The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  “So swiftly has she risen, this great city, as though magically conjured by djinni out of thin air. Justifiably her citizens might expect to wake tomorrow in a wilderness, and find that this gorgeous citadel had been as insubstantial as their dreams.”

  Archly exchanged glances between some of our operatives as his irony was appreciated.

  “But if that were to come to pass—if they were to wake alone, unhoused and shivering upon a stony promontory, facing into a cold northern ocean and a hostile gale—why, you know as well as I do that within a few short years the citizens of San Francisco would create their city anew, with spires soaring ever closer to heaven, and mansions yet more gracious.”

  Of course we knew it, but the poor mortal waiters didn’t. I am afraid some of our younger operatives were base enough to smirk.

  “Let us marvel, ladies and gentlemen, at this phoenix of a city, at once ephemeral and abiding. Let us drink to the imperishable spirit of her citizens. I give you the city of San Francisco.”

  “The city of San Francisco,” we chorused, raising our glasses high.

  “And I give you”—smiling, he extended his hand—“the city of San Francisco!”

  Beaming the waiters wheeled it in, on a vast silver cart: an ornate confection of pastry, of spun-sugar and marzipan and candies, a perfect model of the City. It was possible to discern a tiny Ferry Building rising above chocolate wharves, and a tiny Palace, and Nob Hill reproduced in sugared peel and nonpareils. Across the familiar grid of streets Golden Gate Park was done in green fondant, and beyond it was the hill where Sutro Park rose in nougat and candied violets, and beyond that Cliff House itself, in astonishing detail.

  We applauded.

  Then she was destroyed, that beautiful city, with a silver cake knife and serving wedge, and parceled out to us in neat slices. One had to commend Labienus’s sense of humor, to say nothing of his sense of ritual.

  ***

  It was expected that we would wish to dance after dining; the ballroom had been reserved for our use, and at some point during dessert the orchestra had discreetly risen and carried their instruments up to the dais.

  I thought the idea of dancing in rather poor taste, under the circumstances, and apparently many of my fellow operatives agreed with me; but Averill and some of the other young ones got out on the floor eagerly enough, and soon the stately polonaise gave way to ragtime tunes and two-stepping.

  Under the pretense of going for a smoke I went out to the terrace, to breathe the clean night air and metabolize my portion of magnificent excess in peace. By ones and twos several of the older immortals followed me. Soon there was quite an assemblage of us out there between two worlds, between the dark water surging around Seal Rock and the brilliant magic lantern of the Cliff House.

  “Victor?” Madame D’Arraignee was making her way to me through the crowd. Her slippers, together with her diamonds, had gone into the leather case she was carrying, and she had donned sensible walking shoes; she had also buttoned a long motorist’s duster over her evening gown. The radiant Queen of the Night stood now before me as the Efficient Modern Woman.

  “You didn’t care to dance either, I see,” she remarked.

  “Not I, no,” I replied. Within the giddy whirl, Averill pranced by in the arms of an immortal sylph in pink satin; their faces were flushed and merry. Don’t think them heartless, reader. They did not understand yet. Horror, for Averill, was still a lonely prairie and a burning wagon; for the girl, still a soldier with a bayonet in a deserted orchard. Those nightmares weren’t here in this bright room with its bouncing music, and so all must be right with the world.

  But we were old ones, Madame D’Arraignee and I, and we stood outside in the dark and watched them dance.

  Down, miles down, the slick water on the clay face and the widening fissure in darkness, dead shale trembling like an exhausted limb, granite crumbling, rock cracking with the strain and crying out in a voice that rose up, and up at last through the red brick, through the tile and parquet, into the warm air and the music!

  The mortal musicians played on, but the dancers faltered. Some of them stopped, looking around in confusion; some of them only missed a step or two and then plunged back into the dance with greater abandon, determined to celebrate something.

  Madame D’Arraignee shivered. I threw my unlit cigar over the parapet into the sea.

  “Shall we go, Nan?” I offered her my arm. She took it readily and we left Cliff House.

  Outside on the carriage drive, and all the way up the steep hill to where my motor was parked, the waiting horses were tossing their heads and whickering uneasily.

  Madame D’Arraignee took the wheel, easily guiding us back down into the City through the spangled night.

  Even now, at the Grand Opera House, Enrico Caruso was striking a pose before a vast Spanish mountain range rendered on canvas and raising his carbine to threaten poor Bessie Abott. Even now, at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the Grand Prize Masked Carnival was in full swing, with throngs of costumed roller skaters whirling around the rink that would be a triage hospital in twelve hours and a pile of smoking ashes in twenty-four. Even now, the clock on the face of Old St. Mary’s Church—bearing its warning legend son observe the time and fly from evil—was counting out the minutes left for heedless passersby. Even now, the O’Neil children were sitting forward in their seats, scarcely able to breathe as the cruel Toymaker recited the incantation that would bring his creations to life.

  And we rounded the corner at Devisadero and sped down Market, with Prospero’s après-pageant speech ringing in our ears. At the corner of Third I pointed and Madame D’Arraignee worked the clutch, steered over to the curb and trod on the brake pedal.

  “You’re quite sure you won’t need a ride back?” she inquired over the chatter of the cylinders. I put my legs out and leapt down to the pavement.

  “Perfectly sure, Nan.” I shot my cuffs and adjusted the drape of my coat. Reaching into the seat, I took my stick and silk hat. “Give my seat to the Muse of Painting. I’m off to lurk in shadows like a gentleman.”

  “Bonne chance, then, Victor.” She eased up on the brake, clutched, and cranked the wheel over so the Franklin swung around in a wide arc to retrace its course up Market Street. I tipped my hat and bowed; with a cheery wave and a double honk on the Franklin’s horn, she steered away into the night.

  So far, so good. The night was yet young and there were plenty of debonair socialites in evening dress on the street, arriving and departing from the restaurants, the hotels, the theaters. For a block I was one of their number; then accomplished my disappearance down a black alleyway into another world, to thread my way through the boardinghouse warren.

  Rats were out and scuttling everywhere, sensing the coming disaster infallibly. In some buildings they were cascading down the stairs like trickling water, and cats ignored them and drunkards stood watching in stupefied amazement, but there was nobody else there to remark upon it; these streets did not invite promenaders.

  I found the O’Neils’ building and made my way up through the unlit stairwell, here and there kicking vermin out of my way. I left the landing and proceeded down their corridor, past doors tight shut showing only feeble lines of light at floor level to mark where the occupants were at home. I heard snores; I heard weeping; I heard a drunken quarrel; I heard a voice raised in wistful melody.

  No light at the O’Neils’ door, naturally; none at the door immediately opposite theirs. I scanned the room beyond but could discern no occupant. Drawing out a skeleton key from my waistcoat pocket, I gained entrance and shut the door after me.

  No tenant at all; good. It was death-cold in there and black as pitch, for a roller shade had been drawn down on the one window. A slight tug sent it wobbling upward but failed to let much more light into the room. Not that I needed light to see my chronometer as I checked it; half past eleven, and even now my teams were assembling at their stations on Nob Hill. I leaned against a wall, folded my arms and co
mposed myself to wait.

  Time passed slowly for me, but in Toyland it sped by. Songs and dances, glittering processions came to their inevitable close; fairies took wing. Innocence was rewarded and wickedness resoundingly punished. The last of the ingenious special effects guttered out, the curtain descended, the orchestra fell silent, the house lights came up. A little while the magic lingered, as the O’Neil family made their way out through the lobby, a little while it hung around them like a perfume in the atmosphere of red velvet and gilt and fashionably attired strangers, until they were borne out through the doors by the receding tide of the crowd. Then the magic left them, evaporating upward into the night and the fog, and they got their bearings and made their way home along the dark streets.

  I heard them, coming heavily up the stairs, O’Neil and Mary each carrying a child. Down the corridor their footsteps came, and stopped outside.

  “Slide down now, Ella, Daddy’s got to open the door.”

  I heard the sound of a key fumbling in darkness for its lock, and a drowsy little voice singing about Toyland, the paradise of childhood to which you can never return.

  “Hush, Ella, you’ll wake the neighbors.”

  “Donal’s asleep. He missed the ending.” Ella’s voice was sad. “And it was such a beautiful, beautiful ending. Don’t you think it was a beautiful ending, Daddy?”

  “Sure it was, darling.” Their voices receded a bit as they crossed the threshold. I heard a clink and the sputtering hiss of a match; there was the faintest glimmer of illumination down by the floor.

  “Sssh, sh, sh. Home again. Help Mummy get his boots off, Ella, there’s a dear.”

  “I’ll just step across to Mrs. Varian’s and collect the baby.”

  “Mind you remember his blanket.”

  “I will that.”

  Footsteps in the corridor again, discreet rapping on a panel, a whispered conversation in darkness and a sleepy wail; then returning footsteps and a pair of doors closing. Then, more muffled but still distinct to me, the sound of the O’Neils going to bed.

  Their lamps were blown out. Their whispers ceased. Still I waited, listening as the minutes ticked away for their mortal souls to rest.

  Half past one on the morning of Wednesday, the eighteenth of April in the year 1906, in the city of San Francisco. Francis O’Neil and his wife and their children asleep finally and forever, and the world had finished with them. In the gray morning, at precisely twelve minutes after the hour of five, this boarding house would lurch forward into the street, bricks tumbling as mortar blew out like talcum powder, rotten timbers snapping. That would be the end of Frank’s strength and Mary’s care and Ella’s dreams, the end of the brief unhappy baby, and no one would remember them but me.

  And, perhaps, Donal. I stepped across the hall and let myself into their room, perfectly silent.

  The children lay in their trundle on the floor, next to their parent’s bed. Donal slept on the outer edge, curled on his side, both hands tucked under his chin. I stood for a moment observing, analyzing their alpha patterns. When I was satisfied that no casual noise would awaken them, I bent and lifted Donal from his bed. He sighed but slept on. After a moment’s hesitation I drew the blanket up around Ella’s shoulders.

  I stood back. The boy wore a nightshirt and long black stockings, but the night was cold. Frank’s coat hung over the back of a chair: I appropriated it to wrap his son. Shifting Donal to one arm, I backed out of the room and shut the door.

  Finished.

  No sleeper in that building woke to hear our rapid descent of the stairs. On the first landing a drunk sat upright, leaning his head on the railings, sound asleep with his lower jaw dropped open like a corpse’s. We fled lightly past him, Donal and I, and he never moved.

  Away through the maze, then, away forever from the dirt and stench and poverty of that place. In twelve hours it would have ceased to exist, and the wind would scatter white ashes so the dead could never be named nor numbered.

  Even Market Street was dark now, its theaters shut down. Over at the Grand Opera House on Mission, Enrico Caruso’s costumes hung neatly in his dark dressing room, ready for a performance of La Bohème that would never take place. Up at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the weary janitor surveyed the confetti and other festive debris littering the skating rink and decided to sweep it up in the morning. Toyland, at the Columbia, was shut away in its properties room: fairy tinsel, butterfly wings, bear heads peering down from dusty shelves into the darkness.

  Even now my resolute gentlemen and ladies were despoiling Nob Hill, flitting through its darkened drawing rooms at hyperspeed like so many whirring ghosts, bearing with them winking gilt and crystal, calfskin and morocco, canvas and brass, all the very best that money could buy but couldn’t hope to preserve against the hour to come. Without the Franklin I’d have a tedious walk uphill to join them, but at a brisk pace I might arrive with time to spare.

  Donal stretched and muttered in his sleep. I shifted him to my other shoulder, changed hands on my walking stick, and was about to hurry on when I caught a whiff of some familiar scent on the air. I halted.

  It was not a pleasant scent. It was harsh, musky, like blood or sweat but neither; like an animal smell, but other; it summoned in me a sudden terror and confusion. When I tried to identify it, however, I had only a mental image of a bear costume hanging on a hook, the head looking down from a shelf. When had I seen that? I hadn’t seen that! Whose memories

  were these?

  I controlled myself with an effort. Some psychic disturbance was responsible for this, my own nerves were contributing to this, there was no real danger. Why, of course: it must be nearly two o’clock, when the first of the major subsonic disruptions would occur.

  Yes, here it came now. I could hear nearby horses begin to scream and stamp frantically, I could feel the paving bricks grind against one another under the soles of my boots, and the air groaned as though buried giants were praying to God for release.

  Yes, I thought, this must be it. I balanced my stick against my knee and drew out my chronometer, trying to verify the event. As I peered at it, the door of a stable directly across the street burst open, and a white mare came charging out, hooves thundering. Donal jerked and cried.

  Timing is everything. My assailant chose that perfect moment of distraction to strike. I was enveloped in a choking wave of that smell as a hand closed on my face and pulled my head back. Instantly I clawed at it, twisted my head to bite; but a vast arm was wrapping around me from the other side and cold steel entered my throat, opened the artery, wrenched as it was pulled out again.

  So swiftly had this occurred that my stick was still falling through midair, had not yet struck the pavement. Donal was pulled upward and backward, torn from me, and I heard his terrified cry mingle with the clatter of the stick as it landed, the rumbling earth, the running horse, a howling laughter I knew but could not place. I was sinking to my knees, clutching at my cut throat as my blood fountained out over the starched front of my dress shirt and stained the diamond stud so it winked like Mars. Ares, God of War. Thor. I was conscious of a terrible anger as I descended to the shadows and curled into fugue.

  ***

  “Will you get on to this, now? Throat cut and he’s not been robbed! Here’s his watch, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Stroke of luck for us, anyhow.”

  I sat up and glared at them. The two mortal thieves backed away from me, horrified; then one mustered enough nerve to dart in again, aiming a kick at me while he made a grab for my chronometer. I caught his wrist and broke it. He jumped back, stifling an agonized yell; his companion took to his heels and after only a second’s hesitation he followed.

  I remained where I was, huddled on the pavement, running a self-diagnostic. The edges of my windpipe and jugular artery had closed and were healing nicely at hyperspeed; if the thieves hadn’t roused me from fugue I’d be whole now. Blood production had sped up to replace that now dyeing the front of my previously immaculat
e shirt. The exterior skin of my throat was even now self-suturing, but I was still too weak to rise.

  My hat and stick remained where they had fallen, but of Donal or my assailant there was no sign. I licked my dry lips. There was a vile taste in my mouth. My chronometer told me it was a quarter past two. I dragged myself to the base of a wall and leaned there, half swooning, drowning in unwelcome remembrance.

  That smell. Sweat, blood, the animal and smoke. Yes, they’d called it the Summer of Smoke, that year the world ended. What world had that been? The world where I was a little prince, or nearly so; better if my mother hadn’t been a Danish slave, but my father had no sons by his lady wife, and so I had fine clothes and a gold pin for my cloak.

  When I went to climb on the beached longship and play with the gear, a warrior threatened me with his fist; then another man told him he’d better not, for I was Baldulf’s brat. That made him back down in a hurry. And once, my father set me on the table and put his gold cup in my hand, but I nearly dropped it, it was so heavy. He held it for me and I tasted the mead and his companions laughed, beating on the table. The ash-white lady, though, looked down at the floor and wrung her hands.

  She told me sometimes that if I wasn’t good the Bear would come for me. She was the only one who would ever dare to talk to me that way. And then he had come, the Bear and his slaughtering knights. All in one day I saw our tent burned and my father’s head staring from a pike. Screaming, smoke and fire, and a banner bearing a red dragon that snaked like a living flame, I remember.

  My mother had caught me up and was running for the forest, but she was a plump girl and could not get up the speed. Two knights chased after us on horseback, whooping like madmen. Just under the shadow of the oaks, they caught us. My mother fell and rolled, loosing her hold on me, and screamed for me to run; then one of the knights was off his horse and on her. The other knight got down too and stood watching them, laughing merrily. One of her slippers had come off and her bare toes kicked at the air until she died.