Six Months Before

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
- Dr. Seuss

Inside his private mansion, on his Whalestrand estate, Cleveland Jeremiah Sharpe sat in his study and polished the dagger.

The newly-christened Sharpe Manor was not really his. It had sort of... fallen into his hands, like most things had. But it had been acquired long before the purchase of Aqualand had ever come to fruition, as sort of a safety net in case things went south in America. And while they hadn't per se, he had been started to be viewed through a lens of suspicion for a while. A lens he didn't particularly want on him for extended periods of time. In any case, it meant no more expensive and boring long-distance flights to inspect the parks progress.

In fact, the way that Sharpe was looked at in Whalestrand was refreshing. There was none of the inherent cynicism of America - it was all wide eyes and outlandish gossip. It was almost like he'd started afresh, with how many wild stories and flights of fancy buzzed in the press and on the street like inquisitive wasps. Was he a wilful dreamer, brought up from poverty in some far-flung farming state? The product of infidelity between a rich countess and some vagabond? A charming rogue from some other dimension, or perhaps another planet? Plenty of speculation, but very little detail.

That was good. Keep things vague and the punters filled in the details themselves. And when you let them do that, you had them in the palm of your hand.

The winter sun was low, so even the largest window permitted only a little light into the room. But what little that did come in still made the metal of the short, pointed blade gleam dully against the clinical white of the cleaning cloth Sharpe ran over it. 

The dagger was not the only unusual thing in his study. On the furthest wall, a large engraved mezzotint depicting some old-world country manor marred the pale surface like a black bruise. Rows of glass cases showed other curiosities - masks, bas-reliefs, statues, arrowheads, jars, a strange whistle. Locked in its own separate case with an iron padlock, a canine skull grinned without mirth from behind the reinforced glass. Something on the mahogany desk faintly glowed and span, the pinkish-purple light throwing weird highlights on the sharp, eagle-like face of its current owner.

It would be trite and inaccurate to say that Sharpe did not believe in the supernatural. In a world that persistently proved that the supernatural existed, such beliefs were the equivalent of putting a hessian sack over one's head to escape the sunlight. Far better to say, perhaps, that he had no romantic ideas about the supernatural. He saw them for what they were and attached no greater significance or fable to them. He put no stock in superstitions or flights of fancy - he stripped the phantom and the banshee and the alien bare and saw their bones, without finery or adornment. 

And that meant he saw their worth.

He picked up a cotton swap and dipped it in the cleaning solution. His sharp, sea-green eyes narrowed as, with that same swab, he traced the simple patterns engraved upon the hilt and cross guard.

Cleve Sharpe was no fool. No fool would recognize the inherent value that came attached to the strange and unusual. And no fool would seek to acquire such things via a shell company, under the guise of "scientific inquiry". No, it took a mind like Sharpe's, honed to a razor edge by years of craft and cunning, to find ways to claim his hands on such valuable items.

And, indeed, value was the key word here. The stranger the object, or at least the stranger the story behind it, then the more value it had. Some English amateur engraving was one thing, but quite another was an engraving surrounded by a tale of vengeance from beyond the grave. A wolf skull might have fetched a pretty penny, but handsomer still was the price commanded by the last remnant of the Beast of Gévaudan. And scrap metal was worth mere dimes compared to a fragment of some alien machine, perhaps a weapon left behind by some scouting party with less foresight than the average gnat.

Cleve Sharpe collected the strange, the unusual, the bizarre. To him, it had much more worth, if not in money, then in notoriety, than any Renaissance-era scribblings. Easy as it was to turn a mere pebble into the Philosopher's Stone with just the right amount of wording, actually looking upon, even holding the truly enchanted... that was no mean feat.

But the dagger, now...

He turned that item over carefully, dipped the swab again and went back to work.

This dagger. He'd acquired it not long after he'd moved his business operations here. It had been found, he was told, buried at the bottom of the mansion's garden - and yet age and weather had passed it over and left not a hint of corrosion or wear. Any real information was scanty - the local library had little to say on the subject and no scholar had seen the like of it. But the design of it echoed some local legends whispered to each other by mountain men and sailors alike, of its ability to draw out...

Power.

Well...

He put the swab down, then reached for the velvet-lined case the dagger was kept in.

"Can't be having that, can we?" he said, more to himself than anything. 

He'd heard of such things before. Daemons. Personae. Stands. Eidolons was becoming frustratingly common - that word was like a mouthful of porridge, heavy and unexciting. But they were all different brand names for the same thing. A thing that Sharpe, for all his cunning and business sense, wanted nothing to do with. The world was already a difficult stream to navigate, and the last thing he needed was a few extra rocks in his path.

That was why he cleaned the dagger himself. He couldn't risk a hired man cutting themselves on it, and then... well.

He put the dagger in the case, point first. He shut the case, locked it, picked it up and took it over to the great iron safe that squatted like a fat, ugly toad on top of a chest of drawers. He'd only taken the dagger out because the man who tended the garden insisted it be looked after. Something about foul luck being attached to it, haunting whoever wielded it. And the almost wild look in those eyes was enough for Sharpe, disturbed as he was by what what he'd heard, to at least indulge the senile old fool.

He'd been meaning to find a buyer for the wretched thing. The sooner it was out of his hands, the better. But it kept slipping his mind.

He locked the safe - double locked it, just to be sure - and stood, contemplating, as he removed his cleaning gloves. 

There was a lot to do, he knew. The Kobbers would be arriving in less than a year - special precautions would need to be taken. Aqualand was running far smoother than it had ever done, and would continue to do so for as long as he permitted it to. But that didn't mean he could get lackadaisical. He needed to give them no reason to look his way, no reason to suspect anything untoward was occurring. Keep the head down for two more years at most, and all would be well. And then, once they'd left...

He just hoped Knaggs didn't lose his nerve. The man had the constitution of a wet handkerchief even on his best days. He'd have to be watched closely.

Cleveland Jeremiah Sharpe left his gloves on the desk and went to his dinner.

--------

Carlton Windsor Knaggs was about to lose his nerve.

He was watching a duo of paramedics taking a girl away on a rolling stretcher. But that was only one half of the horror that whirled in his head like a hurricane. The other had been the half-hour before, when he'd rushed into the animal training building and saw the other trainers pulling the screaming blonde from the water of the tank. Everything after that had been a blur - the frantic yelling down his phone, the agonized cries of the woman, the smell of the blood oozing from her mangled leg.

He'd had to resist the urge to throw up once or twice. Although wherever that was from the blood or the panic churning in his chest, he didn't know.

He watched as the paramedics carried the woman, groaning and sluggish from the morphine, out through the doors and to the back parking lot. He felt disconnected from the world around him, as though floating through the air in some awful waking nightmare, hoping that what he was seeing wasn't real, that he would wake up. But his desperate attempts to will the tang of iron in his nose, nor the sight of a janitor frantically scrubbing blood from the floor, didn't work.

Knaggs was a paranoid man. He'd been brought up, by stern parents and so-called friends who never paid back the lunch money he loaned them, to never trust anyone. What didn't help was that, as he grew older, he proved to be an extremely anxious man as well. Even a small mistake, like missing his tram home, sent him into a hyperventilating panic. And now, the two forces combined in his head, stirred by his own fright at what he'd seen, forming a thick black milkshake of terror as everything that could go wrong played itself out in his head.

They'll know now. They'll know what we've got down here. They'll come looking, and they'll ask how we got them, and what will we say then? And then they're gonna look through our books, and see what we've been up to, and what's our excuse? And then it's over for me. All because we slipped up in trying to corral something we didn't even understand-

"Boss?"

Knaggs yelped as he span like a startled cat. The speaker - a young man with brown hair and too much stubble - flinched away from him in surprise, and it took the superior a moment to recognize who was in front of him. He didn't know the person's name and he didn't care to remember. Probably just another idiot fisherman's son from the coast. But he knew enough that they were one of the animal handlers, specially hired for when things got particularly... troublesome with the park's new acquisitions.

"We, uh... got them under control," said the handler, jabbing his thumb at the tank. When Knaggs had run in, it had been churning and the air had been filled with eerie screams and hissing. But now the handlers were retracting their long catchpoles and electric prods, the waters still rolling but growing still, and the cries had died away. Things looked... relatively normal.

Except for the janitor, still scrubbing, the lather turned pink with blood. Knaggs swallowed and tried to ignore it.

"Anyone else hurt?" he croaked out. Her face...

The nameless handler shook his head. "No, boss. Nobody else was on the platform with her. The lads came running as soon as she went under and we grabbed the prods as we went."

"And you didn't see how it happened?" pressed Knaggs. "I mean, what she was doing?" She was only sixteen...

"No idea, boss. Far as we know, she was just doing the routine."

Knaggs took out his handkerchief and mopped the copious sheen of sweat from his forehead. God. This was the worst time for something like this to happen. Here he was, thinking they finally had the damn things tamed, only for there to be an actual attack. Six months out from when ZF Corp moved in and that menagerie of freaks followed. But there'd be some very damn intelligent freaks among them, as always, and it wouldn't be long before this came out in the press. And if one of them got hold of this story somehow-

No. Stay clam, Knaggs. Remember what Sharpe told you. First things first - damage control. Now, what's the plan...?

"Listen," he hissed, "this doesn't get out. Okay? Not a damn word. I will pay you double your month's salary to keep this quiet - I'll get the cash from somewhere. And if the press speak to you, you put it on her. Tell them she wasn't following the safety guidelines, I don't know! Any excuse will do! As long as we can keep this quiet and opening day goes smoothly, nobody's gonna suspect anything!"

There was a pause as the handler's brow wrinkled with the effort of thought. God, Knaggs hated Whalestranders. Fish-sucking hicks who couldn't tell their asses from their elbows, every last one of them, and it took them five minutes to string a coherent thought process together. But they were cheap to hire and the only ones willing to take on any jobs in the park at the moment.

"...you're saying we should throw her under the bus?" the man asked at last.

"What do you think?!" snapped Knaggs. "I'm not letting this park go under because some girl squeals to the press! Besides, she did something to provoke those animals, right? That's usually what happens!"

"Aren't you taking this a bit far, boss?" the handler asked. "I mean, what d'you reckon they're gonna think, other than 'oh, she got bit by one of the show animals'? Nothing really suspicious about-"

Whatever mental lock that had kept things under control snapped.

"Are you blind, man?!" Knaggs screamed. "Did you even look at her leg?! Those weren't teeth marks!"

He wanted to say more. A lot more. About what he'd seen in that damned tank, and the noises he heard from it, and what one of the cleaners had seen scrawled into the metal floor when there should have been nothing to scrawl with. And what the woman might say, and what PR could possibly cook up to blow it over this time, and god, how the hell are we going to explain this one to Sharpe, that conniving old vulture?!

But his nerves were so thoroughly jangled that words eluded him. So after a moment of futile spluttering, he gave up and stormed off, leaving the bewildered youth behind. As he went, his hands automatically grasped for a pint glass that wasn't there. He'd promised his wife three years ago - not another drop. But if there was ever a time when Carlton Windsor Knaggs needed a beer, this was it.

That nerve was practically a thread by now.