"bwokel" Blake said, smashing his fist onto the green cradle. The green plastic shattered and Wobble froze. Blake made a gurgling sound.
"Now it is", Valentine said. Narcisse stroked the back of Blake's neck with her intact hand.
"sowwy", Blake said in his faint, breathy voice, "vewy sowwy, papa".
Valentine picked him up again. "We'll make a new one". A piece of planking and a small, dulled nail would do. "Together".
Blake liked the sound of that. He showed all his fangs.
* * *
The days passed like the cars of a speed freight. Valentine contrived to take Blake on a fishing trip. Sufficient dirt, an oversized droopy boat hat, and some baggy clothes made him into a lean boy whose arms and legs were finishing up a growth spurt. The fish were biting, but any sort of motion, from a frog's leap to a rabbit's careful hop, made him drop his rod and investigate.
On his own, Valentine visited a little shrine near the old arch that he'd found on his first trip to the city. Years ago his father had eliminated the Kurians from St. Louis - he learned this not from his father but from some men who had served with him - and the Grogs set up their form of memorial in the lobby of what had been an elevator to the top of the monument. Some bits and pieces laid out in an arch of parachute "silk" that imitated the one above - bullet casings, a canteen, a K-bar-style knife, a climbing glove, and some nylon rope he understood, but there was also a fox tail, a bunch of oddly shaped dice in a clear plastic tube, and a stoppered bottle of what looked like salad oil.
The mementos were meticulously dusted. Maybe at festivals a storyteller hopped up on the display (did the Grogs believe that putting the items behind glass detracted from their power?) and used the props. Or perhaps there were bodies buried behind the access door the heavy case blocked; the Grogs often put mementos outside grave sites. It wasn't even taboo for a Grog to take them up for a moment's examination or obeisance, provided they were returned when the task was done.
He was tempted to take the glove. Though it was larger than his own hand it still seemed small when compared with his memories of his father's huge, capable ones, but the aging Grogs clustered at the doorstep were already snorting and huffing when he bent too close to the display.
Cutcher took him up to the riverbank bluffs and showed him a house with a rambling basement cut into the limestone, lately occupied by a river trader who owned a wharf-side sawmill and a bone-wracking tubercular cough. In a fit of anxiety about his approaching death, he'd donated the property entire and its furnishings to the church.
"One last trade, this time with God", Cutcher chuckled. "May his bargain pay off".
They planned to move Blake as soon as the researchers from the Miskatonic did their last set of visual-acuity tests. He'd have room to explore up there, in the moonless darkness under the trees. Cutcher said that keeping up with him would be good for his cardiovascular health.
It felt wrong to say good-bye in a basement. Good-byes were for front yards, garden gates, train platforms, and bus pick-up corners, not shuttered basements that smelled like soaking diapers.
"If you need more money...", Valentine said to Narcisse.
"Monsignor Cutcher has ample sources. We want for nothing".
"Except the sight of one of those big palms".
"Royal palms", Narcisse said, nodding. "I do miss them, and the smell of morning wind off the sea".
"I want to thank you again for..."
She poked him in his good thigh. "Daveed, please. I am old, and have learned the difference between needed and used. Here I am needed. Here I talk long through the nights with our fine priest as we watch. A deep, kind man with the magic of the right hand. I have known only two or three others like him".
"I wish I'd had time to find Blake some blocks. And some early-reader books".
"I will find or paint some Scrabble pieces. Like the ratbits had. He will learn ABC's when he is ready. He learns, but his mind has not yet caught up to his body".
Valentine regretted the lost mah-jongg pieces. Blake would probably enjoy the colors and intricate designs. Valentine's last reminder of the good days with Malia Carrasca were in some prison warehouse deep in the Nut, probably.
Narcisse gave him a bag of dried-meat sticks, a bag of glazed biscuits, and some nuts mixed with oats and corn-bread crumbs - the Grog version of trail mix. He rolled one of the cheroot-sized tubes of meat and sniffed the greasy, peppery coating. Narcisse could make even the spongiest legworm flesh taste like tenderloin medallions in a sauce, but he suspected this was pork.
"You must not leave yet", she said. "I must press one last hug on you.
He knelt down so she could hug him. Those mauled limbs that had first met around his neck on a sunbaked Haitian street pressed at either temple, pressed hard, as though trying to meet somewhere in his corpus callosum. She closed her eyes and spoke in her Creole, sliding the words together so fast and low he didn't have a hope of understanding with his mother's Quebecois French. It went on for some moments and his pressed skin began to tingle.
Finally she stopped.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
"I asked heem to put honeycombs in your path, so your journey is sweet. There is too much bitter in you, Daveed, and it finds its way out".
Narcisse had a talent for cryptic expression that sometimes rivaled that of the Lifeweavers. Valentine wondered if he'd been cross with Blake, or the Bloch brothers from the Miskatonic when he gave them their marching orders. "If only you could add a little molasses to me, the way you do to the spoon bread".