Blow Me Down Read online

  “Lay up, ye blighted minx! I’m not as fast on me pins as ye are!”

  The woman raced around the table and headed back out the door, scattering giggles and come-hither looks behind her. The naked man, a pirate if the earrings and weathered look were anything to go by, followed without giving Renata or me a second glance.

  “Oh,” I said, as the door slammed behind the couple. “That sort of business. You’re a . . . er . . . this is a . . . uh . . .”

  “Sportin’ house, aye,” Renata said, taking a healthy swig from her mug of ale. “That be Red Beth, another of me girls. Ye not be one of them lasses with yer nose stuck high up in the air who look down on us, be ye?”

  “Me? Oh, absolutely not. My nose is right here, perfectly level. I’m known for being very open-minded. Ask anyone. I’m all for . . . er . . . sportin’. Big fan of it.”

  “Are ye, now,” she asked, her eyebrows doing a surprised little waggle. “Ye don’t have the look about ye.”

  “Oh, I’m not a . . . that is, I don’t do it for money.”

  “Ah? That’s mighty charitable of ye, dearie, but ye’re due somethin’ for yer troubles.”

  “No, no, you’re misunderstanding. I don’t have sex professionally. It’s more a hobby . . . oh, that doesn’t sound right. I meant that I’m an amateur at it . . . er . . . that is, I know what I’m doing and what goes where and the approximate time and actions needed to achieve . . . oh, hell, I’m just making this worse, aren’t I?”

  Renata laughed as I stuffed a piece of undercooked mutton into my mouth more to shut myself up than to satisfy the gnawing hunger. “That ye are, dearie; that ye are. If’n ye’ve had enough to eat, p’raps now would be a good time to have that talk I’ve been hintin’ at.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, pushing the now-empty plate away. With no other beverage offered, I took a few cautious sips of ale to wash down the last of the meat, figuring that unless the game’s creators spent way too much time ensuring that the game duplicated every last aspect of real life, I should be safe from the threat of an alcohol-induced migraine. “As to that, I believe I can be of some use to you. After all, a business of this sort is no different from any other that provides a service. I will simply use the standard small business model and adapt it for your specific needs. If you could bring out your financial records, receipts, bank statements, and a list of expenses that I can itemize, I’ll get started and work you up a business plan that will allow you to run with a tightly controlled budget, and yet save sufficient funds for your retirement.”

  Renata looked at me like three naked customers were dancing on my head. “Financial records? I’ve this house, dearie.”

  “No receipts? No tax statements from years past?”

  She shook her head, still giving me a wary look.

  “Okay. We start from scratch. That’s doable, too. Do you have paper and a pencil?” I asked, looking around the room. “I could work up a model for you now, just something basic so you know where you stand, financially.”

  “I’ve no parchment, no,” Renata answered, a frown pulling her brows together as she watched me over the rim of her tankard. “ ’Tis dear, parchment.”

  “Dear? Oh, expensive. Gotcha. Hmm.” I tapped my fingers on the table and considered my situation. Clearly there was going to be more to achieving the officer level of the game than just collecting wooden limbs. No doubt the game’s creator felt some sort of a teamwork challenge was necessary. “What I really need is a spreadsheet. I’d be able to adapt one for you with just a couple of keystrokes, but I don’t suppose there’s any way to get one in the game environment?”

  Renata just stared at me.

  “Right; I thought not.” I tapped my lower lip, thinking hard. “Tell you what—I’ll quit the game and load up a spreadsheet, give it a quick modification and plug in some basic numbers, then print out the data and pop back into the game so I can read it to you. Does that work for you?”

  She was shaking her head even before I finished speaking.

  “Don’t like spreadsheets?” I asked.

  “Aye, I like my sheets spread, but that be not what I’m shakin’ me head over, dearie. It’s this idea ye have about leavin’ us and returnin’ to yer previous life.”

  “Don’t let it worry you,” I said, waving an airy hand. “I promised my daughter I’d make it to the officer level of the game, and I thoroughly intend to fulfill that promise. To be honest,” I said, leaning forward across the table, “just between you and me—I’m getting a kick out of this whole thing. It’s going to cost me to admit to Tara that she was right about a little playtime, but the truth is, this pirate stuff is a bit of a long-suppressed fantasy of mine. I’m not so sold on the game as she is, naturally, but I can see the attraction of such a virtual diversion.”

  Renata’s rheumy-eyed gaze held mine. “ ’Tis not just virtual, dearie.”

  “What isn’t?” I said on a laugh, my smile fading when her face remained watchful. “Oh, I get it. You’re not programmed to acknowledge that this world isn’t real. Sorry. Didn’t mean to—”

  “Nay. I ken well enough the origins of this world. But ye don’t be understandin’ that for ye, it’s more than just a game.”

  A faint prick of unease skittered down my back. “What do you mean by that? Of course it isn’t real. It’s pretend, a virtual world, nothing more.”

  Silence filled the room for a moment while she worked through what she wanted to say. “For others, that may be; I cannot say. But for ye, dearie . . . ye’re a part of our world just as much as Red Beth and her Jack Tar are.”

  “No, no, no, no,” I said, mentally asking myself why I bothered trying to argue with a computer character. “I’m real. You aren’t. Neither is Red Beth and her boyfriend, or that dead man outside the inn, or that handsome Corbin, or the sheep that woke me up, or anything else here.”

  She just stared at me with a bit of a pitying touch to her eyes.

  “Fine. You want me to prove it? Watch.” I reached up to my face, intending to pull off the virtual reality glasses, but there was nothing there. “Um . . . okay. There’s got to be a trigger or something somewhere to generate the computer interface.”

  I looked around the room for inspiration, examining everything from my hands (you never knew) to the surroundings for something that would bring up the computer interface. A sense of claustrophobic panic welled up within me as my searching grew more and more frantic.

  “Maybe it’s where I woke up,” I said, dashing out of the building to the nearby alley. As I searched the alley for a magic door, or computer keyboard, or even just a big button that said PUSH HERE FOR REAL LIFE, the panic was joined by a horrible sense of life spiraling out of my control.

  “No,” I said after a fruitless twenty-minute search. I kicked at a wooden water bucket and spun around, desperate for something that would take me out of what had turned into a nightmare. “No, this can’t be happening to me. It’s a game, a computer game. There were virtual reality glasses. I put them on and, whammo, I was in the game. So, therefore, I must be able to take them off to return to life.”

  My face was just as barren of glasses as it had been the thirty-odd other times I’d checked it.

  “No,” I whimpered, remembering the storm and the zap of electricity that had knocked me out when I was in the process of logging in to the game. What if it had done something to me? What if it had somehow rearranged reality and sucked me into a world where the unreal became real?

  “Aye, dearie, now ye understand,” Renata said, watching me from the mouth of the alley. I slumped dazedly against the wall, my knees threatening to give out under me. “Welcome to Turtle’s Back. I hope ye’ll be happy with us, since ye’ll be spendin’ the rest of yer life here.”

  A black maelstrom swept up out of nowhere and claimed me, sucking me down into its inky depths, but before it wholly consumed me, my mind managed one last coherent thought.

  I wasn’t going down without a fight.

&
nbsp; Chapter 4

  A paradox, a paradox,

  A most ingenious paradox!

  —Ibid, Act II

  I have always maintained that tears serve little purpose. They are a waste of energy, they are purposeless, they seldom serve to make you feel better as you might think they would, and they can leave you with red eyes and blotchy skin. Many has been the time I’ve counseled my emotional daughter that it would be better to channel the energy expended upon emotional outbursts into more proactive, positive actions.

  The thought came to me, as I sat sobbing my eyes out in Renata’s house of ill repute, that there were times when I was extremely full of it.

  “Ye feelin’ better now, dearie?” Renata asked as the sobs trickled to heavy sniffling, nose blowing, and the odd hiccup or two thrown in just to make things interesting.

  “Yes, thank you; I think I’m past the worst of it. I’m mostly worried about my daughter. How is she going to cope with a vegetable for a mother?”

  “Ye’re not still thinkin’ of throwin’ yerself off the dock?” the concerned woman asked.

  I shook my head and made another swipe at my nose with the handkerchief she had provided. “No, I’m not suicidal anymore, although I think there’s merit in the idea of a near-death experience to bring my mind back. Because, you know, either I’ve gone insane, or the world has, and somehow I just think I could handle the insanity better if I knew it was something that psychotherapy and a really big dose of Prozac could fix. Finding myself a prisoner in something that doesn’t exist is—”

  “There she goes again,” said the dark-haired Suky, hoisting the baby she had been nursing a bit higher on her hip. “Ye’ve set her off again, Reggie. Now we’ll have her waterin’ the rug afore all our Jacks.”

  “She’s a blight, she is,” Mags, another of Renata’s women, complained as she primped before a tarnished bit of mirror set on the sideboard. “Can’t ye do somethin’ with her, then? Sittin’ there blubberin’ like a scalded cat like that, she’ll run off all our business.”

  “Hush, ye heartless tart. Can’t ye see the poor thing is upset?” Sly Jez patted my shoulder sympathetically. I sniffled appreciatively at her. “She’s had a bad bit of news, she has. What is it, Amy—is yer trouble that yer man’s run off with another lass?”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said, giving in to the few more tears of self-pity that welled up.

  “Maybe she’s lost her mum, like Suky did last week?” Red Beth suggested. The ladies were all lounging around the main room in the house in various states of undress, waiting, so Renata had told me after I had regained consciousness and she had helped me back to the house, for the brisk evening trade.

  Suky tossed her head. “ ’Twas a blessing, that was. Sour old cow.”

  “No, it’s not my mother,” I answered, still trying to come to grips with the horrible twist my life had suddenly taken.

  “I know!” Mags piped up, doing a little twirl that spun her sheer petticoat out. “The stiffenin’s gone out of her man’s mizzenmast. That’d make anyone bawl their eyes out.”

  “That’s not what’s troubling me. I don’t have a man—”

  The ladies, as a group, gasped in horror.

  “Ye don’t have a man?” Mags asked, one hand surreptitiously making the sign of the cross.

  “No. I’m entanglement-free at the moment.”

  “None?” Sly Jez prodded. “Not even a Jack Tar what comes to shore every six months?”

  “No, no men, Jacks or otherwise. I had a husband. . . .”

  “Ah,” the ladies sighed, relieved.

  “Died, did he?” Red Beth asked.

  “No, actually, I divorced him several years ago. He was not at all husband material, but I was young and didn’t see that at first.”

  “Divorce?” Sly Jez looked to Renata, who was squinting into a rum barrel and muttering to herself.

  “It be somethin’ out of yer ken, lass,” Renata answered.

  “So you be havin’ no man now,” Sly Jez said slowly, her brow furrowed as she puzzled out the sad tangle of my life.

  “That’ll be hard, what with men in short supply. What the emerald mine don’t take, the sea does,” Suky said. The ladies nodded.

  “But what happened to the man ye had?” Jez asked.

  “Amicable divorce. Mostly amicable.” I gave one last sniff and told myself to get a grip. Self-pity was like tears—simply not productive.

  “Sounds painful,” Jez said. “Are ye lookin’ for a man, then?”

  “Well, not really looking . . .”

  “Of course she is,” Mags said, rolling her eyes. “But she’ll not be findin’ one here.”

  “Actually, I did meet a man here earlier.”

  “Oooooh,” said the chorus of women.

  “Fast worker,” Suky said, nodding her grudging approval.

  “Well, ye have to be, what with the few lads around here,” Mags said. The ladies—Renata excepted; she was still muttering at the rum barrel—sighed sadly.

  “So, who be the one who’s caught yer eye?” Sly Jez asked, taking a seat and adjusting her breasts. She was the only one who was still fully clothed, if you could call breasts straining to overflow her leather bodice clothed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, momentarily distracted by her actions of plumping her breasts so the bodice was almost made moot. “Shouldn’t you be . . . you know . . . tucking them back in rather than bringing them out?”

  “I’m fluffin’ me cleavage,” she answered, looking down at her breasts in surprise. “Why would I want to hide ’em? ’Tis me best feature.”

  I looked at my breasts. Even lifted and separated as they’d never been before, they weren’t overflowing the confines of the bodice. I debated fluffing but passed on the idea since there was only so much madness I could stand in any one given moment. “Er . . . Corbin was the man I met.”

  The sound of a metal tankard hitting the wooden floor was the only sound in the room.

  “He seemed nice enough, once he got rid of his blond persona,” I added, still eyeing my modest bosomage. Maybe fluffing wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Every other woman here seemed to have desirable cleavage. I didn’t want to be left behind—good God, what was I thinking!

  “Corbin?” Sly Jez asked in a squeak.

  “Mmm?” I tried squeezing my arms together against my sides to see whether that gave me bonus bosom power.

  “Captain Corbin?”

  “Yes, he was a captain. I kind of liked him, after he got through doing the charmer bit.” I glanced speculatively at Jez’s cleavage. It couldn’t all be natural. Maybe she was lacing her bodice tighter than I was.

  “Black Corbin?” Red Beth asked.

  “I think so, although he was blond at first. But I like him better with the darker hair. He looked more real, you know? More . . . trustworthy.”

  “Black Corbin, the scourge of the Seventh Sea . . . trustworthy?” Suky choked.

  I looked up, finally becoming aware of the strained silence in the room. The ladies all wore looks of stunned disbelief. “Oh, he’s not as bad as all that. I’m sure most of that is just PR. He was actually quite nice when I won a ship off him. That bit about revenge was just his wounded male ego talking, I’m sure.”

  “Ye won a ship off . . . Reggie, did ye hear?” Red Beth turned to the madam. “She won a ship from Black Corbin!”

  Renata shot me a long look. “Aye, I heard.”

  “How’d ye be doin’ that, then?” Sly Jez asked.

  I gave up trying to have the sort of breasts that overflowed anything and quickly told the women of my meeting with Corbin, including the duel and its outcome. “He said he’d get revenge, but you know how men are—they get all wounded pride and have to talk big in front of their friends,” I concluded.

  “Black Corbin has no friends,” Mags said slowly, giving me a wide berth as she sashayed over to where the hunk of meat was still cooking over the fire.

  “Well, I’m in
no position to judge that. I haven’t been here long enough—” The realization that I’d be stuck here unless I found a way out hit me again, and a few drops of moisture attempted to squeeze out of my tear ducts.

  “Oh, Lord, there she goes again,” Suky said, taking her baby off for her postdinner nap. “Someone stop her before we are a-drownin’ in tears.”

  “No need to stop me,” I said, raising a hand. “I’m done crying. I’m not the crying sort; really I’m not. I think I’m a bit PMS-y is all.”

  “Eh?” Jez asked, her brow wrinkled.

  I glanced at Renata. She seemed to be the only one in the game who actually knew it was a game. Maybe she was the equivalent of a Help file? I set the soggy handkerchief down and paced the length of the room. “PMS is unimportant. What is important is the fact that I’m through with tears. Nothing was ever accomplished through crying. No, what’s needed here is a plan of action. Organization, that’s the key! My old accounting business admin professor used to tell me that given the proper organization, any situation could be overcome. I’m an intelligent, resourceful woman—I’ll simply gather the data available, organize it in an easily understandable fashion, and then use it to solve my problems. Oh, for my laptop! Or even a whiteboard! I could work up a killer PowerPoint demonstration if I just had the necessary equipment, and what I could do with a high-speed Internet connection, maybe a dedicated T3 line . . .”

  The three ladies gaped a little bit at me. I decided they weren’t up to hearing about modern technology and moved on to a topic that would have a more productive outcome. “This may take a bit of time, unfortunately. Renata, I . . . er . . . could I stay here? I can’t pay you in money,” I hurried on before she could demand that I become one of her girls, “but as I mentioned before, I can trade my financial skills for room and board. I’d be happy to not only create a business plan for you, but set up retirement plans for all your ladies.”

  “Aye, ye’re welcome to stay, dearie,” Renata said, gathering up a basket. “I’d best be doin’ me shoppin’. Ye lasses take care of our guest, now.”

  The ladies murmured unenthusiastic agreements as Renata left the house.