‘Roll up, roll up now. This is it, the main event. We give you the Battle of the Century!! …Yaayy, Schhhhh… The crowd goes wild.’ Despite all of the hoopla and the distortions the voice, disembodied in darkness, remained unmistakable. After all, who else could it be? ‘Here it is now, folks,’ the total blackout said. ‘In your very own church hall, Tha Rumbllle in Tha Jumbllle. <Audible gasps>. The Beast with Two Backs versus The Fiend with Two Faces. Or is it more of a sad swap meet?’
‘Are you high or something?’ shot back Jeffrey, Father Grant: speaking from the next cell – equally disguised in darkness. ‘I could give two hoots.’
‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ said the voice of Thomas Chandler. ‘Ony last re-que-est?’ He briefly affected a mock Chicano accent before reverting to his own. ‘Yes, I’ll have a big fat doobie rolled between the thighs of a dusky virgin, please.’
‘Give it a rest, Brom.’
‘You’d think the thinning of the ranks would mean closer ties between us, wouldn’t you?’ Chandler said. ‘Between what’s left. Except, it doesn’t. It’s fear, the stink of fear puts us at each other’s throats, more and more. And yet we’re expected to just rub along happily together? Well you and I certainly have been, haven’t we, Jeffrey?’ Such constant moodswings back and forth would have caused whiplash in any more sane and reasonable person. Somebody stable. ‘And we’re meant to take them at their word? Their word?!’ Thomas Chandler’s lips writhed, unseen, mouthing their offence. “Contrite,” he repeated.
Father Grant, turning away on to his other side, said nothing.
‘But, if it please the court…’ Chandler mewed. ‘I mean. Cunt, right? That we should show ourselves penitent, sheepish,’ he said, ‘… hangdog. Pcha!’
Such adjectives were themselves outdated: meaningless, in a world without any sheep, no longer any dogs.
‘Aren’t you tired?’ said Grant. ‘Of words?’
‘Mercy me, oh, lan’sakes! Too many words, ah can’t take it. Making mah head hurt with awl theys meanin’s!’ said Chandler. ‘Ah’m sorry, is mah edjicashun showin’?’ More mindful of who he was talking at, Thomas Chandler snapped to. ‘Jeffrey,’ he said softly, rustling in the straw as he attempted in vain to move closer. ‘Jeffrey with two f’s,’ he said. ‘Jeff-free.’ Had he even got the right direction?
‘Fuck you,’ said Jeffrey Grant. ‘And fuck me. You sold me out.’
‘I did?’ said Chandler, genuinely surprised. ‘No, never.’
‘And Jumeira.’
‘Back my play,’ Chandler said. ‘You know me better than that. But we’re not out of the woods yet.’
‘We’ll never be out of these woods,’ sighed Grant.
‘No doubt,’ said Chandler. The cells fell silent. It almost seemed like he might finally be quiet. ‘Doubt’s something we can’t afford,’ he said, thinking better of it. ‘And words? Words are all we have left to fight with.’
‘“Keep Faith”?!’ Grant mimicked. ‘You even sound like him, d’you know that? How much like him you sound?’ Unable to see Chandler’s face, he couldn’t know its expression.
‘I made my choice,’ said Chandler, ‘my own bed. Lying. Next to you.’ Despite their circumstance, he intended no irony. ‘Oh, no, no, it hurts, ah cain’t take it, ah cain’t take it all in at once. Youah too biiig!’ he said.
They both burst into laughter.
‘You are extraordinary,’ said Grant.
From somewhere over in the next cell Chandler’s voice crooned sweet and low. ‘Come what may…’ it said, sounding finally at peace: Thank God almighty free at last. ‘This… This is the real me,’ Thomas Chandler said. He laid himself back in the filthy straw. ‘If this really is to be the end of the line, then I’m okay with that,’ he said. ‘I can really be me. For perhaps the first time in my life.’ … ‘No, scratch that. What am I saying? Now that I’m finally sorted, of course I mean to live! I mean for us both to live,’ said Chandler. ‘And I’m not prepared to lose…’
‘Where is Else?’ demanded Nicholas, Father Else, just as soon as he stepped over the threshold, shutting their door on the winds that continued to howl outside.
‘In their room,’ said his wife, Robyn, ‘Where else.’
Up above, Else Two sought much-needed solace in a once-favourite passage of text. In a world short-changed on knowledge, shorn of power, of all the riches that came with and also fed the imagination, an ability to think original thoughts outside of the box withered on the vine. Else Two knew this much and for certain. As the dimensions of their freedoms shrank and possible shores receded, they found themselves clinging harder and faster to what little of it remained. A much-cherished book. An only remaining friend.
In their small hands they turned over and again about the last of their few remaining treasures: The White Mountain Scrap Book, Early Stories and Legends of the Crystal Hills, as collected by Ernest E. Bisbee. “And his frisbee,” Father would say when reading these stories to them, usually when they were tucked up safely in their beds last thing at night. Something he’d never adequately explained, just a nonsense word presumably, a soundalike. Play, with words, where so little other diversion remained for them. Else Two opened up the book and fanned through the brittle and yellowing pages, until it should fall open exactly where they knew it would.
“Two pioneer children,” so it went, “left alone one day by their parents, were greatly alarmed when a large black bear entered their cabin and, descending to the cellar, proceeded to make a hearty meal from the pork barrel.” That sounded more than delicious. “Disturbed in the midst of his repast by the excited children overhead, he started to scramble back up the ladder and had actually succeeded in getting his huge head reared above the floor when the quick-witted children slammed down the heavy trap door and stood on it pinning him down by the neck, whereupon the huge beast shortly hung himself, by kicking the ladder loose from under him in his struggles.”
Else Two took note. It took two. “Two pioneer children.”
It would take two if they were to have any hope of success in their newest and latest aim: to find and kill the terrible Beast that had sundered their family, ruining it for all time. A One and a Two.
Or a Two and a Two, perhaps.