The Strange Case of Wes Freeman
based on the world of HDM which belongs to PP.
Wes Freeman was a fourteen year old boy who, as his tutor liked to remind him, was not shaping up to be much of a scholar. In fact, this tutor, a rusty man by the name of Mr. Lyons, who rode his rusty bicycle up from the small college in Marshall to teach, or rather lecture, his young protégé on the history of the New World and a smattering of science. There was no theology in these lessons, for you see, as Mr. Lyons liked to point out, the great church that enveloped the Old World like a brooding angel over the void never got much a foothold in the footloose New World.
National difference, you see (so said the rusty Mr. Lyons) was much more important in the New World as the kingdoms of Spain and France vied with the republic of Denmark for control. Spain had been beaten back into the country of Mejico. The Republic of Texas broke from New France a little over a hundred years ago. That left New Denmark and New France to eye each other suspiciously and skirmish along their mutual borders.
At this point in the lesson, Wes, reprobate that he was, would be staring out of the window and his daemon, Hilrithra, would be a fat little dog dozing lazily right along with him. But the persistent rusty little Mr. Lyons would continue on with his lesson. For you see, in the later period of the history of the New World, the distinctions between New France and New Denmark had become increasingly unimportant. National distinctions grew very fuzzy as these colonies became increasingly independent and miscegenated.
Citizens of New Denmark, squeezed along the eastern seaboard of the New World for so long, became colonists who fanned out over New France (some who had had their taste of adventuring made it no further east than the Mississippi river) in search of new land in the unoccupied zone. The people of New France began to thirst for land and joined in the race as well. New settlers from England and the rest of Europe arrived as well.
These settlers, having been relatively content to stay in one place for so long, ran up against a formidable obstacle, the Legatee nation, a hybrid conglomeration of all the New World's native inhabitants who had banned together, however loosely, to repulse any further encroachment by grasping settlers. The Legatee nation formed a bulwark in the northwest and all through the Rocky Mountains. But, young man, progress must win out, first rule of history and all, and the Legatee have been pushed and pushed like mites along the floor of destiny.
Snapping back to attention after such a lecture, the young Wes Freeman would actually find himself inhabiting a little piece of the Northwest Territory. Unfortunately the rusty Mr. Lyons and his brown and tan little sparrow deamon, Nola, were there too. One day, however, Mr. Lyons came into the house where Wes lived with his mother, Sue Freeman, and informed the small family that he was leaving Marshall, the name of that little piece of the larger texture of history, and that Wes would have to find his edification elsewhere.
Sue Freeman, or rather Dr. Freeman, ran the sanitarium in Marhsall that had been endowed by a wealthy heiress whose favorite brother died of a horrible lung disease. It seemed that the dry mountain air and serene setting (now that the Legatee had been swept along) could have helped the heiress's brother. So the sanitarium was established.
It turned out, however, that the sanitarium never caught on with the terminally ill, but rather with the wealthy magnates and socialites that both fueled and feed off of the New World. She secretly worried that her son had simply run Mr. Lyons out of town. He was the third tutor who had thrown his hands up in frustration. "The boy's daemon doesn't even care to change shape," one tutor explained, indignant that his lessons that had charmed flaxen haired little girls and their polite, ever shifting daemons, failed to spark anything in this dull boy.
At first, Marshall served as a military supply depot during the vicious wars with the Legatee. Railroads brought mobile cannons and troops and supplies to the front. The plains around Marshall served as aerodocks for the zeppelins that firebombed Legattee settlements in the mountains. Soon, however, a town began to take shape in the valley around a creek and the dramatic red stone formations that jutted out from the Rocky Mountain range. Everything was dust and wood frame in Marshall. But the town could boast several burgeoning industries, two banks, a college, and, of course, a sanitarium.
There were coal and silver deposits to the south and minerals and gold up in the mountains. On a clear day, you could see the coal fires from the flats smoldering up through cracks in the ground. On any day you could find dirty miners trekking up into the mountains. Those deposits were just one of the reasons that the settlers had fought so hard for the Legatee's land.
With Mr. Lyons gone, Wes Freeman didn't see any reason to give history, science, or much of anything any of his attention. Instead, half his attention was turned to stoking the fires that fueled the enormous furnaces of the sanitarium. The other half was turned to contemplating his daemon, Hilrithra, who lay in a miserable heap next to his feet.
Hilrithra had taken the form of a lazy fat dog and refused to change. When Wes moved, he had to pick her up and carry the pathetic thing to wherever he willed himself to go. Of course doing so took exactly an act of will, an enormous exertion, like combustion or particle separation.
Wes knew that his age was approaching. He could practically feel it. His mother explained that the feeling might be due to changes in his brain. She had read in the Academy of Science and Research's journal that radical changes to the brain's structure and shape might account for part of the phenomenon of "the somastatic morphological tendency" of daemons. But all of this about morphological this and that wouldn't be so bad if Hilrithra wasn't exhibiting such, frankly, lame tendencies.
While Wes did not consciously feel it, the power of appearances certainly held sway over him. This power took him up in its grasp every time one of the sanitarium's wealthy patients addled by in furs, stroking some chestnut brown beauty of a daemon. In these moments, Wes became all too aware of the half-life he lived. His mother, being a prominent doctor, had been appointed to direct the sanitarium. It fell to her to tend to the wealthy victims of "modern life." These people looked to her to cure them of their incurable swoons, their gastric disruptions, and their hysterical melancholia. Wealth poured from these patients like the spume they coughed up into lacy hankies.
His mother cast a formidable shadow over the welfare of these magnates, socialites, and aristocrats. And yet Wes found that his place in that formidable shadow was marginal at best. He spent most of his time in the furnace room, watching wobbling fat women with grizzled tomcat and bulldog daemons pushing laundry bins and cranky Mr. Tinglar with his daemon Gelbing, a moody porcupine with twitchy quills. When he finished his daily round of chores everyday, Wes felt like there was little left to do but watch an endless supply of fuel be consumed by an endless supply of flames in the furnace room, waiting for the moment that Hilrithra would decide what he would be forever.
As Wes sat tilted back in a spindly wooden chair by the furnaces, Mr. Tinglar came hobbling towards him with a spiteful, vinegary, sour look on his face. Gelbing wobbled along beside him, her quills trembling like always. When Mr. Tinglar stopped, Gelbing nearly ran right into him. "Watch you foul little thing!" the old man said. He turned to Wes, "And you to! No laughing out of you. Ain't a funny thing at all that Gelbing is blind. She did it to spite me of course. Foul little daemon. But she can't help it and I better not catch you snickering about it."
"I wouldn't…"
"Well, don't then. In any case, got a message from your mother here. Errand or something. None of my business. Didn't look…" The torrent of reproaches and accusations trailed off as Mr. Tinglar hobbled away with his daemon wobbling after him.
Wes unfolded the stiffly folded piece of stationary, printed with his mother's name, Dr. Sue Freeman, across the top. The message was written out in blue ink, in his mother's looping handwriting, "Please come and see me." That was it. That was all that his mother had sent Mr. Tinglar to come and tell him. Wes heaved himself up from the chair, gave Hilrithra a shove with his foot, then bent down to pick her up and go on his way.
The staff offices were located on the top floor of the neatly rectangular building that formed the main part of the sanitarium. Most of the patients who came to the facility complaining of nervous agitations and stomach problems stayed in this building. Those with more rare diseases like tuberculosis stayed in a nearby building, sequestered from the others.
Wes slipped by the orderlies and patients who inhabited the bottom four floors. No one took any notice of him. People at least noticed him in the furnace room. Of course, the notice he received there usually came in the form of grunts and complaints, but sometimes grunts and complaints were better than nothing at all.
At the door to his mother's office, Wes knocked at the rattly frosted pane of glass that bore her name. "I'm with a patient, just a moment," her voice said. Wes stood against the stripe of light blue painted under the wainscoting, in a beam of light coming the windows set up high on the opposite wall. A few moments later, the door opened and an old woman wearing an enormous diamond pendant came scooting out of the office. "Thank you for stopping by Mrs. Dunn-DeBacker…"
"That's DeBacker-Dunn, dear. My late husband's great uncle was the famous Harold DeBacker. We took the name when the late Mr. Dunn inherited the DeBacker fortune."
"Of course, Mrs. DeBacker-Dunn. How careless of me. In any case, I will be sure to tell the orderly for your floor to carefully regulate the temperature of the water in your wash basin."
"Yes, yes. You see my poor Rea here gets terribly upset when I dip my hands in water that is too cold." With that, the old woman scooted away down the hall.
While they spoke, Dr. Freeman's daemon, Erigemon, a gray and red Rhesus monkey, jumped down to fawn over Hilrithra. For all of the attention that Erigemon gave Hilrithra, one might have been surprised when Dr. Freeman looked over at Wes, and said, "Good, you're here. Come inside. Quickly. I've got to tend to patients."
Inside, Wes's mother sat at her desk, Erigemon nearly propped up on his shoulder, almost invisible. "I need you to do something for me Wes." Without realizing it, Wes rolled his eyes. "Don't give me that look young man. There is a very important visitor arriving this afternoon. We must be ready for him."
"Aren't all the visitors very important." Again, there was sarcasm in his voice that Wes didn't intend to put there.
"Very clever. No, this visitor is very…unusual. There is an old stone cabin up on the ridge. I need you to go up there and spruce up a bit."
"Can't you send one of the ladies to do it?"
"No, Wes. I cannot. I'm asking you. Now please do this for me, all right? Take this key and run along."
Wes put the key in his pocket and went to the basement to get cleaning supplies. As they walked, Hilrithra said, "Why would someone want to say up on the mountain in an old stone cabin?"
"I don't know."
"We're going to have to walk all the way up there."
"I know. It won't be so bad."
"I think it will be."
In the basement, one of the cleaning ladies shoved an old rusty bucket in his arms with a few rags, a little broom, and a can of noxious smelling powder. "Water's over there," she said, pointing to an enormous faucet coming out of the wall.
The rusty bucket was heavy and it leaked. Wes's shoes were soaked and they weren't even half way there. Hilrithra, who became a mottled little bird, sat on Wes's shoulder saying, "Oh that nasty bucket. Walk faster Wes. Walk faster."
"I'm trying."
"I want to go lay back by the fire. Walk faster."