by Mark Helprin
“She’s dead,” Virginia told him.
“I know you!” Mrs. Gamely said to Peter Lake, almost accusingly. “You drove the sleigh. You haven’t aged, not a day. How can that be? Why are you here now?”
“Stop babbling, old woman,” Peter Lake commanded. She was hysterical, and although he had a vague idea of what she was saying, he was tired of inexplicable memories.
“Don’t you know what I’m talking about,” she asked. “It was a long time ago, in Lake of the Coheeries. Beverly . . .”
Peter Lake shuddered. “Shut up, old woman!” he screamed. “Shut up, or I’ll throw you halfway around the world!”
Mrs. Gamely shrank back. Martin sprang to her side as if to protect her from Peter Lake.
With the air of a master locksmith called to open a vault, Peter Lake walked to the bed and drew back the shroud. Staring at the dead child, he touched her forehead with two fingers of his left hand, and looked into her eyes. Hardesty thought that perhaps this man—derelict, mechanic, or whatever he was—was about to bring her back to life. But it soon became clear that he did not intend even to try.
Peter Lake’s face softened momentarily into a barely perceptible smile. “This is the child . . .,” he said. “This is the child that flew to me. And this is the child in the hallway. That was a long, long time ago.
“As I remember, I thought it was a boy. No matter. She was dying and blind, but she remained standing. She didn’t know that it was her privilege to lie down.”
Virginia tried her best to speak, but no words came. A man was standing in front of her, talking about her dream as if it were not a dream but something that had actually happened in another time.
Then the lights were extinguished. The whole city went dark. Even distant towers, where the lights had never dimmed, now looked like smooth black slabs. Patients screamed, and orderlies ran through the halls, knocking each other flat. Without the lights, the fire seemed many times brighter than it had been. It was strong enough to illuminate the room. Clouds of smoke miles away reflected the firelight, which flashed onto walls and faces as if it were a lighthouse beacon. The steep reflective clouds had climbed so high that they dwarfed the city.
“I have to tend the machines at The Sun,” Peter Lake announced. “Even though there isn’t any power now, those old engines can still work, and someone has to make sure that they do. The generators have to generate, and the turbines have to fly at full speed. I must keep them running. I have no choice.”
CONFUSED AS much by his power as by his powerlessness, Peter Lake walked through blackened streets underneath a sky pulsing with firelight. By holding a hand against his wound, he was able to halt most of the bleeding. Still, it hurt a great deal, and he feared that his heart would stop, or that he might yet bleed to death.
Every time he saw a Short Tail, he threw him mercilessly into the air to light up the street ahead of him. He seemed nearly invulnerable to them now, though what use, he thought, was invulnerability, if he could not protect a suffering child? As he turned west on Houston Street, half a dozen Short Tails rushed at him from a vacant lot. He picked them up and made them into comets so quickly that they didn’t know what hit them. As he crossed Chambers Street, he noticed another group of Short Tails several blocks away. The last of them had run half a mile up Broadway before Peter Lake seized them with his left hand and aimed them so that there would be fireworks over the Manhattan Bridge.
He was surprised to see that The Sun was as dark as The Ghost across Printing House Square. Candles burned as The Sun’s reporters worked to meet their deadlines. In the lobby, Peter Lake was astonished by the many reporters, printers, and copy boys who came and went with candlesticks.
“What is this!” he cried out, “a monastery?” But they climbed the stairs and crossed the courtyard without answering.
“There’s no power in the city, Mr. Bearer,” a guard informed him.
“I know that,” Peter Lake said indignantly. “What about our machines?”
“They can’t get them to work,” he was told.
The pain of his wound grew fierce as he took the stairs down to the mechanical floors, where the mechanics and the apprentices were hard at work by candlelight. When they saw him, they rushed up with oil-blackened faces, and told of their efforts, over days, to start the machines. “The whole thing’s jammed up!” Trumbull, the former chief mechanic shouted. “I doubt if even you can fix it. Every single machine seems as if it’s been welded into one goddamned piece!”
“Put the cover back on the tribuckle,” Peter Lake commanded the apprentice who had once followed him.
“But, Mr. Bearer,” the apprentice protested from a garden of gears and shafts that he had painstakingly removed from the tribuckle’s interior, “I’ve got to reassemble it.”
“Then stay still,” Peter Lake ordered. The boy looked at him in wonder as all the metal pieces flew like a torrent of autumn leaves, and replaced themselves inside the tribuckle.
Shafts banged into place, gears clicked together, plates were slammed down with a satisfying thump, and each screw whirled like a dervish into its hole. If a piece did not quite fit, it jiggled wildly until it was able to force itself in smoothly. And in their race across the floor, metal pieces of lethal weight carefully detoured around the trembling legs of the bug-eyed apprentice.
“What else didya strip?” Peter Lake asked.
After they listed the machines that they had disassembled, they heard the rush of the pieces, as if a thousand nimble mechanics were working in perfect coordination. It sounded like a tin coin bank turning over and over, or an attacking army clad in chain mail and spurs. The outside covers slapped themselves on, and the screws raced for their holes.
Peter Lake staggered down the aisles of machinery, touching each machine as if he were patting a cow. Each cow thus signaled responded with a deep, powerful, well-oiled whirl, and ran from then on as if it had learned the secret of perpetual motion.
When Peter Lake passed one of the generators, the lights of the machine decks blazed on, and the spent mechanics cheered. Then the big steam engines slowly fired and hissed, sending out plumes and exhalations. Their huge arms and ellipsoidal wheels set the light in order and organized the magnetic fields into obedient bustles and hoops.
As Peter Lake struggled down the rows, different areas of The Sun burst into clear light one by one, and the workers cheered just as the mechanics had done. When the presses began to roll, the pressmen felt a surge of emotion, for they loved their charges as much as Peter Lake loved his.
After he had started every machine, Peter Lake sank down near an elephantine walker beam. Upon seeing the blood running from his wound, the other mechanics wanted to help, but he dismissed them. Thinking that nothing could happen to Peter Lake that he would not allow, they backed off to find their own places amid the perfectly running engines.
Peter Lake now felt the full power of the machines among which he lay. And had it not been for their counterbalancing motions, he surely would have been torn apart by the forces that swept through him. Coursing magnetic fields as sinuous as the northern lights lifted him on swanlike waves. As heavy flywheels spun without a tremble, the smooth rotation of mass pounded him like jackhammers. Though it might be rushing in a blur, he had absolute sympathy for each wheel as it turned, and each strike of each bolt hit him as if he were a drum. But far more influential than the magnetism or the variations of mass, was the light. It streamed from the old-fashioned clear bulbs in conical lamps hanging like fruit above the machines. Peter Lake watched it move. Slow and capturable rivers showered the surfaces of oiled steel, and made rainbows, jewels, and sparkling thistles with open arms.
ON AN errand for The Sun, Asbury and Christiana had been driving toward Manhattan along an expressway that skirted the city of the poor, when they noticed the pall and the hellish sky. A few minutes later, they were stopped in halting traffic after a mob had toppled a sign bridge onto the road. From half a mile back, they wat
ched the crowd begin to attack the stationary automobiles.
Afraid to leave their cars and venture into the city of the poor, especially since pillars of fire were now twisting amid the rubble, most people locked themselves in, petrified with fear, as thousands of marauders streamed onto the highway. Cars were rocked, windows smashed, and lighted pieces of wood dropped into gas tanks. Families were pulled from their cars and dragged separately into the darkness. The shoulders of the road became a slaughterhouse in which trembling victims and shining blades met to produce rivers of blood. As the mob moved down the line and the cars began to rock, the passengers closed their eyes and said their last prayers.
The first troop-carrying helicopters passed overhead in ten minutes of thunder, but the murder below was concealed in smoke.
Asbury and Christiana left their car and jumped over the guardrail onto the plain of bricks.
“How far does it go?” Christiana asked about the vast prairie of brick.
“For miles.”
“At least no one’s here. If we stay in the bricks, maybe we’ll be safe,” she said, remembering what she had once seen, and knowing that there were some men who could run across the brick as fast as gazelles, and who, like a specialized order of predatory animal, preyed upon those who strayed onto that angular and difficult ground.
“Maybe,” Asbury answered, “but we’ll be visible in the daylight, so we’ve got to get to the river by dawn.”
They set out, using the darkened mass of tall buildings in Manhattan as their guide. There were at least five miles between them and the river, half of which was over the brick and the other half of which passed through the unknown hollows that had long been forgotten by all but their inhabitants, who knew nothing else.
They got off the brick several hours before dawn, and moved through the hollows as fast as they could.
They had planned to walk across the East River, but the center channel was now a swiftly running canal cradled in a bed of melting ice, cutting deeper and deeper, and covered with a slick of burning oil that made flames a hundred feet high. “The only thing we can do is get to the harbor and go around,” Asbury said. “But we’ll have to wait until dark.”
Thinking to hide all day in the rubble, they backtracked to the quietest hollow, hopping from one burnt-out building to another, and moving only when no one was around.
As they were hurrying from a ruined tenement covered with rusted fire escapes that wrapped around it like dead ivy, they were accosted by an old man who jumped up from a pit in the ground. He motioned for them to come over to him, and they did.
In a dialect that they could hardly understand, he told them to follow him to the church.
“What church?” Asbury asked, and was informed, in the same obscure dialect, that the people of the hollow had always been able to hide safely in the courtyard of a church.
Because of the way the rubble had fallen, the churchyard was invisible from the street. Long disused cloisters ran around its sides. At the far end, a thousand people were gathered, so frightened that even the children were still. The old man was proud to have rescued the strangers and to show them how cleverly he had hidden so many people. He was about to leave, to save others, but Asbury asked that he stay. “If you keep on going out and coming back in,” Asbury said, “you’ll be sure to give us away.”
“Ta feerst woones asay tha than,” the old man replied. “In’now saf be thay.” He smiled toothlessly, and slapped his thigh. “Tauntin uld Flinner gut mir chik fas thin rabbitin. Goone ameed feers com chik fas rabbitin!” he said, and he went to bring more people to safety.
Asbury and Christiana were surrounded by men, women, and children with sunken eyes and distended bellies, whose bones showed through their sallow skin. These people lived for a very short time, and were buried without markers. They were the people of the hollows, who thought that the inhabitants of the city of the poor were well-off, and that the once-shining towers across the river were a place of the gods. They were afraid even to look at Asbury and Christiana, who towered above them.
“Can you defend yourselves,” Asbury asked, “if we should be discovered?” There was no answer.
“We’ll just have to wait until dark,” Christiana said, “and then leave them to what they know.”
The old man brought back dazed survivors, who leaned against the brownstone columns and watched as clouds of smoke and ash were rammed across the sky by the edges of hot cyclones. It was hard to tell whether it was night or day, and the sounds of firestorms, explosions, and artillery came from every direction.
In the middle of the afternoon, Asbury and Christiana looked up and saw the old man proudly leading into the hiding place three little men in black coats.
“Those are them!” Asbury screamed. “You’ve brought them in.”
The Short Tails pushed the old man to the ground, and stepped back. Asbury pleaded with the men among the huddled survivors to help him prevent the Short Tails from leaving, but as the Short Tails walked backward toward the exit, brandishing their weapons, no one moved.
Finally, when the Short Tails were halfway across the courtyard, Asbury ran toward them, and Christiana followed.
He tackled one and slammed a fist into his chest. The Short Tail said something in a voice full of air, and quickly expired. But the other two began to beat Asbury with chains. He was unable to separate himself from the one he had killed, and was choked by the body as if he were drowning in it.
After a confusing struggle with the remaining Short Tails, Asbury killed one of them, and the other escaped. They tried to get the people in the churchyard to scatter, but it was no use. Led by the one who had escaped, the Short Tails had already arrived. Some blocked the exit, and others ran up the stairs to the roof, where they took up positions once occupied by the gargoyles that had been there to guard the monks. They flooded into the end of the courtyard, urged on by one of their number who stepped to the front and beat his chest as if he were a baboon. Asbury raised a chain, and the baboon skittered behind his comrades. Asbury and Christiana stood near the two bodies, wondering what would happen when the Short Tails found the courage to close. Even the gargoyles, who were archers, were afraid to fire, and contented themselves with arrows casually loosed into the trembling crowd. The sounds of the arrows finding their marks—like a sharp ax penetrating deep into dead wood—finally emboldened the Short Tails, and they moved forward.
But Athansor came from out of the whining ash-wind, and made four stunning passes that knocked over the living gargoyles and hurled them from the walls and towers. When the Short Tails looked up, they saw him descending slowly toward them as if he were coming down a beam of light. Christiana believed that she was imagining him, but down he came, stamping his feet on the air, sidling, bending his muscular white neck, and flaring his just and terrible eyes.
As the Short Tails scattered, Athansor galloped around the courtyard, springing off the walls so hard that they collapsed, and catching little men in his teeth. He trampled them, knocked them over, and butted them murderously into stone columns. A few stood to fight, and for these he went up on his hind legs—twenty-five feet in the air—and then fell upon them with his hooves.
As the white horse fought, what was left of the cloisters reverberated as if in an earthquake. When he finished, he came to within a few yards of Asbury and Christiana and whinnied.
He knelt, and Christiana mounted him. “Come,” she said, and Asbury followed. In one silent bound, they left the smoky cloister and climbed over the river. A million fires flickered at them, and they looked down upon a landscape that was trembling and dark. Because of the ash-wind, night had come early. As they flew through clouds of smoke, they had to close their eyes and lean forward, pressing their faces against the soft white coat of the horse’s astonishingly broad and spacious back. Asbury thought that they were dreaming, but Christiana knew that they were not.
ON THE last day of the last year of the second millennium, Hardesty and Virg
inia put the body of their child in a small wood coffin, and walked south through the city. Hardesty insisted that she be buried before the turn of the millennium that night. To leave her behind in the set of a thousand years into which she had been born, while they crossed into the next, seemed appropriate and decent. They wanted not to tease her with even an hour or a day of the new time that she would never know.
It was a strange procession—Hardesty in front, with the coffin on his shoulder; Virginia following, her eyes downcast; Mrs. Gamely behind her, with Martin walking by her side and holding her hand. Late that afternoon, the canyons were dark because of the ash-wind and the early setting of the sun. The city of glass windows, which had once been illuminated by a billion scattered fractions of the sun, was now as black as ink. They navigated through the narrow canyons, and their compass points were the low buildings outlined against the throbbing orange of the firelit sky. Eventually they reached the Battery, where they heard midtown’s glass towers igniting like Roman candles in the flames that swept down from the north.
They stepped onto the uncertain burning ice below the Battery’s old stone wall, and started toward the Isle of the Dead, a mile and a half across the harbor. Usually a small ferry plied back and forth several times a day. During the freeze, people had simply walked behind the sleds that carried the coffins. But now tremendous crevasses had shattered the solid and beefy hunk of glass that had once locked up all the islands and touched the harbor floor. From dozens of wide fissures, flames would sometimes rise several hundred feet above the burning rivers of oil that had carved out the canyons. Walls of black smoke and white steam floated upward, gradually becoming rose-colored in the firelight. Geysers from caverns stuffed with roiling green water and flaming oil would suddenly burst from amid a lake of clear ice and throw heavy knife-edged shards for miles. The surface began to melt because of the heat that radiated from the cloud-filled sky, and the ten- or twenty-foot-deep ponds that appeared were sometimes instantly drained by a new crack through which the water vanished into an anarchic network of tunnels, caves, and underground rivers.
