This was a monologue for a Dungeons and Dragons character (the cynical rogue described in the last post) that I delivered near the climax of the game. Some background: for almost a year I'd been playing a human rogue known as Philip Ecton, a heavy-drinking drifter with a hat of disguise whose dialogue was so saturated with slang from 20s detective novels that half the time he was incoherent. The only thing anyone knew about his past was that he came from Forest Oaks and was searching for a kid named Billy. Anton Silverstreak was another character's brother, and the Rose was a crime organization our party was in the midst of fighting.
It was the time of night in speakeasy when the piano man was so loaded on hootch that the notes sank into something slow and tuneless that kept getting worse until the sap gave his arrangement a fitting ending of about fifteen notes smashed at once when his head hit the keyboard. The town council went puritan the year before and declared Forest Oaks dry, but prohibition only turned the creek of liquor into a river and gave the budding gentleman’s association known as the Rose an in on bootlegging.
I was sitting at the bar, nursing a snoutful for half an hour, eavesdropping on the closest thing the Roses had to a boss, Anton Silverstreak, talking to his half-orc goon named Ray Tombers about the kid they nabbed. It was all in the cant, of course, but I’d been on the beat for five years and had learned enough to pick up most of it. Rube’s condensed translation for their conversation goes something like this: they had the kid in a little shack outside the town walls, they’d gotten the ransom, and the detective on the case (Anton himself) was to report that the kid had been spirited off to another plane by some demon pirates after another week of phony snooping. The only word I couldn’t make out was “doorknobbed,” as in Ray’s passing comment “I doorknobbed the brat last night, like you said.”
The kid was mine. I’d found him on the streets when he was three, part of some mob of wandering beggars who left him to rot in our little burg when he got so ugly that the revulsion outweighed any sympathy a starving kid might get. He didn’t know how to speak any common besides, “Copper for your pity, sir?” He didn’t know what the words meant, or what to do with the greenbacks people sometimes tossed at him. He might’ve tried to eat one or two, which would have been a welcome change to his diet of dead rats and dirt.
I asked around. The town council was on their Darwinist kick, they wanted the kid to starve to clean out the streets. The church wouldn’t take him in because the bums who brought him in worshipped some kind of snake octopus. The poor families didn’t want another mouth and the rich families couldn’t handle the smell. I’d seen all the scum as a detective, I thought I could watch the situation meet its natural end without flinching. I almost did.
I named him Billy. Even when his stomach wasn’t a cave anymore, he took a while to start talking, and once he did he didn’t catch much. I’d tell him I was going to a market to buy dinner four times in a minute, and when I got back his eyes would be streaming because he didn’t know where I’d gone. He mostly just sat around, playing in the dirt or throwing rocks around or smiling up at me dumbly as I went on some yarn he couldn’t understand. I loved that, how he always smiled. He never knew what was going on, and he didn’t give a lick, so long as he was fed he was happy. He was the only person I ever knew who had so little going on in their head that I could really trust him.
In my investigations I discovered that Anton nabbed him using the hat of disguise to look like me. Anton walked in the door, opened his arms, and stuck a sleeping draught down his throat when Billy came in for a hug. There are a lot of reasons I wish I could bring Anton back to life to do him in all over again for, but that’s near the top of the list. Number five, maybe.
Anton was in on it all. The hat of disguise let him get a little bit of every market there is, straight or crooked. He was the bootlegger Johnny Voss, the grifter Scott Staley, the traveling salesman Philip Ecton, and of course the famed detective Anton Silverstreak. I talked to them all, and once you knew who was under the skin they all seemed to blend together. He was a musician with his face, changing his expression perfectly to fit the ideal reaction to any situation. He spoke so fast you couldn’t catch half of what he said, but it had a pleasant meter to it, a tune, half the time it even rhymed. You just wanted to tap your foot to it, to smile, to forget the words and wallow in the faith that such a nice fellow had your back.
He thought he could get rich with a thumb in everything, but cutting your brain into a couple pieces doesn’t make you any smarter. He couldn’t keep track of it all, and there are some debts smiles and music can’t pay. I had an eye on him when a tax collector paid him a visit. He invited the poor sap in, and soon as the door closed he put a knife in the bureaucrat’s throat. When he lugged the bastard downstairs, the body and the man wore a matching expressions: cold and dead and hopelessly bored. I think that’s as close to his real face as I ever saw.
He bumped thirteen saps as his financial situation went down and his tolerance for cracking skulls went up. Or maybe fourteen. Depends on what doorknobbed means.
I played it clean at first, gave the correct amount to the correct alter ego of Anton’s at the correct hour of early morning on the correct back alley. He said I’d find Billy back at my house. I didn’t. I didn’t hear anything after that.
I followed Anton and Ray to their shack, slipping inside the door just as it closed. I didn’t want to kill him in front of Billy, but the pit was empty, no furniture or floorboards, so I slipped my knife in the back of his head. I thought it would feel like a lay to shove a blade in such an evil brain, but it wasn’t any more exciting than stabbing dead meat. It might have felt better if I’d taken my time, let him run his sweet, useless gums as I took him apart.
Ray gave a deep scream when his boss hit the floor, and I threw a knife into his belly out of instinct. He gurgled a bit as he croaked, like air bubbles from a sinking ship, and mumbled something in orcish. I rushed over and asked him where he’d put Billy, if Billy was safe, what doorknobbed meant. Maybe the way he smiled with his lips sealed tight around those disgusting tusks was meant as a final kick in the head.
I fiddled around with the corpses to make it clear enough that any bull could tell that Anton and Ray killed each other. I put a pouch of coins with exactly the ransom in Ray’s hands, making him the fall guy. It kills me that Anton died a hero, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Daniel Marlow is still on the books as a cop in Forest Oaks, though he’s been missing five years. I used the hat to try and see if any of Anton’s former contacts knew where Billy went. Eventually the leads dried up and I became Philip full time, drifting around, waiting for a trail to emerge.
Everywhere I go, I ask people what doorknobbed means. Most say it’s to open a doorknob, which gets me exactly nowhere. A substantial minority notice that it’s used as a verb and it means to hit someone with a doorknob. I wouldn’t put it past Anton, but it doesn’t do me much good either. Three have said it means a rub out. Statistically, that’s nothing, but I’ve been searching five years. I haven’t got many other options.
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