Under the Noon-Night Stars

It was an orange, spirit-soaked Duskday morning. Johnny was worming around with both his arms lost in the bowels of the street.

“Dropped his thimble,” said Marla when she spotted me spying from up in the oak. Her and Johnny were close. They had both worked the same block as long as I’d been around. She always put on like she hated him, but I saw her cry just as hard as any of us when they took Johnny away, and I caught them once doing more than just talking in the alley. It was okay. I wasn’t jealous.

Johnny rocked back up on his knees so I could see the string and ladle he’d been fishing into the storm drain. “Bastard’s not coming out.”

Usually Johnny kept his thimble in his flask. Usually also there was a good bit of dandy-brandy or shine in there. Kept him honest, he said; kept him from getting greedy. That way he could only work when his flask was empty and he really needed the money. Marla said hearing it clinking every time he drank was good to keep him remembering what each swig cost. I didn't say anything about it, but it kept him drunk, and that was good too as far as I was concerned. Johnny got mean when he was sober. The fact he had it out of its bottle meant he was getting ready for a show.

I myself didn't have time to pay them much mind. I still had the fields to tend to before it got too dark for the honest sorts of work. I just kept at the slow task of plucking acorns and filling up the burlap.

A few minutes later I heard a whoop from below and saw Johnny was stood up wobbling, holding up his thimble real proud and high over his head.
“Puck, Puck, I'm gonna need you tomorrah. Be here by noontime.” I nodded and scampered down the tree, smiling shyly at Marla as I headed off.


I strung up beads and acorn caps painted like eyes and weaved up osier and dandy-string wickerwear. Those were what I sold to the shops on the main drag to make my bucks. The storemen bought them at a couple coins each, and they sold them right back to the Sats for bucks each, calling them gallump eyes and authentic artifacts and whatnot. They sold hot right alongside the arrowheads and spirit-drops and mini totems.

Of course the Sats don't believe the hocus, and we don't believe it neither—none of us but the true lunies—but the Sats get a kick out of thinking we believe it. They come here part to feel real dirt under their feet, part to hear the local yokels tell their ghost stories. Gallumps, far as I could ever figure, were a real mean swindle dreamt up long before Johnny or I or the rest of us came around to use it.

Anyways, it was later I was in one of the shops trying not to touch anything with my palms all stained yellow from the dandelion fields when I heard the bell jingle over the top of the door and a bumble of Sats come in. They had the usual dizzy walk all the kids here for school break get, the walk of being not yet used to the gravity and not yet used to the wine neither.

A new shipload had showed up that Duskday noon, right on schedule. I'd seen it landing when I was in the fields. Most of them would only stay till the next Dawnday when the next ferry went, but some would stay a few flips of the sun. This fresh off-the-boat lot, two girls and two guys, were eyeing up everything in the shop. They were waving their money around, not like they were showing it off, but just like they didn't know better. I tried to keep talking to the shopman, but the way the blonde girl kept bouncing around with her little tits bouncing right with her, I couldn't focus. She might've been the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. I'd seen a lot of pretty Sats though, and even I was smart enough to know I was looking at something special. My mouth went dry and I did something then I knew was crazy. I waltzed right up to the whole gang of them and started talking.

I don't know. Maybe I thought I could pass off as a Sat. If I thought that, I didn't think it for long. I saw the look in their eyes. I didn't even get through asking their names before her and her girlfriend' lips curled and their boyfriends whisked them right out.

I was saved having to see them any longer. Nick came buggy-wheeling right up offering a ride. He must've seen the money on them and been ready at the corner. I knew his racket. He would take them out on the steppes to see all the geysers and spirit pools. He would show them how the boys ladled them up. He would ride them all the way to the endless shore of the mare where they would, if the clouds were right, look out at their world in the noon-night sky before he took them back. He made a good buck doing that.


There were a couple ways to tell a Sat. There was the way they laughed about in the street—but that way only worked for the lady Sats—and there was the way they could tell at dinner tables over acorn mash: how they all wore those big jangly novelty watches with six sides, one each for Dawnday, Highday, Duskday, Lowday, Darkday, and Waxday, and with the normal hands that told the time too. Nobody who spent any real time on Huyg would be caught dead wearing one, but the Sats bought them up. That was the Ferryman’s swindle. He got the freshest bucks selling those watches right as they got off the ship, right after the money exchange, which itself was the bankman’s swindle. Everybody in Huyg had a swindle. There were con men, hucksters, grifters, buskers, and racketeers. Johnny was all of those wrapped up in one, and a showman to boot.

After the night and morning came and went, once the noon-night stars started glimmering and I was back to help him just like I told him I’d be, Johnny got raveling up to spin his yarn. He didn’t talk to anyone in particular, and he acted like he didn’t care who was listening. He talked loud and sure. Sure enough, just like always, the Sats would make like they were walking by and didn't hear, but then stop mid-step just before leaving earshot.

“I was son of a Jupe, you know,” he started, “a real big-shot gassed-up fatcat.”

He got a few skeptical glances, but looking at Johnny, you could almost believe it. He had a big burly frame and wide face. But if you got close you'd see his eyes were too dark and beady and his skin had a few too many lines and whiskers.

“I was just here on vay-cay-shun, just a pup. Real proper. A whole family thing. The gallumps napped me—stole me right up out of my bed in the dead dark night.” That always got the reaction he wanted. The Sat tots all got wide eyes and hid between their Sat-momma legs. The older folks all smiled indulgently. Of course, even those true lunies that bought in said there hadn't been any gallumps since we moved in and killed them all off some two or three hundred years back, and Johnny certainly weren't that old, but that didn’t him from telling it that way. “They stole me away and they raised me up, out in the steppe and sea—” Johnny waved theatrically out past city limits toward the hazy orange beyond. “And they taught me all sorts of Gallump things. I learned their talk. I learned their tricks. I learned their magic. I learned their dance.”

That was when Johnny got to the real show. He must've judged he had enough of a crowd by then. He started pouring the spirits one-by-one out of their vases around him. Johnny stood for a moment or two with the spirits of all colors pooling up in their divots before he got into it. He started dancing. He stirred up the spirits so they almost looked not like smoke or liquid but like real flesh. He whipped them around deft and fierce. I knew Marla was down below, working the fans and heaters, but the way Johnny hammed it up with his big staff spinning and dancing it looked like was all him. He twisted the air around so they danced with him. It got so cloudy with spirits in the air that Johnny got lost in the shedding haze, and on his stage all you could see were six twisting smoky forms, dancing around wildly. They had snarls, and snakeskin, and writhing manes. They were the gallump spirits risen back to raucous life. He did a whole routine like that before the forms supplicated back into just pools of haze, then Johnny stamped his staff and bellowed, “Titania!"

The six streams rose up curling like vines on an invisible pillar, then they coalesced into one towering goddess. She danced her fangs around, a stately ochre haze taller than the tallest oak. The drums boomed and rattled all around from the speakers Johnny had set up. Johnny emerged again as the smog cleared, and he stood right below in Titania's pirouetting shadow, himself moving in perfect synchrony with her every turn. The music riled up to something big and the moves got frantic. The foggy gallump goddess shed more and more spirit in big wafting sheets over the crowd. The corner of the street was so hazed up that you almost couldn't see your feet.

Then the drums reached their crescendo, and a big bawoof of flame swallowed the dancing Titania from her skirts up. Everything got hot and smelled burnt. All that was left of the show was a cloud of true smoke, dead and gray, settling over the stage. The Sats all clapped and tipped good. It really was a spectacle, but after the twentieth or so time seeing it, I was only there to whoop and holler from the audience.

Johnny gave it a few minutes. He was a true showman. He was in an alley changing, but the Sats all stood crowded around with bated breath even after the show was over, wondering if he'd gotten burnt up by the flame.

There was a sigh of relief when he came back out, out of his dancing get-up, all garbed up in robes and spangled in beads and crystals and gallump-eyes, toting a folding table under one arm and a heavy burlap in his hand.

A pretty Sat girl came bouncing up with her friends. They were the ones I'd seen earlier. The blonde one was at the front and friends were egging her on to get her fortune read. They kind of herded her right up to Johnny’s table, and he was ready. He swept his spirit board right out. It was a polished oak, dimpled and inlaid with ochre and sulfur patterns around the edges. He pulled one then-unopened spirit vase from under the table too, popped the cork off. He took his thimble between two fingers and scooped that little bit of spirit from the vase. It was an evil-looking purple one. Slowly, Johnny tipped the thimble high over the board, so the spirit came snaking down in a long dribbly waterfall. It fell on the board so it filled in some of the dimples and it began to look sort of constellated. He said all sorts of silly things in hushed words I couldn't make out about the stars and what they meant and the girl went cloudy-white. Her friends all jeered at her, but Johnny wasn't finished.

“Now you gotta make it come true,” he told her. The girl made a quizzical face. The way Johnny said it, like she should know what he meant, was all on purpose. She didn’t know what he meant. Not till he scooped up one more thimble-full, popped open his mouth and poured the spirit right in. He re-filled the thimble and handed it to her. I could tell she didn’t want to, but she swallowed it down all the same. Johnny whispered something to the girl and she went smiling prancing away. I don't think she or anybody else but me saw the single drop of liquid silver that Johnny sat in the bottom of the thimbleful she drank.

Johnny did a few more fortunes after that. I didn’t pay much mind except to notice that he didn't do any tomfoolery with their thimbles.


Johnny bragged he got a couple ten thousands of bucks ransom for that Sat girl. Hel was her name, turned out, the one she never gave me. That was the biggest ransom he ever got, and also the last he ever got. He’d been nabbing up the Sat girls for a while, it turned out. That was Johnny’s real swindle. That was what he wanted me for that night. Later, after all the Sats went to bed, he dragged me out to help him with it. Seemed the spirit he'd given her had done its job. Hel was laid out unconscious on the street. I have no clue how Johnny got her friends away except that he knew the barman pretty well and maybe it had something to do with that. He wanted me to get in on the racket. I was gonna help out just that first time getting her locked up where nobody would come looking. He had all the rest worked out he said. The ferryman had been scoping it out, and he was supposed to be doing some sort of vetting on every Sat that came through to see if they’d be right to nab. They had to be rich enough that there’d be a ransom worth taking, but not so rich they couldn't make any real trouble. Well, the Ferryman missed something big with Hel. We didn't find out until the Highday next after she was already long ago safe on the ferry with some big angry men who hissed a lot of ‘mooncalf’ and ‘luny’ and ‘titmouse’ at every Huygite they could get in earshot of.

Hel turned out not to be any old Sat. Not a Sat at all, in fact. She was real Jupe, blood and bone. Her daddy found out, mad as hell, and had Johnny taken away. The ferryman and a few Sats they’d been bribing on the world-side port too. They hanged the lot of them. By all accounts they made quite a show of it. That was the end of it. Marla moved away not long after, pulling some strings I never knew she had to get a cushy Sat job in some fancy glass office. We got a new ferryman and some new lawmen too. People kept on swindling.

The only thing I could never puzzle out is what I saw that day after his noon-night show, in the Darkday dead of night before everything went to shit. It's the one time the streets of Huyg ever truly sleep, when even spirits in the steppe are frozen to ice and geysers stilled mid-burst. I was up worrying about what I'd done, and so I peeped out my window try to get a look at the shack where Johnny had Hel caged up. What I saw was just one man. Just Johnny on his stage, still awake for some reason, no theater get-up, no fortune teller robes, but just him in a big puffy jacket sitting at his table. Again and again I saw him pour the spirits over his board. It looked like he was fortune telling, only I couldn't tell who he was swindling. And he looked awfully sad.

When I’m telling tales these days on the street and some bold Sat or another starts asking me when the last of the gallumps died, I usually don't say much. But if they really press me on it and offer a few bucks, I tell them the story of Johnny Obe.

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Pub: 07 Apr 2025 03:41 UTC

Edit: 07 Apr 2025 06:13 UTC

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