, I'm surprised that the FBI got involved in this so quickly..."

"A pleasant surprise, I'm sure," Noirbarret said.

"Oh, of course. Anything that helps find poor Pen." The woman looked to the kitchen door; the agent's black umbrella rested against the frame. "Oh, my: is it supposed to rain, today? I...uh, was planning to put up fliers..."

Noirbarret shook his head, chuckling:

"Ah, no. Not that I'm aware of, ma'am. No, it's just that the Bureau trains us all to be prepared for anything..."

"I thought that was the Boy Scouts?"

"Heh. Well, nobody would confuse me for one of those, I'm sure. Now, I like to believe that I'm an honest man, and to be honest with you I do have my own 'selfish' reason for investigating your foster child's disappearance. Do you happen to know the boy's whereabouts this past Sunday, between noon and four PM?"

"Why, um, yes." The woman blinked, staring down at her tea. "Pen went to see the Orioles."

"That's not the birds at the zoo, I take it..."

"Of course not." She gave the man a wan smile. "No. The stadium. He was there all afternoon, I suppose."

"Was he with another family? Friends?"

She shook her head:

"Uh, no. I don't think so..."

"The boy was alone, then?"

When she looked up and saw Noirbarret's cold black eyes staring down at her she nodded, defensively looking away.

"Pen... he's a very independent child. It's just his way. I wouldn't ever be so permissive with another boy like that— not someone as young as Pen— but with him..."

"It's 'different', isn't it?" Noirbarret cooed.

Martha looked up at him, her wrinkled eyes trembling. She slowly nodded:

"Yes. It's always been a little different, when it comes to Pen." She took a sip of tea, regaining her composure, and she looked up at the man with a more probing gaze. "Agent Noirbarret, I'd appreciate it if you told my why, exactly, youare looking for Pen."

The man scratched at his temple, clucking his tongue:

"Ah, well, ma'am. To be honest, there was something of an 'incident' at Memorial Stadium the other day—"

"Something involving Penrith?" Her voice quivered with alarm.

"No. Not in the slightest." He said. "The, uh, incident didn't involve your boy. No, little Penrith was just a witness. Maybe. That's why I need to talk to him, really—"

"C— could his disappearance have anything to do with—"

Noirbarret raised one of his hands, shaking his head slowly:

"No, ma'am. Of that I'm certain." He toyed with his teacup, again looking at the fireplace ashes in the next room. "No, you see, it's possible that he may have bought some counterfeit merchandise at the park. Inadvertently, I'm sure..."

Martha blinked, shaking her head back and forth:

"C— counterfeit? The FBI gets involved when some huckster sells knock-off merchandise? Really, agent!"

Noirbarret clasped his hands on the tabletop:

"It isa multimillion dollar industry, ma'am. And that's just in the greater Baltimore area, alone..."

Martha scoffed, taking a long sip from her tea.

"Yes. Well, forgive me, Agent, for being a little more concerned over the whereabouts of my boy."

"Of course, ma'am." He cooed. "Though you'll forgive me: he was never really your boy to begin with, was he?"

Martha looked up at him. She caught a lump in her throat, and looked back down, nodding sullenly.

"Come to think of it," she said, "I do think Pen was wearing a brand-new Cal Ripken jersey; he's Pen's favorite player. I didn't ask him about it at the time. I mean, Pen always has a little money of his own. But I know he'd never knowingly buy something that wasn't genuine..."

Noirbarret flipped open a small notepad and went to scratching a few lines down. He nodded wearily as the woman spoke. When she was done he tapped the page, clucking his tongue.

"Now, about his name. It is Penrith, right?"

Martha nodded.

"That's a rather unusual handle, isn't it? If I may say..."

"It's, oh, I think it's English. Pen was never very upfront with his family history. I don't know what happened to his parents and the rest of his family, but it was something tragic, I'm certain. He'd never discuss any of it, the poor dear. And the Baltimore CPS files on him weren't very complete when they assigned him to me. Um, but you see he has this accent. It's a funny little thing; very cute, but very hard to place. He told me he was Welsh, which might make sense. And there's a 'Penrith' in England, you see. It's a very small town. I assumed that his parents just named him after that town. But then one day I found out that there's another Penrith, down in Australia. I got to thinking that maybe he was named after that one."

"Why's that, ma'am?"

Martha shook her head, sighing.

"I don't know. A feeling, I suppose. Pen's accent is a beauty, but it's a very strange thing, too. It's the kind of accent I've only seen on old friends who traveled all around the world with their parents in their youth."

"Mmm. Kind of a 'bastardization' of dialects, then?"

Martha's eyes locked on the man. She scoffed.

"Perhaps that isn't the word I'd use, Agent." She looked down into her tea, smiling again. "But he lets the strangest things slip into that accent, whenever he gets really excited. Almost like a... a certain kind of..."

"...brogue." Noirbarret muttered.

Martha looked up, surprised.

"How did you know?"

The man smiled gently, slowly rising out of his chair:

"Oh, just a lucky guess. A kid spends any time around the British Isles and then he comes back across the pond, well, he's sure to have picked up a bit of Scot when all's said and done. It's an infectious thing, really. Kinda like syphilis."

Martha again stared at the man, a disapproving scowl on her face.

"That's... uh, not to say that he... uh, has syphilis, of course." Noirbarret cleared his throat. "Tell me, ma'am: what's his medical history, briefly? Just so I can know if there's any issues we need to watch out for in our search."

The woman shrugged:

"Oh, not much of a history at all, really. No, uh, allergies, or anything. No problematic doctor visits. Pen's rather lucky that way."

"How so?"

"Well, he's quite the resilient boy. Two months ago we had to update his vaccinations for school. It turned out that Pen's physician got a bad batch of MMR vaccine and most of the kids who got it came down sick for days afterward. Pen was perfectly fine; not even a sniffle. Then there was that time he went up to clear our gutters and he took a tumble off the side of the house! I was certain he'd broken a rib, and maybe punctured a lung, even. But once I'd called the ambulance and checked him again he was fine. The ER cleared him to go home that night! Like I said: Pen is quite the lucky boy."

Noirbarret played with his stubby pencil, staring down at his notepad:

"And resilient too, hmm?" He looked up at Martha. "Ma'am, could I possibly see Pen's bedroom?"

The woman escorted Noirbarret upstairs, where the agent surveyed the bedroom. He drummed his fingers along a small desk beside the bed. There was a school notebook, paper, and pencils strewn about it, but nothing else. He rooted through the boy's dresser, finding nothing but ordinary children's clothes. Looking back at the bed Noirbarret ran his hand along the underside of the mattress all along each side of the bed. When Martha gave him a quizzical look he smiled:

"You, uh, might be surprised at the things a young boy could hide under his bed..."

"I've been a foster parent for a very long time, Agent Noirbarret, and no: I would not be surprised in the slightest."

"Well, I was hoping for something. Anything. A clue to where he might've decided to go..."

The man looked around the room, shaking his head.

"There's not much here at all, is there?"

Martha stared at the floor, nodding.

"Well, Pen doesn't really have much on this earth to call his own. In fact he left most of the things he does have. When I woke up and saw his Walkman on the table I hoped that he wouldn't be gone long. He treasured that toy so very much. He's...you know, just so grateful..."

Martha put a hand to her mouth, shaking her head. She walked off a ways, and as she did so Noirbarret's eyes were drawn to the window behind her. He approached the shelf and stared at a small tchotchke resting just against the window's glass, shining in the afternoon sunlight. It was a bell, and it was a very recognizable one.

"The Liberty Bell?" He muttered. "Any reason why he'd have this?"

Martha smiled:

"Oh, that. It was from a little contest at his school. Pen's history class was learning about the Liberty Bell, and their teacher gave them a creative writing assignment. They had to come up with a little story about how the bell got its crack— anything they could think of, really. Pen wrote a story about a group of boys who convinced the bell-ringer to let them try ringing it, and he did, because he was drunk." She smiled. "In his story, the bell was so heavy that when the boys started ringing it it kept launching them into the air— one side of the rope, and then the other— and they got so carried away with it that they rang it too hard and it cracked."

"Kinda mundane," Noirbarret turned the bell over in his hand. "Guess his teacher liked it, though..."

"Mmm. She said that it, uh, just captured all the senses, the way he told it. She said it was so vivid— with the feelings, the sights, the smells, and all that— and he was so exact with the dates. Believable, too. It was almost like he'd copied the whole thing from someone's first-person narrative."

"Now that is interesting, isn't it? 12-year-old boys aren't exactly known for writing the most believable fiction, are they? Or consuming it..."

Noirbarret set the bell down. He motioned all around the room, drawing a short breath:

"Uh, ma'am, it's not my business, of course, but when I look around this room, and the rest of the house, too, I'm not really seeing any pictures of the boy. Now, I can understand if you don't like putting up your foster children's photographs— don't wanna get too attached, or anything, but it seems that you've got a big montage of all your former charges over the fireplace, downstairs. So..."

Martha licked her lips; she shook her head:

"Uh, no, Agent. It isn't like that, at all. It's, well... Pen has an, uh, 'aversion' to cameras."

"Do tell?"

"He, well, gets in these moods whenever anyone breaks out a camera. It's like a very deep kind of melancholy. He just really doesn't like to have his picture taken. When I asked him why, once, he told me something about how things 'don't last', and he doesn't like the idea of leaving pictures behind, when the moment's gone."

Noirbarret chuckled, wagging his head:

"Your kid sounds a little like a nihilist, doesn't he? Guess that's alsosomething 12-year-old boys aren't exactly known for..."

"Penrith is a very special boy," Martha said.

"I don't deny it."

The woman held up a finger, drawing a slow breath. She walked out of the boy's room and down the hall, into her room. When she returned a moment later she was carrying a small framed photograph, and she held it up to the man.

"This is the Maryland Zoo," she whispered. "It was a long day, that day. I helped chaperone their school field trip. Someone gave me a camera to record the trip. I snapped photos of all the students. But every time I caught Penrith in the lens— with his friends, or out on his lonesome— he'd always catch sight of me first, and then he'd look at me with those big, sad little eyes; I couldn't bear to snap a shot.

"He watches his surroundings a lot. I don't know why, but he's always very vigilant. It's funny: he likes to carry around this little vintage fox head, like from an old lady's fur coat. He says it's just some kind of fashion accessory, but I've heard him talking to it before, like it's an imaginary friend. 'Friend' might not be the right word, the way he talks to it, but I like to tease him sometimes. The way I see it, he's more like a fox, the way he's so skittish around everyone. No, he doesn't relax, often, but I really appreciate it when he does, because I know that he's enjoying himself. Well, anyway, there was a moment— just a small window— when we visited the black-footed penguin exhibit. I don't know if Pen had ever seen a penguin in person, before. But they call those penguins 'jackasses', you know, because of the way they brae. Penrith was laughing even before we made it into the exhibit; that word is funny enough, to a child, but when we actually saw the colony— they were cavorting all around, playing in the surf right beside the viewing bars, and going on with their funny barking— Pen was transfixed. It was only a moment, and it was a moment that never comes around too often..."

She handed the framed picture to Noirbarret, who took it up and examined it: it was a very blurry shot, as if taken in a hurry, and it showed a mess of little bodies pressed up against a set of bars that were rusted by their exposure to saltwater. The only point of focus was a small spot in the middle, and in that small spot a boy's face looked on past the bars. He was laughing. His hair was a black bed of ungainly spindles, except around the front of his ears, where a few telltale strands of gray marred his skin. His eyes were blue, but not pure; there was something else in them, like a coat of rust covering the color, and they were quite expressive. The boy's nose had been broken sometime in the past and it was never reset.

Noirbarret looked up from the picture and noticed Martha holding a hand against her mouth; he could tell that her lips were trembling.

"Can I ask you a question, ma'am?"

Martha snapped out of her reverie and nodded at the man. Noirbarret held up the picture, wagging it about in the air:

"This boy is special to you, isn't he?"

Martha slowly nodded.

"Yes," she mumbled. "He is."

He slowly walked up to her, and as he walked he noticed the necklace around her neck. It was on a braided chain of sterling silver, but the honey-colored bauble at its center was as cheap as chalk.

"If you don't mind me asking: that looks like paste, doesn't it?"

Martha swallowed:

"Yes," she muttered.

"That doesn't seem to be the kind of thing to come from your fine jewelry drawer..."

"No..." she fingered the little 'jewel' at the center of the necklace. "No, this was from Penrith. It was my birthday. Imagine, you know: he remembers my birthday? Honestly..."

Noirbarret stopped right in front of the woman:

"This boy," he mumbled. "This boy seems to care for you a great deal, doesn't he?"

Martha closed her eyes, sighing:

"With Penrith it's always the little things. He's so very considerate, and so understanding. But you can tell that he's so very sad, too, I think. I... I'm always trying so hard to get past all those defenses he puts up. He's very good at that, and—"

Martha paused, mid-sentence, and her wrinkled eyes widened into saucers.

The woman sputtered, her body convulsing in Noirbarret's arms. The man held one hand on her shoulder, and with the other he still gripped his dagger tight, even as he twisted it in her chest.

Martha opened her mouth, moaning in terror. A few stray trickles of frothy blood escaped the corners of her lips.

"Shhhh… shhhh…" Noirbarret cooed.

The woman's lips trembled as she watched Noirbarret— with some otherworldly grin on his steely lips— gently drag her over to the bed and lay on her back.

"Shhhhhhh…" He again cooed, leaning down near the woman's ear. "I am sorry, my dear," he whispered, "and it's nothing personal— not that that's any consolation. But, you see, I think that you're rather dear to this boy, and if that's the case..."

Noirbarret pulled the dagger from her chest, causing Martha to scream, briefly, as she helplessly tried to cover the wound. He cries devolved into raspy moans before long, and after a few seconds she was perfectly still.

"...if that's the case, then you cannot stay in this world."

He examined that cheap paste necklace around the woman's neck, and then violently snapped it off. He twirled the honey-colored bauble around his finger, smirking, and then he looked down at that photograph. He stroked at the hair of that boy in the photograph.

"How did he like his feathered bed, and how did he like his sheets?"

Noirbarret looked down at Martha's corpse. He sneered:

"How did he like his lady, gay, who lay in my arms, asleep?"

The man took a few slow breaths, and then he slammed the picture frame on the floor. He retrieved the picture from its remains. He looked at that tacky Liberty Bell decoration on the window, and then he smiled. When he looked down at the photograph again he curled his lips into a vicious snarl:

"I'm coming for you, Penance," he growled. "It's that time again, old 'friend'. I'm ready to take away everything that you care about, once again..."

Noirbarret shook his head as he walked out of the bedroom, chuckling to himself. Really: the fox was supposed to make things as sporting as possible, wasn't he? This fox wasn't even trying. The man collected his umbrella at the kitchen door, and then he sauntered out into the sunlight, singing a jaunty little tune as he went.

He was singing 'Philadelphia Freedom'.