"Trust me?" Did Dvorak realize the irony of those words? How foolish that they should converse at all, the knife at his back and the hushed breathing from behind and ahead, stalking them. Fear raised the hairs along his arms and heightened his senses, distorting and magnifying every sound.
Their journey ended where the trees were less thick and the fog had been swept aside. Walls did indeed cordon them in, gray walls that ended abruptly ten feet ahead in a welter of shadows that rustled and quivered like dead leaves lifted by the wind, but there was no wind.
Dradin"s temples pounded and his breath caught in his throat. On another street, parallel but out of sight, a clock doled out the hours, one through eleven, and revelers tooted on horns or screamed out names or called to the moon in weeping, distant, fading voices.
Dvorak shoved Dradin forward until they came to an open gate, ornately filigreed, and beyond the gate, through the bars, the brooding headstones of a vast graveyard. Mausoleums and memorials, single tombs and groups, families dead together under the thick humus, the young and the old alike feeding the worms, feeding the earth.
The graveyard was overgrown with gra.s.s and weeds so that the headstones swam in a sea of green. Beyond these fading statements of life after death writ upon the fissured stones, riven and made secretive by the moonlight, lay the broken husks of trains, haphazard and strewn across the landscape. The twisted metal of engines, freight cars, and cabooses gleamed darkly green and the patina of broken gla.s.s windows, held together by moss, shone especially bright, like vast, reflective eyes. Eyes that still held a glimmer of the past when coal had coursed through their engines like blood and brimstone, and their compartments had been busy with the footsteps of those same people who now lay beneath the earth.
The industrial district. Dradin was in the industrial district and now he knew that due south was his hostel and southwest was Hoegbotton & Sons, and the River Moth beyond it.
"I do not see her," Dradin said, to avoid looking ahead to the squirming shadows.
Dvorak"s face as the dwarf turned to him was a sickly green and his mouth a cruel slit of darkness. "Should you see her, do you think? I am leading you to a graveyard, missionary. Pray, if you wish."
At those words, Dradin would have run, would have taken off into the mist, not caring if Dvorak found him and gutted him, such was his terror. But then the creeping tread of the creatures resolved itself. The sound grew louder, coming up behind and ahead of him. As he watched, the shadows became shapes and then figures, until he could see the glinty eyes and glinty knives of a legion of silent, waiting mushroom dwellers. Be hind them, hopping and rustling, came toads and rats, their eyes bright with darkness. The sky thickened with the swooping shapes of bats.
"Surely," Dradin said, "surely there has been a mistake."
In a sad voice, his face strangely mournful and moon-like, Dvorak said, "There have indeed been mistakes, but they are yours. Take off your clothes."
Dradin backed away, into the arms of the leathery, stretched, musty folk behind. Cringing from their touch, he leapt forward.
"I have money," Dradin said to Dvorak. "I will give you money. My father has money."
Dvorak"s smile turned sadly sweeter and sweetly sadder. "How you waste words when you have so few words left to waste. Remove your clothes or they will do it for you," and he motioned to the mushroom dwellers. A hiss of menace rose from their a.s.sembled ranks as they pressed closer, closer still, until he could not escape the dry, piercing rot of them, nor the sound of their shambling gait.
He took off his shoes, his socks, his trousers, his shirt, his underwear, folding each item carefully, until his pale body gleamed and he saw him self in his mind"s eye as switching positions with the Living Saint. How he would have loved to see the h.o.a.ry ejaculator now, coming to his rescue, but there was no hope of that. Despite the chill, Dradin held his hands over his p.e.n.i.s rather than his chest. What did modesty matter, and yet still he did it.
Dvorak hunched nearer, hand taut on the rope, and used his knife to pull the clothes over to him. He went through the pockets, took the remaining coins, and then put the clothes over his shoulder.
"Please, let me go," Dradin said. "I beg you."There was a tremor in his voice but, he marveled, only a tremor, only a hint of fear.
Who would have guessed that so close to his own murder he could be so calm?
"I cannot let you go. You no longer belong to me. You are a priest, are you not? They pay well for the blood of priests."
"My friends will come for me."
"You have no friends in this city."
"Where is the woman from the window?"
Dvorak smiled with a smugness that turned Dradin"s stomach. A spark of anger spread all up and down his back and made his teeth grind together. The graveyard gate was open. He had run through graveyards once, with Anthony-graveyards redolent with the stink of old metal and ancient technologies-but was that not where they wished him to go?
"In the name of G.o.d, what have you done with her?"
"You are too clever by half," Dvorak said. "She is still in Hoegbotton & Sons."
"At this hour?"
"Yes."
"W-w-why is she there?" His fear for her, deeper into him than his own anger, made his voice quiver.
Dvorak "s mask cracked. He giggled and cackled and stomped his foot. "Because, because, sir, sir, I have taken her to pieces. I have dismembered her!" And from behind and in front and all around, the horrible, galumphing, harrumphing laughter of the mushroom dwellers.
Dismembered her.
The laughter, mocking and cruel, set him free from his inertia. Clear and cold he was now, made of ice, always keeping the face of his beloved before him. He could not die until he had seen her body.
Dradin yanked on the rope and, as Dvorak fell forward, wrenched free the noose. He kicked the dwarf in the head and heard a satisfying howl of pain, but did not wait, did not watch-he was already running through the gate before the mushroom dwellers could stop him. His legs felt like cold metal, like the churning pistons of the old coal-chewing trains. He ran as he had never run in all his life, even with Tony. He ran like a man possessed, recklessly dodging tombstones and high gra.s.s, while behind came the angry screams of Dvorak, the slithery swiftness of the mushroom dwellers. And still Dradin laughed as he went-bellowing as he jumped atop a catacomb of mausoleums and leapt between monuments, trapped for an instant by ab.u.t.ting tombstones, and then up and running again, across the top of yet another broad sepulcher. He found his voice and shouted to his pursu ers, "Catch me! Catch me!", and cackled his own mad cackle, for he was as naked as the day he had entered the world and his beloved was dead and he had nothing left in the world to lose. Lost as he might be, lost as he might always be, yet the feeling of freedom was heady. It made him giddy and drunk with his own power. He crowed to his pursuers, he needled them, only to pop up elsewhere, thrilling to the hardness of his muscles, the toughness gained in the jungle where all else had been lost.
Finally, he came to the line of old trains, byzantine and convoluted and dark, surrounded by the smell of dank, rusting metal. One backward glance before entering the maze revealed that the mushroom dwellers, led by Dvorak, had reached the last line of tombstones, fifty feet away.
-but a glance only before he swung himself into the side door of an engine, walked on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet into the cool darkness. Hushed quiet. This was what he needed now. Quiet and stealth in equal measures so that he could reach the relative safety of the street beyond the trains. His senses heightened, he could hear them coming, the whispers between them as they spread out to search the compartments.
Spider-like, Dradin moved as he heard them move, shadowing them but out of sight-into their clutches and out again with a finesse he had not known he possessed- always working his way farther into the jungle of metal. Train tracks. Dining cars. Engines split open by the years, so that he hid among their most secret parts and came out again when danger had pa.s.sed him by, a pale figure flecked with rust.
Ahead, when he dared to take his gaze from his pursuers, Dradin could see the uniform darkness of the wall and, from beyond, the red flashes of a bonfire. Two rows of cars lay between him and the wall. He crept forward through the gaping doorway of a dining car- -just as, cloaked by shadow, Dvorak entered the car from the opposite end. Dradin considered backing out of the car, but no: Dvorak would hear him. Instead, he crouched down, hidden from view by an overturned table, a salt-and-pepper shaker still nailed to it.
Dvorak"s footsteps came closer, accompanied by raspy breathing and the shivery threat of the knives beneath his coat. A single shout from Dvorak and the mushroom dwellers would find him.
Dvorak stopped in front of the overturned table. Dradin could smell him now, the must of mushroom dweller, the tang of Moth silt.
Dradin sprang up and slapped his left hand across Dvorak"s mouth, spun him around as he grunted, and grappled for Dvorak"s knife. Dvorak opened his mouth to bite Dradin. Dradin stuck his fist in Dvorak"s mouth, m.u.f.fling his own scream as the teeth bit down. Now Dvorak could make no sound and the dwarf frantically tried to expel Dradin"s fist. Dradin did not let him. The knife seesawed from Dvorak "s side up to Dradin"s clavicle and back again. Dvorak thrashed about, trying to dislodge Dradin"s hold on him, trying to face his enemy. Dradin, muscles straining, entangled Dvorak "s legs in his and managed to keep him in the center of the compartment. If they banged up against the sides, it would be as loud as a word from Dvorak"s mouth. But the knife was coming too close to Dradin"s throat. He smashed Dvorak"s hand against a railing, a sound that sent up an echo Dradin thought the mushroom dwellers must surely hear. No one came as the knife fell from Dvorak "s hand. Dvorak tried to grasp inside his jacket for another. Dradin pulled a knife from within the jacket first. As Dvorak withdrew his own weapon, Dradin"s blade was already buried deep in his throat.
Dradin felt the dwarf"s body go taut and then lose its rigidity, while the mouth came loose of his fist and a thick, viscous liquid dribbled down his knife arm.
Dradin turned to catch the body as it fell, so that as he held it and lowered it to the ground, his hand throbbing and b.l.o.o.d.y, he could see Dvorak"s eyes as the life left them. The tattoo, in that light, became all un done, the red dots of cities like wounds, sliding off to become merely a crisscross of lines. Dark blood coated the front of his shirt.
Dradin mumbled a prayer under his breath from reflex alone, for some part of him-the part of him that had laughed to watch the followers of Saint Solon placing sparrows in coffins-insisted that death was unre markable, undistinguished, and, ultimately, unimportant, for it happened every day, everywhere. Unlike the jungle, Nepenthe"s severed hand, here there was no amnesia, no fugue. There was only the body beneath him and an echo in his ears, the memory of his mother"s voice as she thrulled from deep in her throat a death march, a funeral veil st.i.tched of words and music. How could he feel hatred? He could not. He felt only emptiness.
He heard, with newly preternatural senses, the movement of mushroom dwellers nearby and, resting Dvorak"s head against the cold metal floor, he left the compartment, a shadow against the deeper shadow of the wrecked and rotted wheels.
Now it was easy for Dradin, slipping between tracks, huddling in dining compartments, the mushroom dwellers blind to his actions. The two rows of cars between him and the wall became one row and then he was at the wall. He climbed it tortuously, the rough stone cutting into his hands and feet. When he reached the top, he swung up and over to the other side.
Ah, the boulevard beyond, for now Dradin wondered if he should return to the graveyard and hide there. Strewn across the boulevard were scaffolds and from the scaffolds men and women had been hung so that they lolled and, limp, had the semblance of rag dolls. Rag dolls in tatters, the flesh pulled from hindquarters, groins, chests, the red meeting the green of the moon and turning black. Eyes stared sightless. The harsh wind carried the smell of offal. Dogs bit at the feet, the legs, the bodies so thick that as Dradin walked forward, keen for the sound of mushroom dwellers behind him, he had to push aside and duck under the limbs of the dead. Blood splashed his shoulders and he breathed in gasps and held his side, as if something pained him, though it was only the sight of the bodies that pained him. When he realized that he still wore a noose of his own, he pulled it over his head with such speed that it cut him and left a burn.
Past the hanging bodies and burning buildings and flamed out motored vehicles, only to see . . . stilt men carrying severed heads, which they threw to the waiting crowds, who kicked and tossed them . . . a man disemboweled, his intestines streaming out into the gutter as his attackers continued to hack him apart and he clutched at their legs . . . a woman a.s.saulted against a brick wall by ten men who held her down as they cut and raped her . . . fountains full of floating, bloated bodies, the waters turned red-black with blood . . . glimpses of the bonfires, bodies stacked for burning in the dozens . . . a man and woman decapitated, still caught in an embrace, on their knees in the murk of rising mist . . . the unearthly screams, the taste of blood rising in the air, the smell of fire and burning flesh . . . and the female riders on their wooden horses, riding over the bodies of the dead, their eyes still turned inward, that they might not know the horrors of the night.
Oh, that he could rip his own eyes from his sockets! He did not wish to see and yet could not help but see if he wished to live. In the face of such carnage, his killing of Dvorak became the gentlest of mercies. Bile rose in his throat and, sick with grief and horror, he vomited beside an abandoned horse buggy. When the sickness had pa.s.sed, he gathered his wits, found a landmark he recognized, and by pa.s.sing through lesser alleys and climbing over the rooftops of one-story houses set close together, came once again to his hostel.
The hostel was empty and silent. Dradin crept, limping from gla.s.s in his foot and the ache in his muscles, up to the second floor and his room. Once inside, he did not even try to wash off the blood, the dirt, the filth, did not put on clothes, but stumbled to his belongings and stuffed his pictures, The Refraction of Light in a Prison, and his certificate from the religious college into the knapsack. He stood in the center of the room, knapsack over his left shoulder, the machete held in his right hand, breathing heavily, trying to remember who he might be and where he might be and what he should do next. He shuffled over to the window and looked down on the valley. What he saw made him laugh, a high-pitched sound so re pugnant to him that he closed his mouth immediately.
The valley lay under a darkness broken by soft, warm lights. No bonfires raged in the valley below. No one hung from scaffolding, tongues blue and purpling. No one bathed in the blood of the dead.
Seeing the valley so calm, Dradin remembered when he had wondered if, perhaps, his beloved lived there, amid the peace where there were no missionaries. No Living Saints. No Cadimons. No Dvoraks. He looked toward the door. It was a perilous door, a deceitful door, for the world lay beyond it in all its brutality. He stood there for several beats of his heart, thinking of how beautiful the woman had looked in the third story win dow, how he had thrilled to see her there. What a beautiful place the world had been then, so long ago.
Machete held ready, Dradin walked to the door and out into the night.
VII.
WHEN DRADIN HAD AT LAST FOUGHT HIS WAY BACK TO Hoegbotton & Sons, Alb.u.muth Boulevard was deserted except for a girl in a ragged flower print dress. She listened to a tattered phonograph that played Voss Bender tunes.
In the deep of winter:
s.n.a.t.c.hes of song
Through the branches
Brittle as bone.
You"ll not see my face
But there I"ll be,
Frost in my hair,
My hunger hollowing me.
The sky had cleared and the cold, white p.r.i.c.ks of stars shone through the black of night, the green-tinge of moon. The black in which moon and stars floated was absolute; it ate the light of the city, muted everything but the shadows, which multiplied and rippled outward. Behind Dradin, sounds of destruction grew nearer, but here the stores were ghostly but whole. And yet here too men, women, and children hung from the lamp posts and looked down with lost, vacant, and wondering stares.
The girl sat on her knees in front of the phonograph. Over her lay the shadow of the great lambent eye, shiny and saucepan blind, of one of the colorful cloth squid, its tentacles rippling in the breeze. Bodies were caught in its fake coils, sprawled and sitting upright in the maw and craw of the beast, as if they had drowned amid the tentacles, washed ash.o.r.e still entangled and stiffening.
Dradin walked up to the girl. She had brown hair and dark, unreadable eyes with long lashes. She was crying, although her face had long ago been wiped clean of sorrow and of joy. She watched the phonograph as if it were the last thing in the world that made sense to her.
He nudged her. "Go. Go on! Get off the street. You"re not safe here."
She did not move, and he looked at her with a mixture of sadness and exasperation. There was nothing he could do. Events were flowing away from him, caught in an undertow stronger than that of the Moth. It was all he could do to preserve his own life, his b.l.o.o.d.y machete proof of the dangers of the bureaucratic district by which he had come again to Alb.u.muth. The same languid, nostalgic streets of daylight had become killing grounds, a thousand steely-eyed murderers hiding amongst the vetch and honeysuckle. It was there that he had rediscovered the white-faced mimes, entangled in the ivy, features still in death.
Dradin walked past the girl until Hoegbotton & Sons lay before him. The dull red brick seemed brighter in the night, as if it reflected the fires burning throughout the city.
And so it ends where it began, Dradin thought. In front of the very same Hoegbotton & Sons building. Were he not such a coward, he should have ended it there much sooner.
Dradin stole up the stairs to the door. He smashed the gla.s.s of the door with his already mangled fist, grunting with pain. The pain pulsed far away, disconnected from him in his splendid nakedness. Pinp.r.i.c.ks on the souls of distantsinners. Dradin swung the door open and shut it with such a clatter that he was sure someone had heard him and would come loping down the boulevard after him. But no one came and his feet, naked and dirty and cut, continued to slap the steps inside so loudly that surely she would run away if she was still alive, thinking him an intruder. But where to run? He could hear his own labored breathing as he navigated the stairs: the sound filled the landing; it filled the s.p.a.ces between the steps; and it filled him with determination, for it was the most vital sign that he still lived, despite every misfortune.
Dradin laughed, but it came out ragged around the edges. His mind sagged under the weight of carnage: the cries of looting, begging; the sound of men swinging by their necks or their feet. Swinging all across a city grown suddenly wise and quiet in their deaths.
But that was out there, in the city. In here, Dradin promised, he would not lose himself to such images. He would not lose the thread.
Curious, but on reaching the door to the third floor, Dradin paused, halted, did not yet grasp the iron k.n.o.b. For this door led to the window. He had engraved her position so perfectly on the interstices of his memory that he knew exactly where she must be . . . One moment more of hesitation, and then Dradin entered her.
A room. Darkened. The smell of sawdust packing and boxes. Not the right room. Not her room. The antechamber only, for receiving visitors, perhaps, the walls lined with decadent art objects, and beyond that, an open doorway, leading to . . .
The next room was lined with Occidental shadow puppets that looked like black scars, seared and shaped into human forms: bodies entwined in l.u.s.t and devout in prayer, bodies engaged in murder and in business. Harlequins and pierrots with bashful red eyes and sharp teeth lay on their backs, feet up in the air. Jungle plants trellised and cat"s cradled the interior, freed from terrariums, while a clutter of other things hidden by the shadows beckoned him with their strange, angular shapes. The smell of moist rot mixed with the stench of mushroom dweller and the sweet bitter of sweat, as if the very walls labored for the creation of such wonderful monstrosities.
She still faced the window, but set back from it, in a wooden chair, so that the curling curious fires ravaging the city beyond could not sear her face. The light from these fires created a zone of blackness and Dradin could see only her black hair draped across the chair.
It seemed to Dradin as he looked at the woman sitting in the chair that he had not seen her in a hundred, a thousand, years; that he saw her across some great becalmed ocean or desert, she only a shape like the shadow puppets. He moved closer.
His woman, the woman of his dreams, gazed off into the charred red-black air, the opposite street, or even toward the hidden River Moth beyond. He thought he saw a hint of movement as he approached her-a slight uplifting of one arm-she no longer concerned with the short view, but with the long view, the perspective that nothing of the moment mattered or would ever matter. It had been Dvorak"s view, with the map that had taken over his body. It was Cadimon"s view, not allowing the priest to take pity on a former student.
"My love," Dradin said, and again, "My love," as he walked around so he could see the profile of her face. A white sheet covered her body, but her face, oh, her face . . . her eyebrows were thin and dark, her eyes like twin blue flames, her nose small, un.o.btrusive, her skin white, white, white, but with a touch of color that drew him down to the sumptuous curve of her mouth, the bead of sweat upon the upper lip, the fine hairs placed to seduce, to trick; the way in which the clothes clung to her body and made it seem to curve, the arms placed upon the arms of the chair, so naturally that there was no artifice in having done so. Might she . . . could she . . . still be . . . alive?
Dradin pulled aside the white sheet-and screamed, for there lay the torso, the legs severed and in pieces beneath, but placed cleverly for the illusion of life, the head balanced atop the torso, dripping neither blood nor precious humors, but as dry and slick and perfect as if it had never known a body. Which it had not. From head to toe, Dradin"s beloved was a mannequin, an artifice, a deception. Hoegbotton & Sons, specialists in all manner of profane and Occidental technologies. . .
Dradin"s mouth opened and closed but no sound came from him. Now he could see the gla.s.sy finish of her features, the innate breakability of a creature made of papiermache and metal and porcelain and clay, mixed and beaten and blown and sandpapered and engraved and made up like any other woman. A testimony to the clockmaker"s craft, for at the hinges and joints of the creature dangled broken filaments and wires and gimshaw circuitry. Fool. He was thrice a fool.
Dradin circled the woman, his body shivering, his hands reaching out to caress the curve of cheekbone, only to pull back before he touched skin. The jungle fever beat within him, fell away in decrescendo, then again crescendo. Twice more around and his arm darted out against his will and he touched her cheek. Cold. So cold. So monstrously cold against the warmth of his body. Cold and dead in her beauty despite the heat and the bonfires roaring outside. Dead. Not alive. Never alive.
As he touched her, as he saw all of her severed parts and how they fit together, something small and essential broke inside him; broke so he couldn"t ever fix it. Now he saw Nepenthe in his mind"s eye in all of her darkness and grace. Now he could see her as a person, not an idea. Now he could see her nakedness, remember the way she had felt under him-smooth and moist and warm-never moving as he made love to her. As he took her though she did not want to be taken. If ever he had lost his faith it was then, as he lost himself in the arms of a woman indifferent to him, indifferent to the world. He saw again the flash of small hand, severed and gray, and saw again his own hand, holding the blade. Her severed hand. His hand holding the blade. Coming to in the burning missionary station, severed of his memory, severed from his faith, severed from his senses by the fever. Her severed gray hand in his and in the other the machete.
Dradin dropped the machete and it landed with a clang next to the mannequin"s feet.
Feverish, he had crawled back from his jungle expedition, the sole survivor, only to find that the people he had gone out to convert had come to the station and burned it to the ground . . . fallen unconscious, and come to with the hand in his, Nepenthe naked and dead next to him. Betrayal.