City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “No, no—it’s a lizard.”

  “What kind of lizard?”

  “It’s a Saphant Click-Spitting Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” he said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”

  She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though—you are going to be late to work.”

  Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbotton set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his rain coat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mottled green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.

  Someone had left a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom and Slattery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a little, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.

  “Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.

  Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbotton pulled the cover aside—and leapt back.

  The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second floor apartment.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.

  Mrs. Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower pattern hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.

  “No pets allowed,” she said.

  “Pets?” Hoegbotton was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”

  Mrs. Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”

  “Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”

  “No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs. Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.

  “It’s not . . . ” He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”

  Mrs. Willis grunted and pushed past him.

  At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed patter of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbotton the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”

  * * *

  Located on Albumuth Boulevard, half way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbotton’s store—“Robert Hoegbotton & Sons: Quality Importers of Fine New & Used Items From Home & Abroad”—took up the first floor of a solid two-story wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbotton clan to save the family name should he fail.

  The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a battered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbotton, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.

  Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.

  When Bristlewing saw Hoegbotton, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few button-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.

  Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and often disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without settling on him. Hoegbotton could not afford to hire more dependable help.

  “Morning,” Bristlewing said.

  “Good morning,” Hoegbotton replied. “Any customers last night?”

  “None with any money . . . ” Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”

  Hoegbotton set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up-to-date?” Hoegbotton’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.

  “Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.

  By design, the way to Hoegbotton’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-rotted-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes. This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths mattered little to Hoegbotton. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbotton loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face-to-face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask. An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.

  Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbotton’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting—crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground—and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the left of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.

  The desk lay beneath an organized clutter of books of inventory, a blotter, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on va
cation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of The Mystery of Cinsorium by Blake Clockmoor. Daguerreotypes of Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for the Kalif’s cavalry on a monstrous but historically common whim) and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else’s mansion in Morrow added a personal touch.

  Bristlewing had already made himself scarce—Hoegbotton could hear him pulling some artifact out from behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots—and the cage stood on the sideboard of his desk as if it had always been there.

  Hoegbotton hung his raincoat on one of the six coat racks lined up like soldiers in the farthest corner of the office. Then he took the past day’s book of inventory and purchases and walked to the door that led to the room next to the bathroom. The door was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbotton had taken from an abandoned Manziist shrine.

  Hoegbotton unlocked the door and went inside. The door shut silently behind him and he was alone. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned squid oil lamp nailed into the room’s far wall.

  Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate minute fractures in the glass. He had worried that the Cappan’s men might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow on the fungus.

  The table held three place settings, the faded napkins unfolded and haphazard. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment of faded words, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bottle of port, half-full, stood on the table next to a bare space in front of the fourth chair.

  By tradition, recently-established, Hoegbotton sat there for his daily readings from the books of inventory. Bound in red leather, the books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were thin as tissue paper to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The two books Hoegbotton had taken with him represented the inventory for the past three months. Sixteen others, as massive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom and Slattery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his desk.)

  Yesterday had been slow—only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing’s description of the buyers as “Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name.” and “Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record after all that time.” Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbotton- penned buyer entry read like an investigative report: “Miss Glissandra Beckle, 4232 East Munrale Mews, late 40s. Gray-silver hair. Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me ‘Mr. Hoegbotton.’ She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snuffbox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.”

  If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbotton for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. After carefully cataloguing its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbotton had asked Bristlewing a question.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “Old musty room. No air.”

  “No. It’s not an old musty room with no air.”

  “Fooled me,” Bristlewing had said and, scowling, left him there.

  3

  But Bristlewing was wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he? And how could Hoegbotton explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he often found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers’ market?

  The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbotton, had been the first Hoegbotton to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.

  For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbotton became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed only a matter of time before more of the Hoegbotton clan moved down to Ambergris.

  However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbotton, his wife, and his daughter disappeared, just three of the thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence—leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and the assumption among those who grieved that the gray caps had caused the tragedy. Hoegbotton remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: “I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain what happened to me. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise.”

  Sitting in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open before him, the young Robert Hoegbotton had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbotton? He spent many summer afternoons in the attic, surrounded by antiquities, speculating on the subject. He combed through old letters Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities. His mother disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother just smiled and said sadly, “I’ve often wondered myself.” He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home.

  His sister also found the mystery intriguing. They would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncover the meaning of words like “gray cap” and “Cappan.” His grandmother had even given them an old sketch that showed the apartment’s living room—Samuel Hoegbotton surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit. But for his sister it was just relief of a temporary boredom and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.

  When he reached the age of majority, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris. No Hoegbotton had set foot in Ambergris for 90 years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he had started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times—at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time—thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.

  The day after he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbotton visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s letters. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbotton an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read “Off Limits By Order of the Cappan.” The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

  When he finally stood in front of the apartment—on the ground level of a three-story building—he wondere
d if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

  After a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Half an hour later, he had unpried the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale “X” running across the dark wood. He realized he was breathing in shallow gasps, anticipation laced with fear. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet the adrenalin rushed through him.

  Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly-lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room—a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay. Hoegbotton relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.