Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  Cid Tanner, on the other hand, had discovered the engine room. The instant he entered, the suite was mired in the scent of grease and fume.

  “My dear Mr. Tanner, I hardly think you are in appropriate decorum! I am a very sick man!” Arturo mounted a protest, waving one dandy hand before him.

  “Injured, not sick,” Cid answered gruffly. “Aeon steam is good for healing, didn’t you know? ’Course, you’d have to want to be healed first.”

  “I do not believe in that hocus,” Arturo said, sidestepping the sally. He was rather enjoying playing the invalid, what with the gruff Cid to tease and the pretty Cezette fawning over his wounds in the evenings. Besides, he meant it; he did not believe those invaluable aeon stones were good for anything other than moving ships across the sky. The idea of an inanimate object possessing any understanding of a brilliant mind like Arturo’s and reacting, indeed drawing power from those thoughts, was ludicrous.

  “The hocus is holding you up,” Cid remarked. “I took a look at their engine configuration. Eighty-eight aeon bolts inserted into eight reactor chambers; very bold design. It’s not as good as pirated lift, but it’s close.”

  Arturo gave him his patented dead-eyed stare, but Hallow seemed to take an interest. Soon the two were deep in conversation.

  “It is hard to follow the thinking of experts, non?” Cezette remarked. “Look what I found in the library! Shall I read it to you?”

  She held a copy of A Crease In The Firmament, a fairly recent release. As usual, the first editions had been made available early for dirigible firms. It was bound in sturdy shipboard leather, waterproofed.

  “By all means, my dear,” Arturo said without a trace of sass.

  The light was fading from the porthole outside, so the girl turned up the arc lamp by Arturo’s head. Cezette opened the latch of the book and began to read in her lilting, youthful voice. She read in a profoundly French way, lingering on the details and coloring the words somehow with the scent of framboises and the sound of the Seine. As she read, her raven locks came loose from her barrette, and she kept tucking them behind her ear or nibbling at them when she fussed over a word. Arturo was more than happy to provide, having a veritable lexicon tucked between his own ears. Cezette made him feel like a tutor, at times, or an older brother, not that he knew what it was like. As she read, Arturo fingered the sheaf of stolen documents, letting his unconscious mind have a go at the problem.

  “Tesseract, what is this word?”Cezette finally paused to ask. She had trouble even saying it, the succession of slithering sounds thickening into her nasal vowels.

  “If I guess right, the author is about to explain for you. It is by no means a common word in English usage, but one frequented by our academicians and physical scientists.”

  Cezette continued to read aloud, obediently.

  “Ah, I see! It is like when Maman tucks in my skirts.” Cezette demonstrated. “I pass the thread through here, and fold the cloth to join the other side. That is how they travel quicker than going on a straight line, by folding space. ”

  “Has she had to do it for you often?”

  “Maman only has her own clothes in the closet, and she is much taller and wider than me. The legs tear when they catch,” Cezette said. “But you know how. You have a pattern yourself.”

  “Pardon?”

  “This, this is a pattern for clothes! The lines here, and here.”

  Cezette snatched up the sheaf of papers and attempted to show Arturo what she meant, lining up the dots and dashes on the paper. After several attempts, she gave up.

  “Quel dommage,” Cezette said, shrugging. She was about to return to the book when Arturo sat up, straight as a rule.

  “Louissaint, you are a genius!” Arturo cried. He grasped the sheaf of papers, shuffling them around, then folding them along the creases, first one way, then another. “Why are these creases so worn? Why so much fiddling and tearing, for a simple message?”

  Hallow and Cid had ceased their earlier conversation, and were now watching intently. In a moment, Arturo had discovered the pattern, after much folding, cursing, and unfolding. His fingers worked deftly, but carefully, at the delicate paper.

  “What is it?” Cezette asked, tilting her head. Her fingers twitched round the thick book, and her legs made agitated clicking noises, as if she was curling her toes. Arturo thought of aeons, and how they were supposed to react to feelings, but it was too distracting at a critical moment.

  Arturo produced three different folded sculptures, a monkey, a dog, and a peacock. On each one there was a bit of message, which he laboriously copied out. Soon Arturo had the complete message writ on a piece of the suite’s notepaper:

  The Detective knows -I

  “That’s not much to go on,” Hallow said, musing on the few words. “Maybe you missed a piece.”

  “It’s an order,” Arturo said. “It’s short, implying there is a clear objective already in place. The missive is only an update. We know they intend to recover the box. I am more interested in the signature.”

  “The ‘I’ could be an initial,” Cid Tanner said, joining in.

  “Then why one letter? Why not first and last name?” Arturo said.

  “More likely an alias, or an organization,” Hallow agreed. “I’ve seen such in the Ministry’s secret records. British Intelligence, perhaps?”

  “Or….” Arturo mused, but it was too nebulous an idea. What proof was there of that conspiracy’s involvement? The men were of various origins, true, and the weapon pulled from his gut was worn from exposure, pitted with salt.

  “Spit it out, lad,” Cid grunted.

  “When I’m sure, perhaps,” Arturo said. “For now, let us enjoy the luxuries at hand. I may be able to join you in your library soon, dear girl. Jean Hallow, would you like to come?”

  “And what am I, chopped liver?” Cid said.

  “You are of course welcome, if you can tear yourself from your nuts and bolts,” Arturo added.

  “Not going to happen. Mr. Tanner loves them like his own children!” Cezette agreed.

  “Harrumph,” was Cid’s only reply, but he knelt to inspect the girl’s legs nonetheless.

  Interlude III

  A City of Two Worlds

  The rattle of a chain link fence could be heard winding its way around the alleys for blocks around, though the men guarding it were deafened by their raucous lifestyle and would never hear it.

  “Big Brother, did you see? Someone got past the knuckle-draggers.”

  “Shh. Do you hear it? It could be the police.”

  “They tore up Tommy Gint pretty bad last week. He was gasping. He couldn’t breathe.”

  “Shhh! I think it’s something worse.”

  The four corners of their alley were bathed in shadow, ominous. After a while a glaring of cats swept through the garbage pails, a sinuous tortoise-and-tabby wave that toppled boxes and tins.

  “Just cats,” said Little Brother.

  “Wait.”

  And of course, Big Brother was right. A minute or two passed before what spooked the cats emerged from the shadows. The first time the boys had seen one, they were taking a shortcut across a roof, which had likely saved them.

  Strangled screams and the shadows playing on the walls were more than enough to keep the brothers from climbing down. They were always too quiet for the police to hear, but Tommy Gint had always said it wasn’t that the police couldn’t, but that they wouldn’t. At best there was a shadow of thinness, nothing substantial, before it retreated into the darkness. The only warning before it got you was a strange clicking, like mandibles coming together.

  Big thought they were hole people, vagrants living in the sewers who sometimes emerged to scavenge food or abduct wives. Little, whose hearing hadn’t been ruined by begging near the tracks day after day, thought it must be something more. They took men and women both, and had far too many legs. Little knew the amorphous thing in the darkness was what the teachers spoke of when they warned aga
inst talking to strangers, a ridiculous notion only the privileged would think was actual advice. Whatever lay in that alley was a living embodiment of Strange. What they knew for sure was this: if it got you, you were never seen again.

  After a while the thing left, and took the terrible oppressive atmosphere with it. It was pitch-dark outside the corona cast by the streetlamps. By and by the lions and bears started to return, those regular predators of the night. They used the alley below the brothers like a marketplace, goods and services exchanged in wax paper packets or hushed moans in the night. Some of the people looked rich. Others looked poor, or very sick. Big told Little not to look at them, and Little never questioned his brother until he saw Big down there one night.

  Big didn’t want Little to know, but Little knew. He saw the tiny glass knobs being passed around, the garnet-red fluid inside turning the bulbs into Christmas ornaments. Sometimes people used right in the alley. It looked like they were having a good time.

  Little relaxed, hunched against the wet pasteboard of their house. An accident of architecture had left the brothers this nook, too precarious for an adult but a perfect place to hide two gangly, malnourished boys. They had pushed aside the tin sheeting to find a perfect shelter between two buildings. There was a fire escape ladder on one end and the alley on the other, and they even had a pantry.

  Little kept looking at the winking lights through the gap in the tin sheet until Big swatted him. They swam over the spot where the cabaret stood, like fairies over Pleasure Island.

  “That place is owned by Stanley Burgess,” said Big Brother. He spat the taste of the name from his mouth. “We can’t be too careful.”

  “If you took a job from his men once in awhile, we could bribe one of them to let me peek. Or you could let me take one. I’m small enough to run one of their sneak jobs.”

  “You staying in school is the only way we’re ever leaving this place. You’re so obsessed with that gingerbread whorehouse! Burgess is a gangster, Little. Everybody he touches ends up dead. Remember Mother?”

  “It’s cabaret, Big Brother. Not a whorehouse.” But Little felt the sting.

  “Like you would know what those are,” scoffed Big, but it wasn’t clear which establishment he meant.

  Little didn’t like to talk of Mother if he could help it. She’d gone to work in the Cabaret when Little was very young, and never came back out. In his heart of hearts, in a place even Little wouldn’t admit to himself existed, he still believed she waited just behind those gilt, blacked-out doors.

  When Little went to school Big spent his days begging and running small errands to keep them afloat. It was this or go back to the Gellers, and Big had left Mr. Geller’s nose too broken to ever go back.

  “I know what whorehouses are. I saw you sneak into the one on Twelfth and Avenue B. What’s so good about Beth Brannagan? I bet the cabaret dancers don’t wobble when they walk.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, and Big’s calloused hands were hard where they fell. Little clutched at his head, drawing up his knees with their thicker rags to protect himself. Despite that, they were still only a brother’s fists, and not the sledgehammers of a day in the yards with a bottle of whiskey behind them.

  As he cowered, taking the punishment and feeling his brother’s frustration with every blow, Little wondered if Big didn’t share some of his sentiments. Big hadn’t complained when they found a place with a view of the cabaret. Maybe he missed Mother just as much as Little did. Probably more.

  After a while the beating gave way to a bout of sulking, and then Big pushed over a pastrami sandwich. Lord, it didn’t even have trash stains on it.

  “Did you…?”

  “I did the deli man in the Lower East a favor,” said Big quickly. “I didn’t steal it.”

  And night wore on, a thick velum crinkling with trucks going by, the klaxon of squad cars, people fucking. Sounds of commerce.

  The next time the brothers came across a Stranger, it was on the run from a group of boys in Alphabet City.

  Burgess had mysteriously shut the doors to his cabaret. The field had suddenly gone fallow in the Bowery, the fat calves of rich burlesque goers suddenly without a place to indulge their debauchery. Rumor had it he had left the city, having been seen in the airship port at Chelsea. Either way, his thugs scattered and the streets were suddenly full of walkers, backup dancers who hadn’t been snapped up by other clubs. The boys had to range farther, aiming to tug at the heartstrings of the families not two streets away, only to find rival whelps vying for the dry teat of the proletariat. They’d run the brothers down with stones and boards and broken shards of glass.

  Sprinting full-tilt across sidewalks only to detour into unknown alleys, avoiding the NYPD airships scouring the tall reaches of townhouses, Alphabet City was a maze. Avenue A, Avenue B. The clearly labeled streets should have been easy to run but the letters appeared again and again, like a badly spelled word. Big and Little found themselves beating their shoes ragged. Little’s left was already gaping like a broken jaw. Closed shops and boarded-up brownstones flew past them. Avenue A, Avenue B.

  In spite of that, Big’s pace never faltered, urging them on with curses and wheezing gasps. By the time the brothers lost the gang they had already plunged headlong into the Stranger lurking in the community garden

  It was a small space, watered by a tiny clankety-clank boiler in the corner whining away like a tiny copper gargoyle. Walled in between two sheer brick bluffs, the sound very nearly masked the clicking of the Stranger’s legs, so soft were they among the only hydrangeas for blocks around. In the darkness, they were a stark picture-house black and white.

  Little turned to scale the fence when Big grabbed his shoulder.

  “No,” mouthed Big, and his eyes were enormous.

  Little froze, gathering all his prodigious street urchin senses on the fence, and his heart stopped cold in his chest. The walls all around them had fooled their ears—the Stranger had been behind them all along, hiding in the shadows of a large tree just under the chain links.

  The state of the place should have been a warning. By day, it must have been well tended by the local families, a place of rest for perambulatory mothers or weary teachers. Its stone arches were too strong to have been placed. More likely they were remnants of a grand mansion that had once stood in this lot, and some community group or beleaguered urban parent had turned the fallow earth into a paradise. If it were a normal garden the place would have been torn apart by territorial boys long ago, its herbs uprooted, sprouts trodden upon and littered with cigarro butts. The very cleanliness of the walls made it apparent there was something else here, something that kept the evening primroses pristine until morning—like a hunter’s trail in the forest.

  Past sundown, those same columns and restful lees sprung infested shadows. A stairway to heaven cast a long dagger of night, hanging over the path like a deadfall. The boys had climbed a fence and gone a few steps into the place, but the incessant clicking now barred their way back. Big tentatively inched a step, dislodging a small piece of gravel, and the shadows convulsed in scrabbling silhouettes.

  “Big… I’m scared,” mouthed Little.

  “Me too,” mouthed Big. He slowly gestured to the middle of the garden, where a tiny wooden shack had been built. Various tools were piled on a bench in front of it, and there was a large padlock, but the upper level was accessible by a brick stair, probably part of the older building. There was a wooden door at the top, open an inch. It looked thick.

  “On three,” said Big, without a sound. He put up three fingers, scarcely visible in the shadows of the buildings. “One… two….”

  “They have to be here somewhere! Climb the fence and get them!”

  The loud, ragged voice tearing through the neighborhood quiet was jagged, familiar. Big and Little froze, their feet in the air.

  “But, boss, that’s the Arboretum—”

  “I don’t give a shit. You get in that tree farm and find them!”<
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  And the chain link fence began to rattle, the clicking grew more intense. Little knew they had maybe one chance to get up the stair. One look at his brother and he knew they had the same idea.

  “Go, Little, go!” Big hissed, and bolted.

  Little churned his legs, following his brother across the shifting loam, the yelling of the boys behind them surging, playing right into their hands. For a sick moment the gang sounded like they almost upon them, propelled by something not quite right. One of them, the leader, had had his arms pricked by a dozen red marks.

  But there were darker things at the bottom of that garden than even the cruelty of boys.

  It wasn’t long after they reached the top of the building that the gurgled sounds of sharp arms around thin necks chased them into the small room. Big slammed the door against them, sealing them inside. Too late did the brothers look, at the wide benches and large windows, realizing this scenic post overlooking the garden was no protection at all but a breezy deathtrap.

  “Little, no!” cried Big, but Little was already leaning out of the window, straining to catch a glimpse of the thing wringing the life from the gang below in bloodcurdling screams. Perhaps it hadn’t reckoned on dealing with several at once, but the violence was anything but quiet.

  “Get it!”

  “Christ, it’s as hard as a rock!”

  Sounds of clanging and the dull thuds of flesh hitting brick drifted upward, into the room where Big and Little pressed themselves invisible against the door. Strangely, the windows in the cliffs above stayed dark, even though the din could have woken the dead. Little could just see the scene below, as if he himself were safe in a tower. The Stranger with its many arms, strangling with limbs writhing like darkness given flesh. The fence offered no easy way out. Any climber would expose his backside to the shadows, an easy target.

  “Oh, God, it’s got Takeem!”

  “Fucker!”