The Inn of the Star Crossed (Chapter 1) Free
by Mark Vincent LaPolla.
If you have not read The Inn at the Crossroads, please click here.
Chapter 1
It’s been a quiet year and Carey and I have labored hard to make it so. A successful inn is a quiet inn.
A typical innkeeper’s day starts at 5:30 AM. I do my toilet, get dressed and hurry off to the kitchen, ready to prep breakfast. I cut up pineapple, kiwi, cantaloupe, bananas, and arrange it on a platter, alternating yellow, green, orange and white, to make a colorful display, and then make the bacon. I squeeze the orange juice for the discerning, discriminating public. Too bad they don’t come to our inn.
I used to put the fresh squeezed orange juice alongside the frozen concentrate until I saw a guest mixing the two. I stood right behind him, aghast. He saw me with my mouth hanging open and said, “The fresh squeezed is too strong.” I smiled and went back into the kitchen muttering.
I stopped spending forty dollars a gallon on fresh squeezed orange juice. Instead, I bought a superior frozen concentrate. No one complained; no one noticed.
Some of the breakfast orders are odd. One guest asked Henry for an unused banana. What did he think we were doing with our bananas? Henry almost broke down laughing. Another guest wanted her breakfast, including English muffins pureed in a blender.
Other orders are ridiculous. One fellow asked for lightly poached eggs but wanted me to put the poaching water on the toast. He gave Henry, our waiter, explicit instruction: three spoonfuls of poaching water on each English muffin. The plate was drowning in water by the time I put the eggs on the muffins.
“Is this guy nuts?” I asked Henry. “Are you sure about this? This will crap up the whole dish.”
I must have been too intense. Henry is a delicate soul. We inherited him from Timoteus, the previous innkeeper. Henry’s a fast waiter if not the most thoughtful.
“Henry to Mothership,” Henry said nervously, “ready to beam up. Yes, yes, and I think, yes,” Henry said, answering my questions.
Henry believes he is from outer space. I could have told him there were no extraterrestrials currently on the planet. I should know. But I didn’t and haven’t said a word about them to Henry. He’d blow a Barsoom gasket.
“OK, ok,” I said soothingly. “No need for a meltdown. Here it is.” I handed him the plate while averting my eyes. Just making this disgusting dish made me want to vomit.
“Oh, yes,” you must be saying to yourself at this point, dear reader, “what happened with the faeries, the dragons, the kobolds? Did everything workout? How did you recover from the enforced captivity at the hands of Titania and what about your baby girl? Was it all a dream?
“Oh ho,” you might say again to yourself, gentle reader who comes after me, “why not talk about your baby first off. Why prattle on about dishes and duties, guests and Henry? How does bacon trump your wife or orange juice your daughter? Didn’t you fight the good fight to have them back? Didn’t you return from the very edge of death to be with them?”
Indeed, I did. But there is the private life of an innkeeper and the public life of an innkeeper. I know now why the journals of all those other innkeepers are so short even after thousands of years of duty at the inn.
First of all, those innkeepers who came before us had quiet tenures, such as the last year has been. So, no matter how many years go by, one can only say, “The bacon burned to a black crisp on the 14th of February and I had to throw it out and start over”, or whatever the dwarfish and elven equivalents are, only so many times. And secondly, I am loath to talk about my family and my private life.
Suffice it to say, Carey had our darling daughter, Erin, and all is right with the world. The birth was a normal, natural birth. We had a midwife; no, not one from the Álfheimr, Faerie, Harappa or from wherever the dwarfs come from, but rather a human midwife. Carey and I thought it would be a good idea for her to give birth at the inn proper or, in this case, in our little owner’s cottage rather than at a hospital.
The main living room of the owners’ quarters was converted into a birthing chamber. Spot, much to his sorrow, was sequestered in his kennel; he wanted to be there to watch it.
Spot, by the way, is doing much better. He is healthy and happy and acting like a puppy. When I took him to the veterinary oncologist to see what could be done to get rid of his cancer, the vet said, “What cancer?”
Spot is cured.
Carey had an easy time delivering Erin. She had less than an hour of labor and our sweet daughter popped out. It was minutes from the first contraction to the birth. Luckily, the midwife was staying at the inn. I ran to get her after telling Carey to breath. It was glorious and beautiful. Births at the inn are a miracle and a half.
Enough! That is personal and private.
Our little Erin is perfect and precocious. She is developing fast and at only eight weeks old has started rolling over and now has also started “talking”. She makes cooing sounds, cute if you are a normal human parent living in a normal human house. But here, the inn translates the coos into words, and it is driving me batty. Carey takes it in stride, but I cannot. Erin is weeks and weeks ahead of normal human development physically, but her mental and emotional development is strictly newborn.
I play with Erin and she giggles and squawks and whees and makes all the baby sounds you’d expect, and the inn does nothing. But, given a moment of calm, little, sweet Erin will look at me and say, “Coo, coo, gurgle, urff, fffffttttfff, coo, urt, ummm,” and I hear, “Father, doth thou love me? Shall we play?” Or sometimes, and even more disturbing, Erin will look at me, scrunch her pretty face up, and gurgle, “Uuuu, fffffofff, urf, coo, uh, uh, ash!” And clear as a bell, the inn overdubs it with, “Where the HELL is the loo in this jernt? I‘ve got to take a massive shite, Da.” And lo and behold, she does, and I have to change her diapers.
Changing diapers doesn’t bother me; Erin is my first born daughter. The linguistic concepts Erin communicates via the inn are too advanced for an infant, though playing, eating and pooping are the world of a baby. For Erin, love and play are practically the same thing.
Still, I worry.
The doctors are not worried. They admit physically, Erin is progressing rapidly, but they assure us within norm.
“She’s precocious,” her pediatrician Dr. Frank would say, “nothing to worry about.”
Dr. Frank cannot hear the translations the inn provides. It worries me. Everything about Erin worries me. Carey, on the other hand, is never bothered.
“Sure, she’s precocious,” Carey says whenever I mention it, “but you have to remember, she lives at our magical inn and she has an elf and a pixie for god-parents, so you have to expect some oddities. There’s nothing normal about our situation and so a precocious baby is just what the doctor ordered.” Carey would then shrug, hug me and tell me not to worry. But still, I worry.
Odd is an understatement.
Spot is acting like a puppy. He’s becoming more and more intelligent. I am waiting for the day when the inn translates his barks.
All in all, we have had a pretty quiet year. We were called on a few times to settle small problems at the other inns. We haven’t had any more incursions of those demons who haunted us, in almost a whole year. Knock on wood.
So, why did I start writing in my journal again?
All isn’t as peaceful as it seems. I find myself using slang, and stilted syntax, by Jove, popular in the Nineteenth Century. The other day, Carey said to me she had a bang-up time that night we went out to paint the town red. And let me tell you, dinner cost me a pretty penny. But I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want to get the ol’ girl hot under the collar. She was likely to take my head off if I mentioned pinching pennies.
But that’s not all, just the other day, I caught myself saying, “I feel so gay today. Today, I am gay.”
Carey smiled at me and said, “I am gay today, too. What a lovely day it is.”
“A rather, fruity day,” I replied. I heartily enjoyed this love making with my sweet and fair wife.
I submit this, Gentle Reader, for your approval as evidence number one. Evidence number two is more worrisome for it does not touch so much on the insubstantial but substantial and material. Any and all items Carey and I brought from California or, if it must be known and it must, any item new in manufacture (I am not sure what the best way to say this is, for you will think me mad,) is blurring around the edges and is also flickering. As if the inn itself is not sure how to paint these newly minted objects into our present reality.
And thirdly, I present evidence the third. Usually, our custom is a rough crowd with little morals and less manners and are of a lazy and sarcastic mood. The guests we have been getting of late have been more of a reflective nature or rather the men have had more of a reflective nature and their wives, for no woman may board here without an escort, have been retiring and gracious. It has truly been a pleasure to serve these gentle folk.
Now you see the problem I have seen? If I do not watch myself closely, my mind drifts and my language follows my mind down byways of the past, that foreign country. How and why we seem to be drifting into the Victorian Era, I know not. Carey, my sweet wife, has not noticed these changes.
I brought them to the attention of my impressive wife for to train on these difficulties her cognitive abilities and, by Jingo, instead she smiled at me and said, “Why Mr. Impollonia, I see no difficulty and if there were such a difficulty, you, my most puissant husband, could easily solve it.”
I gently shook my head at these remarks and walked back to my study to contemplate what is happening at our fair inn. Now, perhaps, you see the troubles besetting us, Dear Reader, and no matter how hard I bend my mind to their solution, I cannot find one.
I think it is time I consult his Majesty Goldemar in the Sideways room. As quick as thought, I put my plan into action.
“Miss Belle,” I said, greeting our enchanted and enchanting pixie secretary as I walked into the inn’s office, “have King Goldemar meet me in the Sideways room at once.”
“In the Sideways Room? What’s going on, hot stuff? What’s got into that big noggin of yours?”
“Not your affair, Miss Belle, just do as I ask and request an audience with the king of the kobolds.”
“Miss Belle?” Belle said, gaping at me. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right? You don’t look so good. And what have you got on? That’s some get up! Are you cold?”
“Do as I have requested young lady, and all will be well.”
“Right you are, Chief.”
“William, dearest,” said my darling wife, Carey, entering the office where business affairs are handled. When she saw Belle, she blushed a fetching scarlet and corrected herself. “I mean, Mr. Impollonia, why are you going forth to meet with the king of the kobolds? If I may ask.”
“Are you feelin’ OK, Carey? Why are you two talking like, like, ah, like that? It’s strange. Why so formal? This is the 21st century, you know. I may only be a pixie, but I know strange when I hear it. And what are you wearing? Where’d you get that dress? I love it, don’t get me wrong, a little too much material for my tastes, but it’s stunning. And that fitted jacket is delish.”
“For sooth, young lady, you have uncovered a truth I must discuss with Goldemar, king of the kobolds. My darling wife, I think we are tainted with a spell. I shall append Goldemar’s wit to mine and perhaps we two can unravel this mystery.”
“I needs accompany you, my husband,” Carey said. “I must assert myself in this one thing for I will not be able to stay here without your strong arm supporting me. I beg your permission to accompany you.”
“You have my permission to come with me, Mrs. Impollonia,” I said to her with a smile.
“Permission? Since when does Carey need anyone’s permission?” Belle said, partly to herself, partly to the room at large. “I’m coming, too. You too goofballs need a nursemaid. I want to find out what’s going on here.”
“No,” I told Belle. “I forbid it, Miss Belle. It is too dangerous for a young lady.”
“Pshaw,” Belle replied, waving her hand at me, “there is not anyway for you to stop me, Bill. Remember! I am your senior by at least five thousand years.” Belle did a double take, shaking herself and continued, “Sheesh, now you got me doing it. Either way, I’m coming.”
And off we strode, our troop of three, to the Sideways Room, that magical room where time stands still, and havoc plays outside its doors.
I gingerly helped Carey down the roughly carpeted stairs filled with canned tomato soup, bagged pinto beans, bottles of brightly colored liquors and other sundry comestibles. The stairs were painted gunship grey and the carpet was black, lined with treads. The carpet was worn and thin in spots, when the liquor and preserved foodstuffs allowed it to show through, providing uncertain footing for milady's dainty slippers. Her slippers were hard to spot against the black treads, making it harder for me to guide her. Miss Belle followed as best she could in her high heels.
We entered into a richly decorated room. The room was appointed in an amalgamation of Regency, Victorian, Edwardian, modern décor. A fine fire blazed on the hearth.
Goldemar was waiting for us, looking a grim, heavily bearded boy of five. His mouth, partially hidden in his flowing white beard, was set in a tight, red slash. His dark eyes were haunted, and he darted occasional quick glances toward the corners of the room.
Goldemar was dressed much as I remembered him from my last audience. He was wearing Spot’s dirty, blue kennel blanket, unraveled and rewoven with golden thread. He had on a silver belt and a golden lion’s head buckle, a white fur lined kidskin cape draped across his shoulders and fastened with a heavy ornate bronze clasp embellished with a black and silver chased Celtic Knot. Rather than his usual mottled green slippers with long curled toes, embellished with golden bells, he had on simple black leather riding boots. He smelled of sharp metal and fiery forges.
In front of him, on a beautiful Turkish carpet adorned with stylized cornflower blue vines, dressed in a gray morning coat, striped trousers, heavy black weskit, a white shirt and black tie, was a body. Next to the body, or I should say him, for it was a man, lay his top hat. The man looked familiar, but I could not place his visage.
As soon as we stepped into the Sideways Room, only a few mere feet in, a heavy veil was lifted from my mind and I returned to myself, slowly, for sure, but I eventually had myself back to normal.
“What the hell was that?” I said out loud. “Two seconds ago, I was practically theeing and thouing and I know Queen Victoria would have been proud of me, of us.” I nodded at Carey and then took a close look at what she was wearing. “Carey, why are you wearing a heavy dress and tailored jacket? Aren’t you hot? I mean, you look great, but isn’t it kind of hard to walk in?”
Carey wore a high-collared deep blue dress trimmed with lapis blue fabric. Gold plaid strips ran up the front of the fitted jacket-like bodice all the way to the collar. The two strips looked like train tracks or military braids. Muted burgundy brocade fasteners, running between the gold plaid strips horizontally, connected the tracks. The underskirt was a loose red and gold plaid, matching the front of the bodice. Her blue overskirt was draped at her hip on the right side and caught with a long, wide bow of the same color. The bottom of the overskirt was cut short into an inverted ‘V’, exposing the underskirt. The ends of the bow dangled almost to the underskirt and were decorated with large red bobbles trimmed with gold netting. Four matching bobbles, smaller in diameter, trimmed each side of the fitted bodice. Carey’s cuffs had plaid trim as well. The effect was stunning.
“And breath in,” Carey said.
“And where did you get all those feathers for your hat? Are they all peacock and Ostridge?” A large spray of blue-green peacock feathers offset by gray and black Ostridge feathers framed Carey’s lapis blue hat.
“It’s a touring hat, Bill.” Carey said, blushing. She looked directly at me and didn’t see the body. “Speaking of which, what are you wearing? A frock coat? And what’s with the grey gloves and walking stick? And those grey striped pants! And an Ascot. Ouch. I mean, a little much, no? Are you wearing suspenders? Really Bill. Isn’t that a little over the top? And speaking of over the top, that top hat, wow. I like the choice of gray, classy and I love the ruby tie pin. That’s all I’m going to say.” She finished her speech abruptly and folder her hands in her lap, looking me in the eye.
“It’s a cravat and it’s tied in a Rusche knot, if you must know,” I said, digging out the information from only the inn knows where.
Belle was in her normal dress. She looked today like a 1940s secretary, tight grey skirt and a white blouse with black high heels and a seam up her stockings. Typical Belle. Carey and I looked like fashion plates from the Late Victorian Era.
“What is going on?” Carey asked.
“I was going to ask the two of you that very question,” Goldemar cut in. “Something is dreadfully wrong with the inn. Have ye noticed objects, especially newly made objects, are losing their coherence?”
That was some speech for Goldemar. And he used a real grown up word: coherence. I was impressed. I was also worried.
“And I find the two of ye dressed for a party when you should be fixing the inn. What in the name of the inn is going on?” He said forcefully and, without waiting for an invitation, he poured himself some sherry. “And who is that?” He said pointing to the body on the floor.
“Who is whaaa?” Carey said as she caught sight of the body. “I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “Bill?”
“Don’t look at me,” I told her. “This is the first time I saw him. Is he dead?”
“He is most assuredly dead,” Goldemar said. “What I want to know is what is happening?”
“That, Cousin, is what we came here to ask you,” I said.
THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES in Chapter 2.