Free The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy Page B

stomach!
”
    “Hey!” Jo was looking down the tunnel in the other direction. “Come look at this!”
    Jo pointed her flashlight down the dripping tunnel. It dropped into an enormous mucilaginous gorge, thick with running juices, the walls writhing rhythmically.
    At the bottom there stood a building.
    It was a solid, respectable five-story brick building. In a city, one might pass it a hundred times without noticing it. Inside a giant throbbing stomach, however, it was noticed.
    “Wonders upon wonders!” said Colonel Korsakov. “I don’t recall eating a small law firm.”
    Jo squinted down at the building. Carved above the door were these words:
             
    LODGE
    ORDER OF ODD-FISH
             
    “Order of Odd-Fish—that’s what is said on the package!” said Jo. “Aunt Lily!…Aunt Lily?”
    Aunt Lily was gazing at the lodge with frozen eyes. Her hands clutched vaguely at her chest, and she turned away with a shiver. “Okay,” she said faintly.
    Jo, Aunt Lily, Korsakov, and Sefino half climbed, half slid down the gorge, grabbing hold of fleshy knobs and pulsing protrusions, and finally dropped to the bottom.
    The lodge loomed before them, dead and silent. Every window was dark. Its crumbling bricks were crabbed with gray, sickly ivy, and cold thin mist twisted around. The whole building looked as if it was sunk into a dreary hibernation.
    Jo walked up the porch steps. She raised her hand to knock on the door—and she felt something familiar.
    Back at the ruby palace, Jo would often go down to the small movie theater in the basement where Aunt Lily kept all her old black-and-white films. Jo would watch those movies alone, far into the night, trying to figure her aunt out. She felt that somewhere within all those old movies, there had to be some clue that would tell her where Aunt Lily had disappeared to for forty years, and where she had come from; and some hint as to why that note had said she was “dangerous.”
    Jo fell asleep while watching the movies, but a story would take shape in her dreams, patched together from clips of the dozens of movies she watched—and for a moment she
would
know who she was. Jo always forgot the dream in the morning, no matter how she tried to remember it. But she did remember that feeling of knowing.
    She felt it now. The feeling of knowing was in that lodge. It was so real that she almost imagined it as an actual physical thing, a black dot lurking somewhere in there. Maybe the black dot was hidden on top of a bookshelf, or tucked inside a drawer, or sitting under a dish; wherever it was, she would find it. She would tear the lodge apart to find that dot. It was the period at the end of her old life.
    Jo knocked. There was no answer. But the heavy oak doors, laced with iron and copper, gave way when she pushed, and swung open into a musty darkness.
    The foyer was a gloomy cave of high ceilings and ponderous decor. Smooth, dusty hardwood floors, overlaid with ratty rugs, spread down two corridors and up a gently swooping stairway. The walls housed rows of bookcases crammed with yellowed books and crumbling maps. A shattered chandelier lay crashed in the center of the room, glistening in frozen splashes of light.
    “Hello?” called Colonel Korsakov. But nobody answered.
    They made their way through the abandoned lodge. There were signs that the inhabitants had intended to return soon, long ago: wineglasses stained red with evaporated wine; a dusty half-finished card game lying on a table; a book cracked open and left on the ottoman; a pipe on a chair. All was veiled with dust.
    “I remember this place,” said Aunt Lily.
    Korsakov stopped. “Exceedingly strange. I, too, remember something about this place.”
    “I used to live here,” said Sefino suddenly.
    “So did I!” said Aunt Lily.
    “I lived here, too!” said Korsakov, astonished.
    “I didn’t!” said Jo, starting to feel left out. “I don’t remember this place at all!”
    Korsakov opened a