Words from the Wood: Rat Barkeep Thumper Franklin Talks Cobbled Street Lore

For the safety of fantasticals, I will not publish the interview location.

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Words from the Wood is a four-part miniseries where I venture into dangerous places and interview Fantastical voices. This is a 4,700-word adventure, or about 18 minutes. Thank you for choosing to spend a sliver of your time in this world.

Now, let’s get weird.

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Welcome.

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In the forest, not all is verdant brown and green
In the forest, we are watched by things unseen

Black are the knotty places, the rock undersides,
the crumbled bark wet with mushroom barnacles,
the midnight depth hollowed into a trunk

where innocent eyes do not venture.

The roots climb down, past the worms,
past the moles, past the dens

where innocent eyes do not venture.

The roots buzz like powerlines
They are electrified and Down they gnarl and climb,
until they grasp hollow air, and they dangle from the underloam
In a room thick with smoke and bodies.

Where innocent eyes do not venture.

-         Johan Von Strudell, German immigrant

This poem was retrieved from Von Strudell’s journal, found deep in a Massachusetts wood in 1755 by his wife, Miriam. Next to it lay Johan’s wooden smoking pipe, split in two, and his bifocals, smashed. His body was not found.

For the rest of her life, Miriam swore that upon discovery of the evidence, she heard fiddles and kettle drums. “In your head?” asked the doctor. “No,” she had replied.

“Underground.”

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Words from the Wood.
Volume Two: Rat Beerslinger Thumper Franklin

A Mexican cartel man was caught by Border Patrol shivering uncontrollably on the U.S. side of Route 2 above El Papalote in Sonora. He was curled against a cactus, covered in dirt, with a broken shovel by his side.

The patrol asked who he was. He was Jorge. Jorge had five daughters. He had been contracted to widen and finish a natural tunnel found under the desert. The cartel would send their drugs through. Should Jorge fail, the cartel made it clear what would happen to him and his daughters.

Why’d you quit the tunnel? An agent had asked.

Deep in the earth, Jorge had heard a thrum and voices as he bashed at a sliver of soft earth that protruded between two halves of a cracked drainage pipe that ran under the highway. He pressed his ear to the wall. He worked on. He crashed through the soft soil into an anteroom supported by Gold Rush-era timber.

The agents pressed him. He would not explain further what he had seen. As a matter of national security, they said, they might choose to let Jorge stay with asylum if he informed them of the whereabouts of this underground chamber. He could have an American life. For him and his daughters. You know what the cartel will do to you, the agents said.

“No,” Jorge had shook his head violently.

“Give me the cartel.”  

I read through these anecdotes with a magnifying glass in a nook at the Free Library on Vine Street in Philadelphia. A thick, dusted brown tome from 1778 hid half my face.

I had not opened this one yet.  

“You know you could wear glasses?” A friendly passing librarian teased.

“No.” I was too immersed to catch her tone. “Fantasticals sometimes hide code in these texts. I need it.”

I sifted through a pile of archival documents and glanced for the tenth thousandth time at a definition, pulled from the observation of a disgraced CIA whistleblower, surrounded by redacted text:

Pubstump: A gathering place. An underground tavern hollow carved beneath a root system, where Fantasticals and woodland creatures drink, fight, and trade. A refuge for outcasts. A hideaway for smugglers, bounty hunters, cutthroats, Shepherds, rat bartenders, raccoon waitresses, murder contracts, and pudding-cheeked bankvoles. A haven for nightclub jazz and underloam wonderment.

Synonym: A sasquatch employment office.

“Yes, but how do I find them?!” I yelled.

“Shhhh!”

I glared back at the suspicious bald man who decided he’d had to read his Inquirer in the cubby right next to me.

“Shh yourself!”

He smacked the paper down. “What are you even looking at? It sounds like Charles Manson seeking the lost city of the Incas over there.”

“I’m an investigative journalist.” I put the magnifying glass back to my eye. “I need to interview a pubstump bartender.”

“What is that even?”

“If you don’t know, then all the more reason people like me need to investigate.”

“I assume this is some Fantastical nonsense? Why can’t people like you leave those things alone?”

He said “things” like they were an icky boo-boo that he had to shake off his thumb. I admit, I was defensive.

“I want to tell their stories.” I looked away. “I want to know their magic.”

The man sighed and stood up. He looked over my shoulder. He had the air of a well-to-do investor or tech mind—a businesslike eagerness like he might grab me and take me in a tin pod with a video game controller 5,000 meters to the sea floor. He leaned in and tapped a finger on the dusted brown 1778 tome.

“I bet this one’s got secrets.”

I’d found that one in the library basement archives hidden behind a collection of World Books from 1917. I was afraid of it.

He slid it toward himself and I put my hand on it.  

“Leave it.”

He slid it off and picked it up. I grabbed for it.

Thmp.

The book made a soft thump on the plush floor and spilled open. A folded-up document spilled out and accordioned open.

We both stood and bent forward. An ambient light seemed to throw dapples of gold across the pages.

It was a map.

“What damn book did you find?” The man snapped. “What have you unleashed?”

“Geology and Territorial Timber Surveyance of the Colonial Era, 1764.” I was transfixed on the map. “Book about mm…about… land plots.”

I picked it up. I smoothed it open on the desk. For all his gusto, this man was invested. I looked up: “What’s your name?”

He stuck out a hand. He was still looking at the map. “Barkam.”

“Jon.”

We shook.

The map was intricate. Carefully plotted coordinates showed tiny “X” marks in what was once probably a deep blue ink. They were scattered—dozens of them—all over the colonial eastern seaboard.  

“Oh my—look at the emblem at the top.”

I pointed to the stamp—a ship’s wheel holding a compass.

Barkam looked and his eyes flickered. “What is that?”

He knew. This man knew more than he let on.

“That’s a Shepherd’s mark.”

I stared at the blue-inked symbol of a compass encased in a ship’s wheel. I was unsure whether to continue. For a brief time, Fantasticals and humans had fought together and achieved rights for the unicorns and trolls—all the magic of the wood—who had so long been persecuted. But now the pendulum had swung and they were back in hiding. Living like their ancestors. 

“What does that mean?”

He asked it like a child asks how Mommy got pregnant.

“It means someone who knows what they’re talking about made this secret map and now we’re looking at it 250 years later.”

I pointed at the clock on the wall and deftly maneuvered the closest article into the book, then snapped it shut.

“The time’s ticking away. I must return this book and move on—”

I plucked up my coat. Shuffled all the articles into an overstuffed folder with no real organization. Put the colonial book under my arm. Barkam blocked my path.

“’Scuse me. Gotta go now.”

“Give me the map.”

I looked up at him. He had deep green eyes and a nose that flared out. I wanted to reach up and rub his bald head.

“No.”

He smiled a big, Grinch-wicked smile. “Okay then.”

ZRRRRNT.

My ribs rattled and my whole body went limp. I crumpled over. I heard the running footsteps and drool fell from my lips. The library’s security buzzer whooped. I rolled to my side.

The book was gone.

I felt the burning tingle where Barkam tasered me in the ribs. Then I moved my hand into the fold of my coat. Brittle but intact—it was there.

I had a map of colonial-era pubstumps.

Germantown Avenue in northwest Philadelphia is allegedly one of seven remaining streets in the colonial city paved with cobblestone.

You can still visit the exact spot where Washington sent 11,000 revolutionary troops into thick October fog to fight Redcoats, and then look behind you where soldiers once bled out from bayonet wounds and see a 1994 lime green Chevy Caprice rumble past with subwoofers rattling out of its skull.

The neighborhoods of Manayunk, Germantown, and Chestnut Hill all back up to the 1,800-acre Wissahickon Valley urban park. This section of Germantown Ave. is just about six miles from the East-West PA turnpike that runs cross-state and past multiple state forests. It’s a few miles from hopping on I-95 and going north or south as you please. Should the road arteries or forest paths be blocked, the Avenue—lined with upscale shops and mansions—is just five miles from the Schuylkill River, which merges into the Delaware River, which sleepily crawls along for close to 300 miles past heavily forested riverside exit points in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

That’s a lot of damn escape points for an angry fanged creature. No wonder they could live 300 years under a colonial urban artery.   

For the safety of the Fantastical population, I will not divulge my exact location.

The main entrance would be perhaps an unhinged sewer grate on the street or a shop basement tunnel that led into the earth. I knew that it was neither of these things, but a large drainage tube that spilled down into a culvert and led through a seam of woods into the Wissahickon Park. Seven days of surveillance with a spotting scope at $170 a night in the third story of a Germantown Ave. Airbnb will teach you things. I’d telescoped a hulking troll wander out of the midnight mist, dragging a log club, and climb into the culvert.

This was my pubstump. I tapped the map. Gazed over at a grotesque silicon mask smudged around a head mold. 

I was a man soon to be a bog troll.

I had a friend who had worked in Makeup on The Shrek Redemption on off-off-off Broadway, and they’d brought me a box of ogre prosthetics. She pulled up right to the curb on an avenue packed with shoppers. I walked out like I was accepting a casual delivery and dragged eighty pounds of foam latex and silicone up three flights of steps, and dumped them in the bathtub.

I ran to the window and peered down into the street. The same black SUV with tinted windows sat parked up one block. Who would have tagged me with a tail? Yeah, I knew. Barkham.

In the fluorescent bathroom light, I sat on the sink and taped hair in my latex ears. I was in a body suit. I hopped off the sink and dipped my head and chugged greedily from the sink. I sweated puddles into my underlayer. The sweat crawled up my back. I sweated the way a seal sweats the ocean lying in the sun.

I looked out the open bathroom door. The brittle map lay open on the table with one flap that curled up so that I could see the deep blue tattoos.

At dusk, swanky Chestnut Hill folk shopped on the Avenue. Younger crunchy people wandered down to Mt. Airy. I peeked out the lobby at the black SUV. I tucked a folding blade knife into my pant leg and folded the map into a gallon Ziplock bag and tied it with twine around my stomach. I slipped out the back in bare prosthetic troll feet. I was like an allergic dog that got stung by 400 hornets. I waddled.

Each perpendicular street to Germantown is a tendril. In this area, they all inevitably wind down to Wissahickon Park entry points. These neighborhoods aren’t like your typical city rowhomes—many are yard plots with big, regal shade trees that hang right over the city streets.

Leaves brushed past my face. I made my way five blocks down. The houses became thinner. The soft gurgle of water trickled near and the distant horn of the regional rail train berrnnnned in the night.

I saw a man-sized corrugated pipe that jutted from the ridge. I checked my phone for the coordinates. This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced this—my phone battery drained from 97% to zero and shut off. Below, the slow flow of the Wissahickon Creek shimmered under the moon. A cool mist curled up around my ankles. The city lights faded to a deep blur and I felt a tremor of electricity in my arteries.

I approached the pipe and grazed my fingers across the patinaed etching:

“1776. Embrace Your Wild.”

I took a deep breath and—

I panicked.

I tore off the latex mask. Shimmied out of the heavy latex and tossed it down the hillside. Plucked the hair out of my ears.

If I died tonight, I’d do it as me.

I climbed into the pipe. I saw only blackness and fog. The pipe roof drip-dripped into sloshy puddles. I was a bat, feeling my way with echolocation. I turned left and right and reached a dead end. Felt the rough wall of unhewn stone. I tapped.

It was hollow.

I pressed an ear against it. Heard nothing. Then the wall swung in.

Casks of ale were lined up against the stone wall, stacked like pyramids, towering up to the underlayer of the earth. Some moldered and others permeated the heavy dank scent of yeasty booze. I mistook the map. This had to be the backside.  

Now, I heard the voices through a three-foot-high door made of a tree stump.  Do it, Jon. Do it. Go get it.

I swung the little door handle and…well, I had to stoop down and crawl on all fours. I crawled through and—

OOF.

Fell out onto a stage. I looked up. An otter sat on a drum stool in front of a set and tapped a microphone. “Test one-two. Test. Barry, more volume in the One, please. Test-one.”

I heard a pig reply: “Oinka!”

The otter turned and nodded at me—wearing a frilly colonial-era shirt and wig with Ray Charles glasses. He said:  

“Be cool.”  

I climbed to my feet and bounced my head off a rock. I looked around the room.

A porcupine in little breech-skin pants grunted as they rolled a keg past. A rat with an eyepatch and a thin cigarette wiped down a long bar made of railroad timbers. The walls were stone and earth. Thick oaken tables spanned an empty open floor. The lights were a glowing iridescent honeycomb. The smell of cloves and booze was in my nostrils. In the back, tinkering with levels on a modern audio system, was a sound pig.

It dawned on me: they weren’t open yet.  

A two-foot possum with muttonchops and a fat unlit cigar in its lips strode out of a back room. A seven-foot werewolf in overalls followed. 

“Speak friend and enter!” The opossum screeched.

My goodness.

The opossum came up to me and stopped. The werewolf bodyguard stood with its claws dangling. “I’m just messing with you. Took you long enough.”

I brushed pipe grit from my shoulders. Walked in deeper. “You knew about me?”

The opossum’s muttonchops twitched. “Kid, you don’t exist for 240 years in an urban center without eyes on the ground. I read your interview with Pan Ewert-London. Whatever you do, don’t startle the owlpigs. They’ll peck your eyes out.”

He pointed up. In the rafters, a flock of half-pig, half-owl creatures roosted on a thick beam that ran across the space. He waddled across the room and I followed.

“Call me Screecher. This is our head of security, Peaches.”

The droopy-eyed werewolf waved and wandered into a back room.

“Here’s the rule: you make any mention of this location in your article, we’ll slit your snizzy and glut your gizzy with a spork.”

“I’ll absolutely pass on that. That hurts, right?”

“Oh, aye. A lot.”

I plucked out my notepad and noted this in all-caps:

“DON’T GET SPORKED.”

Screecher talked on: “I’ll introduce you to Thumper Franklin, our beerslinger in residency.”

Thumper Franklin. What a badass name. I felt a tingle of excitement. Who would this Thumper be? A bog troll? A sasquatch?

We wandered around thick oaken pillars that anchored the cave tavern’s roof. I noted a decadent 1700s portrait in the center of the wall behind the bar. I squinted. It was a portrait of Ben Franklin with two naked mermaid women on his lap. In this very bar! That dog.

Three mice stood atop an iceberg chunk that jutted out of a tin bucket. They furiously chomped it and broke the ice down for the evening crowd. A piano tinkered and a giant frog in a jazz hat with a cigarette tuned the keys. Screecher waved at someone behind the bar.

“What’s your name, kid?”

I already felt like an outlaw. And these critters all had such bad-ass names. I needed one.  

“Call me…Thunderdome. Tsunami Boom Pow Pow Thunderdome.” I nodded. “The third.”

“Tsunami Boom Pow Pow Thunderdome the Third, meet Thumper Franklin.”

Peaches came up and whispered something in Screecher’s ear. He scurried away and I was left alone at the bar with…a rat.

Thumper was about a foot tall in a tailored suit with a thin cigarette and an impeccable little 1920s Manhattan mustache.

“Pleasure.” He stuck out a paw. “Youse want a drink?”

“Um…I’m on the job.”

The rat stared at me with dark, unflinching eyes, and pointed to a wooden sign behind the bar:

“Minimum Six Drinks Per Rogue. Drink or Die.”

“Uh, looks like I’ll have six beers then.”

Thumper tapped a lever with his foot and smooth, frothy amber beer gushed from a tap. He sniffed.

“Youse a journalist?”

“Sort of. Independent-like.”

The rat picked up an ancient musket ramrod and used it to push the heavy beer toward me. “Cheerses.”

I sipped it. “So, Screecher runs this pubstump?”

Thumper shook his head. “Nah. Screecher’s just shift manager.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Joint runs itself. Since about ’84.” Thumper dragged his cigarette. “1784.”

I pulled out my notepad. “I’m going to take notes and then I’ll publish this in my newsletter. My readers would love to know your stories. Is that okay?”

Thumper shrugged. “I can’t tell a story better than the one you’re standing in.”

“Fair enough. So, how long have you been here?”

Thumper counted on two hands. “Well, my great-granddaddy slung ale when Dizzy Gillespie was resident here, before he took off for New York. I came down after the last purge. Mommy said it weren’t safe for a tough rat like me.”  

I made notes:

DIZZY GILLESPIE PLAYED HERE. REFERS TO MOTHER AS ‘MOMMY’.

The purge he mentioned—this was a sad reality for fantastical creatures. In the early 2000s after 9/11, fantastical creatures were scapegoated as terrorists or collaborators—as they always have been. They were imprisoned, beat, slaughtered in alleyways. By the 2010s, they’d achieved momentum toward legislative rights, but it was swinging back now, and the creatures were again underground.

“You’re a rat but clearly you see magic here. I just saw a full-grown werewolf when I walked in.”

“Peaches.”

“Yes. What does this place mean to the Fantastical population of Philadelphia?”

Thumper sucked in his hand-rolled cigarette and stubbed it out on his foot. “First off, I want you to come sit at the end of the bar where the corner seat meets the wall.”

I stood up and he gestured me over. I recognized his tactic. He didn’t want my back to the crowd. For my safety.

“This place is a revolution that never died. Conflicts ebb and fade, but theirs—” he pointed a little claw at an owlpig that flew down to peck sunflower seeds off the floor— “theirs never stops.”

“So this is a gathering place for revolutionaries?”

“Not just.” Thumper lit a new cigarette. “Business transacts here. Contracts. News changes hands.”

I noted a row of teeth that were embedded in the oaken bar, with a browned smatter of blood that had caked in when some creature’s face had forcefully met the timber.

“And the criminal element?”

“Pew.” Thumper dismissed this with a hiss. “The real criminals are in your world.”

A groan of feedback came from a microphone. A burly groundhog roadie covered in tattoos adjusted a mic stand.

“So…this thing here—this is gonna be some kind of colonial jig throwback?”

For the first time, I saw a delightful glint in the scruffy rat’s eyes. “Not quite.”    

I made another note. “It was awfully easy for me to find my way down here. Don’t you worry about getting raided?”

A commotion arose from the far side of the room at the main entrance.

“Get off me! Gerroff! Animals! You filthy savages!”

Peaches had one claw wrapped around the nape of a man’s neck and dragged him into the pubstump. The man’s head was shiny and he had thickset eyebrows over shifty eyes. It was the library foe—Barkam.

Thumper leaned in. “See, the humans think that this world belongs to them. And that they need to control it.” He blew a thin line of smoke that curled up around my head and rested in the smog that touched the ceiling. “But you don’t control nothin’, and sometimes youses is the one getting used.”

Screecher and his muttonchops waddled in behind Barkam and followed Peaches to a back room. Barkam shook and squirmed and tried to shoot free. He saw me and screamed:

“Hey! From the library—you! You gotta help me, man. You gotta help me—”

Peaches picked up a bar rag and shoved it in Barkam’s mouth. I stayed still in my seat.

Thumper continued:

“You think you stumbled into a 300-year-old pubstump on your own merit. But the eyes of the forest saw you followed by a Barnaby, let you in, and took the opportunity.”

The Barnaby Corporation was an engine behind Fantastical oppression. They’d slaughtered wildeboars in the 1800s for their tongues, killed unicorns for their horn dust, sold out creatures to circuses and laboratories. They lobbied congress with billions of dollars each year. I cursed my carelessness for making public inquiries about the nature of pubstumps. I wasn’t a courageous journalist who found this pubstump cave with little opposition.

I was bait.

“What’s gonna happen to him?”

“Well, now they gotta slit his snizzy and glut his gizzy with a spork.”

I flinched. “I hope to God that those aren’t real body parts.”

“Oh, aye. The hurtiest ones.”

I recalled my interview with fantastical Shepherd Pan Ewert-London five weeks earlier. Specifically, I had asked him about a particular sasquatch and been stonewalled. I decided to try again.

“Thumper, what can you tell me about a sasquatch named Stomp Freedomfoot?”

Thumper knocked his foot against the tap and beer gushed into a new mug. “Next question.”

I collected myself. “Pubstumps are woodland lore—establishments that someone like me has dreamed of as this wispy, vague dream that cannot be touched. And now I’m sitting in one. If I could learn one lesson tonight, what should it be?”

Thumper had that devil glint again. “When you leave here, thinkin’ of this joint as lore and gore, think on this: every piece of nature you traipse through, every city street youse walk, somethin’ with four limbs and a touch of magic is likely watching you. This is not a dream. It is the invisible reality you experience every day.”

Damn. Thumper got poetic.

He gave me a long look. “You know how youse can best experience this place?”

I watched him, enrapt. “How?”

He finally smiled a bucktoothed rat grin. “It’s 7 o’clock. Saturday night. The doors are opening.” He pointed across the room. “So, just watch.”

So I did.

A pair of unicorns in black leather walked in on all fours with foot-long horns that sparkled in the honeycomb light. I heard their musky neighs and they stopped and paid a cover charge. They bent their heads. A porcupine doorman in black shades reached into a bucket and put pieces of cork on each of their horns. Then he let them in.

An eight-foot river troll bowed his head to come through the entrance. The grotesque creature carried a crossbow and checked it at the door. Then the giant sat on a stone stool at a corner booth and ordered a Cosmopolitan.

A pair of shady foxes ducked in. A ball of light flitted about and darted through the entrance. The door-porcupine held up an arm and the glow of light stopped and went dim. What remained was a female pixie in full camouflage, with a long blond braid, and two three-inch sewing needle swords strapped to its back. The pixie sassily argued with the porcupine until it relented and let her in with her weapons. She flitted up right next to me—like a hummingbird—and settled in the stool to my left.

“Thumper, shot of Old Granddad.”

I gazed down with my mouth open. The nine-inch-tall creature was gorgeous. She carried a belt of dewdrop potions—little grenades. Her cheeks were soft and tinged with the slightest pink sparkle. Her eyelashes, long and flowing. Her figure, adorable and filled with childlike magic—

“The fuck you looking at?”

My mouth dropped harder. She stared up at me.

“Thumper, tell this guy I’m gonna impale his ass in about two seconds if he doesn’t stop ogling me.”

Thumper laid a thimble of whiskey in front of her and she picked it up, drained it, and let out a belch that rattled the air. She haughtily turned her head and floated up into the smoke.

“Creep.”

“What the heck just happened?”

“Thumper laughed. “That, sir, was a tooth fairy.”

Creatures streamed in. The scruffy otter tapped on the microphone and stood behind a keyboard. The otter leaned his head in and said two words:

“Ya ready?”

Reader, the next 30 seconds pair well with a Bo Burnham, vintage 2021.

The lights dimmed and turned a neon glow blue. The air filled with a sparkled radiance, like motes of electricity suspended. I held my hands in front of my face and felt like I had climbed inside a star. The room swayed. Glasses clinked and voices drew distant.

Then I saw the creature in the far dark corner who stared right into me from the shadows.

Legs stretched out in buckskin pants. Sawed-off shotgun laid out on the table. The cinnamon-brown fur that scruffed out like it had been shocked in all directions. The sasquatch raised two fingers, and I raised two back. And he nodded.  

I found myself gripping the bar, trying to physically hold on to this moment.

I awoke on the banks of the Wissahickon, with bright morning light in my eyes.

I stumbled to my feet and walked. Up the ridge and back toward Germantown Avenue. Squirrels played in the trees and I could feel their eyes on me. As the city streets grew back together into rows of shaded houses, I saw the pale light of a daytime street light flicker. I peered closer and saw a raccoon atop the pole, jiggering the wires so that the light flared up. It was code, and a quarter mile away another streetlight flicked on.

Sunday morning traffic was quiet. But I noticed a black SUV that was still idling by the sidewalk across from my rental. I boldly walked up and peered in the window. As I expected, it was empty, and fingernails had clawed a streak down the side of the door panel in a desperate struggle.

All around me were the signs of the underground.

This was not an anthill—it was a Pangaea. I had my article and it was time to write it. A shudder passed through me. Because I knew.

The creatures that live in the quiet invisible places—they are not intruders in our world.

We are visitors in theirs.

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I’m so glad you came along for this urban pubstump interview. I honestly didn’t know if I’d make it out alive. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.

How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Words from the Wood: Part One, as I ventured into Elk State Forest to interview a notoriously violent Fantastical activist.