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The Millennium Earl once said:
"You are most unfortunate, Tyki, my boy. You've repressed your Noah side for so long that it will take a considerable effort to awaken it fully. The pity of it!"
But Tyki didn't consider himself unfortunate; he was fickle-minded, vain, and a bit simple-hearted but hardly unfortunate. Misfortune was the Earl's domain, and he was born to be the disciple of pleasure.
Tyki Mikk looked the part: thin, tall, and handsome in his immaculate dark coat and a top hat which he wore over his neat wavy hair. He had a winsome, carefree smile and he was envied, loathed, and admired for it.
Tyki Mikk played his part: a man of many fates and faces, of many vices and virtues, he was whoever the Earl wanted him to be and ever so defiant of the Earl. Any other way of living, without a duality in every aspect, was dull and dreary. The enticement was in helping a fellow vagrant after a bloody murder, in dining with his new family after he spent a night in a filthy bed, in disappearing and reappearing on a whim. Joy had a different meaning to him after he held a blood-stained human heart in his hand, a meal tasted particularly pleasant after he fed off scraps for a while, and the soirees in high society were even more radiant after a week spent among the sick and the damned.
Tyki Mikk was born in tumultuous times. His country was impoverished by wars and revolutions, but his brother Sheril was to become the next minister of foreign affairs, so his life was comfortable and uneventful until one day, Tyki abandoned his old life. He left home and traveled through Europe for a while. In Paris, he lost most of his money while playing cards and trying to impress an illustrious dame. Then he lost the dame to a dashing military officer, but he was not dismayed by his losses; quite the opposite, he felt that he had lost his money and the dame by a stroke of good fortune.
After he had grown bored of Paris, Tyki went to London by ship and by train, sleeping in cheap cabins for third-class passengers, jumped off the train before it reached the heart of the city and found himself on a desolate street on a nasty rainy night.
The cobblestone road glistened in moonlight, the moon was bright and enormous, and the windows were darker than the overcast sky, resembling hellish pits, if he were to indulge his imagination. Tyki closed his eyes and the smell of rain, the stir in the shadows, and the moon seemed to him particularly thrilling and invigorating. A carriage darted by him and splashed him from head to toe with dirty rainwater, but small misfortunes could not dampen his good spirits.
A poorly dressed man was standing idly beneath a flickering streetlamp. The stranger didn't appear peculiar in any way. He was preoccupied with his petty worries, smoking a cheap rolled-up cigarette, and then set about to walking determinately into the darkness. Tyki followed him because he didn't have anything better to do, and the stranger could lead him to shelter where he could afford to spend the night.
Unbeknownst to Tyki, the man wended his way, tottering and shuffling his feet, to the slums of East London. Low ugly houses of stone and brick populated the landscape. Many of them were hung with dirty signboards on which dark smudges for letters formed unrecognizable words. It was difficult to distinguish one such establishment from another. By the outward appearance of some of the houses, Tyki judged that the ground floor accommodated a variety of shops and above them perched up tiny squalid apartments in which a few families at a time took shelter. In the distance, a sinister windowless factory building kept vigil. Old paupers sat by the doors, following the passersby with their eyes in which the spark of life was extinguished by privation and suffering. It was a despondent place made pristine by the torrents of rain that washed away the grime, soot, and stench of human waste.
In the meantime, the stranger dove into one of the narrow streets and disappeared from Tyki's view in the heavy fog. Tyki helplessly shook his head and pressed a cold, wet palm to his forehead. He got lost in an unfamiliar city in the dead of night just as he felt the onset of one of his terrible migraines. The migraines were recent. In the last week, they became more frequent, and he began hallucinating about glowing objects in the shape of crisscross gears—that these objects were all around him and he needed to find and destroy as many of them as he could.
'Is that a symptom of brain fever?' he thought to himself. The thought amused him because he didn't truly believe that he would die from something as trivial as brain fever.
Tyki walked without any direction for a while until he came upon a sordid inn which offered cheap enough lodgings. In a dimly-lit common room, several men sat around a table, drinking beer from pewter mugs, and Tyki lingered about to make new acquaintances.
While Tyki aimlessly wandered about the streets of London, a plan matured in his head to disappear for a while, mingle with the crowd of faceless workers, live as they lived, poor and free, in harmony with the wayward fortune. Sheril will try to bring him home again, but it won't occur to him to look for Tyki Mikk among the downtrodden of this world.
Tyki paid the owner for a wretched room and some food and sat down at the same table where the three haggard men in worn-out checkered jackets drank their beer.
"Say, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find work around here?" he asked.
"Depends on how picky you are, lad," grumbled one of the men.
"To be honest, I don't have much money on me, so anything will do."
"Anything? Ha-ha-ha. Well, in that case, you can go down to the Docks with us tomorrow. There's always work at the Tobacco Dock."
"Momo, you shouldn't blabber to every stranger you meet," a man with short, brown hair said indignantly. "There isn't enough work for the three of us, and he is just another mouth to feed."
"Don't be such a grouch, Clark. He seems like a nice enough lad down on his luck."
"That's not the point. How are you going to earn any money if they only need two dock workers tomorrow, and there's four of us?"
"They always need strong, young men at the Tobacco Dock to haul goods from the New World. They won't pick an old geezer like you, but maybe he'll get in." Momo turned to him. "What's your name?"
"Well," Tyki mused, "you can call me Tyki."
"Care for a drink?"
The swivel in the mugs looked unappetizing, and Tyki shook his head. "Your third companion isn't much of a talker, is he?"
"That's Tam. He hasn't said much since he came back from the last war. The doctors say he went deaf in one ear from a strange explosion. He mostly talks to this kid, Eez, who lives with us at the barracks."
Tam gloomily nodded his head and drank the rest of his beer in one gulp.
"But he's a good worker. We split our earnings evenly. That's the deal if you want to stick with our group."
"Sure, I'll see you tomorrow."
"We'll meet you downstairs at six. Don't be late."
Tyki waved his arm and headed upstairs to his room. Besides a narrow bed under a faded mattress, in the enclosure of barren yellowish walls, there was a rickety table and a worm-eaten chest of drawers with a dirty mirror on top of it. Before he sat down to eat his meal with the workers, he asked the owner to bring him some clothes and leave them on the bed. The rags which were once clean and plain looked worn and motley after the owner's wife or sister mended them many times, but Tyki was worried that his expensive coat and suit would attract too much attention at the docks.
Tyki tossed and turned in his bed for an hour, before falling asleep in blissful unawareness that he had spent his last day as a human.
In the morning, the Noah in him awakened.
Every member of the Noah family experienced the awakening differently. The Noah in Tyki awakened in front of the mirror as he was washing his face with water from a wooden tub. His countenance was convulsed with pain, and blood poured profusely on his hands from the newly manifested stigmata on his forehead. Blinded by the blood in his eyes, Tyki groped around for the tub, brushed against it, and the tub overturned, splashing the floor and his new clothes with soapy water. Now howling with pain, now laughing like one possessed, Tyki bent down to retrieve it and crawled on the floor a few paces before his gaze fell on a pair of pointed black shoes. A cold shiver came down his spine, but his apprehension gave way to acute self-pity when he wiped the blood from his eyes and took a good look at the stranger who stood in the doorway. He had to be utterly mad to imagine so ludicrous a man.
From the grayish morning light emerged a tall grotesque gentleman in a light-gray coat. His long face was frozen in a wide, sinister smile, his immovable features monstrous and comical. He wore a garish top hat decorated with skulls and roses, and in his hands, he carried a pink umbrella with a bright-orange jack-o-lantern skewered on its tip. Tyki ought to know better, but he fancied that the pumpkin brazenly winked at him.
A man like that comes from nightmares or fairy tales in which he steals children and guards his sizable treasure. He is comical and horrifying; he embodies a childlike dread of the vast incomprehensible world, yet in his absurdity he evokes laughter and liberates us from that fear. He is the king of the upside-down world which exists only on the other side of a distorting mirror, but from birth he is confined to his twisted surroundings, and he is powerful because he is unaware of the distortion.
The man introduced himself as the Earl of Millennium. Tyki forgot about the pain, dimly perceiving that his past predicaments were insignificant in the face of the new danger embodied by the stranger, and climbed on the bed without taking his eyes off the Millennium Earl.
"Who are you? How did you find me?"
The Earl, as it turned out, paid him no heed, muttering something to himself and rubbing his hands together. Suddenly he twirled his umbrella, jumped up and down on one leg with youthful vigor Tyki didn't expect from such a stout, imposing even if clownish man, and exclaimed: "Olla, bolla, herke, berke!" And as he shouted nonsensical words, he struck Tyki in the chest with the tip of his pink umbrella.
Tyki felt no pain and to tell the truth, he felt nothing at all when the left half of his body vanished. His arm and leg sank into the solid wall behind him, as if the wall and everything around him became weightless, imponderable like air.
"He's one of us!" The joyous voice belonged to a girl in a short white dress and hideous purple stockings. She came through the door and walked over to the Earl's side. "You were right, Millennie, he is quite extraordinary."
"He-he-he, who would have thought that there would be two children in that family to awaken as Noah? We should have watched you more closely, my boy." The Earl turned his eerie yellowish eyes to him, and abundant tears rolled down his cheeks, but his perpetual smile, his stony face, and his eccentric manners conflicted with his expression of grief. "Soon we will be together again like in the days of old... inseparable..."
"My family? What does my brother of all people have to do with you? I've had my fill of the fat ridiculous clowns!"
"Do you know, my boy, that in their holy book God never laughed? Don't you think it's a pitiful fate to carry a burden as heavy as humanity's sins without laughing?"
"He insults the Earl, lero!" cried out the umbrella, rising to the ceiling without any help from the Earl or the girl, and Tyki decided that nothing on that day made sense and that it had to be so.
The girl caught the umbrella, and the three of them silently wept. After the Earl blew his nose, the girl wiped the tears from her brilliant eyes and approached him. She touched his cheek, thoughtfully pressed a finger to her lips, blushed faintly, and stared at him as if he were an uncommon curiosity.
"Your face…" she sang in her clear voice. "Your eyes… You look at me with such wonder in your eyes. You don't recognize me. Your memories are unclouded. I must admit that I'm jealous of you a little."
"Explanations can wait, Road," said the Earl. "I must take leave of you at once. The Ark is waiting for me outside. You can stay with him if you like until he decides to return home. His memories—"
Tyki didn't wait until they concluded their conversation. He ran with only one coherent thought on his mind that he had to put some distance between him and his morning guests in whose affairs he would have neither part nor lot. Obeying his fervent wish, his body fell through the ceiling, and he found himself in the common room. The corpse of the inn owner was sprawled out on the floor, and one of the lodgers who had a black pentacle engraved on her forehead outstretched her arms towards him.
"Master," she whispered, gaping at him with expressionless eyes. "Don't leave me…"
Tyki clenched his fists and wished to be far away from the loathsome inn. He miraculously ran through the wall as if it were air and plunged into the ill-assorted crowd of workers, peddlers, and urchins preoccupied with day-to-day worries.
No one noticed him at first, but when he ran into a fruit cart, he drew attention to his bloody figure in an unbuttoned shirt, and people began to gather round, point fingers at him, and shout at him. Tyki turned onto a narrow street between a bleak workhouse and an orphanage, but no sooner had he recovered his breath than a familiar umbrella emerged from the morning fog and a checkered door in the shape of a heart blocked the way back onto a busy street. Upon the door, dangling her legs over the side, sat the girl in the white dress and purple stockings.
"Say, Tyki, why were you running from us? You didn't let me introduce myself before you so rudely disappeared. I have to warn you that the Earl likes proper manners and next time he'll scold you."
An unfamiliar hopelessness beset Tyki when he saw that both paths for retreat were cut off by the girl with the strange door and by the talking umbrella. He tried to escape through the wall of the workhouse, but whatever miraculous abilities he possessed a moment ago, he had none of this thrilling power when he needed it desperately and he succeeded only in getting himself a swelling on the forehead. The girl and the umbrella watched his efforts to flee from his destiny in breathless suspense.
"Do you think he's hurt badly, lero?"
"I don't know, but he sure is a curious Noah."
Glib and slick-tongued, Tyki was rarely struck speechless, but this had to be one such occasion. While he struggled to find appropriate words, the girl drew herself up and, balancing herself on the folds of the door, waved her arm:
"Let's go, Lero!"
"Right away, Mistress Road!"
The door opened with a creak, and the impertinent umbrella shoved him into the yawning abyss of the color of a gentle night without any consideration for his well-being.
Tyki stood among the ruins of a lakeside city and the sky above him ran red with blood. The scarlet sun cast a sinister glow upon the white marble of the ruined tower, and the stars darkened, and the waters turned into mud.
And the girl said gravely:
"Seven thousand years ago both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air met their death in the aftermath of a terrible battle. The Noah family alone survived the deluge, hiding in the Ark until the waters receded and the sun once again shone benevolently upon the earth. We of Noah family are the descendants of the first Noah who took refuge in that Ark."
The girl emerged from the vision, sitting in midair on her umbrella, snapped her fingers, and the city around Tyki rippled and vanished in a shower of confetti. The room was empty, save for the scattering of glowing pumpkins which served as lamps. It had no walls or furniture, but the glassy floor was sturdy, and Tyki reposed himself on it, stretching his tired legs. He temporarily lost a very human ability to feel astonishment, and even if the girl transformed into a fat Earl in front of him, he would shrug his shoulders as if he witnessed nothing out of the ordinary.
"Now I can properly introduce myself," the girl said, smiling pleasantly. "I am Road Kamelot. We've been waiting for you for quite some time."
"A Kamelot? So, my brother is one of the 'Noah,' too?"
"It's splendid!" Road clapped her hands. "He married that old duck Tricia to properly adopt me. Soon we'll be a real family, Tyki. It's nice to have a grown-up handsome uncle."
A heap of lace with girlish arms hung on his neck, a small head comfortably rested on his shoulder, and the girl quietened in an affectionate embrace. "Of course, we are one big family," she continued prattling joyfully, "but I never called anyone 'uncle' before. I'm so happy, Tyki! But keep in mind that from this day onward, you'll have to spoil me with gifts. I wrote a list of the things I want, but I also enjoy a good surprise now and then."
"My brother who lusts after half the court got married, huh?" Tyki said quietly. "I didn't know."
"You're always away from home. It's not a surprise that you miss out on all exciting events and family gossip. But he married that submissive woman to adopt me properly and that's that. She doesn't have a clue about us."
Tyki freed himself from Road's embrace and unfolded a piece of paper she slipped into his hand. At the top margins of Road's list, a word written in uneven capital letters stood out: "INNOCENCE." Below, marked with numbers one through four, were listed the following wishes: one dead exorcist, woolen thread to knit a scarf for the Earl (gray and dark blue), cotton candy, and one completed math homework. Who was this annoying girl? Why did she act like she'd known him for a lifetime, but he couldn't recall anything about her?
"It's all very confusing to me. Noah, the Earl, Innocence... It's so unbelievable that it's laughable."
"When the Noah awoke within me, I was frightened, too, but the Earl was very kind to me. I want to show you the same kindness. Forget the life of idleness and ease you led among humans until now. You'll feel less and less affinity with them as time goes by. So, the sooner you let go of your past affections, the easier it'll be for you to serve the Earl."
"Serve the Earl?"
"That's the whole purpose of the Noah clan."
Road climbed back on her umbrella and explained to him that they would dine with the Earl who wanted to give Tyki a cordial welcome and that it would be ill-mannered of him to attend a party in his honor in filthy rags. Tyki was still in a daze, but on Road's request he clothed himself in a dainty black suit. Glancing at his reflection in a mirror, he noticed that his skin was dark, and a row of black cross-shaped markings adorned his forehead like an imprint from a heavy crown.
While he tidied himself up, the girl attached a tie to the indignant Lero and conjured up the same door he saw in London. They walked through it into a windowless dining room hung with portraits of unfamiliar people and took a seat at the long table on which were displayed odd dishes. The candles gave forth enough light, and at the head of the table where a family patriarch would usually sit, Tyki saw the gentleman who called himself the Millennium Earl. He wore a warm pink sweater and sipped tea from a gilded cup like many English gentlemen, but the similarities ended with the sweater and the teacup, for he had a familiar ominous air about him even at home.
"Ah, Tyki-boy," he said with a perpetually wide smile, "I trust Road explained everything… Excellent! Would you care to taste a dish so-and-so? And where's Skinn?"
"I think he got lost, wandering about the Ark in search of sweets."
"What kind of a welcoming party is it? Is Sheril coming?"
Road heaved a sigh. "It's just the three of us, Lord Millennium."
"I'm disappointed, my children. Who's going to eat all this food?"
Lero crept up behind Tyki and informed him that the Earl enjoyed watching his dear guests eat because he had personally prepared the food. Tyki politely inclined his head and filled his plate. Angering the menacing gentleman seemed like a terrible idea.
"What's the deal with the umbrella?" He summoned up his courage to speak.
"I was never introduced, lero-lero-lero!"
Road giggled. "Lero? He is a golem, one of his kind. He can talk and he is adorable."
"Thank you, mistress Road!" Lero squealed with delight and stuck out his tongue at him. "I exist to serve you, mistress Road."
"I created him with my magic," the Earl chimed in with the nonchalance of a chef confessing to making a bowl of soup. "That reminds me. I have a gift for you, my boy."
While Road complained that she didn't get a gift, the Earl rummaged under the table and rose, holding in his fat little hands a box wrapped in glittering paper and decorated with purple hearts. There was an inscription on the box: "Welcome to Noah family!❤ ❤" Tyki grimaced and tore off the ribbons. The lid slipped off the box, and confetti rained down on him with the deafening bang of a firecracker.
"Aren't they neat, he-he?!" said the Earl with tears in his eyes. "I call them Teez. Do you like them?"
Tyki wasn't eager to find out what Teez were but decided that no harm would come to him from a bit of curiosity. The longer he sat at the table in the company of the Earl and Road, the more dreamlike this day seemed to him, and soon he would surely wake up and laugh at his silly fantasy. Talking umbrellas, flying clowns, girls with the power to walk through dreams were figments of his imagination consumed by brain fever.
Teez turned out to be flesh-devouring butterflies. It was a perfect final brushstroke to a mad carnival. Tyki stared at the purple and black wings decorated with the ornaments of spades and clubs and began laughing; and he laughed, grinning wider and wider, shaking in convulsions, and oblivious of a ferocious expression on his face reflected in a portrait frame.
He never woke up from that dream.
"I'm sorry the party was so boring," said Road, cleaning the table after dinner. "As you probably noticed, the Ark is understaffed."
Shortly after he gave Tyki his gift, the Earl retired for the evening, taking Lero with him, and Tyki remained at the table, with Road as his company. Butterflies escaped the Earl's box and covered his left arm, their graceful wings aflutter.
"What are they?"
"Golems. They eat human flesh."
"That's what the Earl said. But they don't seem interested in getting a taste of me."
"You're so strange, Tyki." Road's delighted laughter dispelled the gloom of the windowless coffin-room. Her eyes were lakes of liquid amber. "And maybe you're just not tasty."
"You think I'm strange though you're the one carrying around a talking umbrella? It's just my sense of humor. Get used to it."
"Everyone around here is so dull and boring, but you… If only you had awakened sooner."
"And the Earl?"
"No, he's wonderful, but he… You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
Road finished her chores and sat down on the edge of the table with her legs crossed. "It's a private family matter. Ask me some other time and maybe I'll tell you."
"If I'm to serve this Earl, don't you think that I should know as much as possible about him?"
"Pester me all you like, but it won't work on me."
Tyki brushed his hand through his hair to shake out glittering confetti. "If you're not in the mood to talk, I'll be off."
"Leaving already?" There was a note of disappointment in Road's voice. "I thought we should get to know each other a little better. What's your favorite color?"
"I don't have one."
"Tyki, you're not mad at me, are you?"
"Fine, it's blue. Like the sky."
"Mine's also blue, but a shade darker… Now, it's your turn to ask me a question."
Tyki wasn't going to play the girl's twisted little games. "You refused to answer my question. Now I'm simply bored."
"Ask a different question. How about my favorite clothes? What do I like to wear?"
"It's obvious. All girls love pretty dresses, lace, and frills."
"That's right, and I also love fashionable school uniforms. By the way, I'm long overdue for a new uniform, but the Earl is being stingy. He doesn't mind that I attend school in some old rags. Say, you're an adult, right? You should have a lot of money."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Road, but I'm broke and unemployed." Road uttered a whimper of discontent. "And besides, isn't it a little too soon for you to be asking me for money? We've only just met."
"Someone hasn't been paying attention."
Road moved closer to him, and for the first time, Tyki scrutinized her with the attention she deserved. She was a strange girl—slender shoulders, slim hands, a sharp, stubborn chin, and a gentle curve of small lips—a girl no more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, if he were being generous, with the eyes of a hundred-year-old hag. An unpleasant shiver ran down his spine.
"No, I heard you. But I don't remember anything, so it's all the same to me." Tyki rose from the table. The butterflies scattered around him, hovering above his head. "Where do you sleep in this place?"
"You can pick any room you like. Most of them are empty besides Skinn's room, but I doubt you'd want to sleep there."
"Do you mind showing me the way around here?"
"Not at all, follow me," said Road, opening a familiar heart-shaped door in the floor under his feet.
Tyki's universe carried on without sense or reason.
