Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

by Sarah Monette

  “Sure. You were fine. We aren’t being graded, you know.”

  “I didn’t mean that. It was just . . . ” She lost her nerve and said, “The bed’s pretty narrow.”

  “Hey, we didn’t fall off. Ten points out of ten.”

  “Okay,” Bram said, although she was only partly reassured.

  But Sean was awake now; Bram felt him shifting position, sitting up against the headboard with the pillow behind his back. She stayed as she was, lying on her side, pressed against the wall, her head inadequately supported by what she would later find to be a pair of Sean’s roommate’s sweatpants.

  Sean said, “What do you want your music to do, Bram?”

  “What?”

  “Your music. What do you want to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Don’t you have any aspirations?” Sean said, a stinging flick of contempt in his voice.

  “Of course I do. I just . . . they’re hard to articulate, you know?”

  “No, they’re not. Not if they’re real.”

  “Well, what’s your aspiration then?” Bram said, defensive and yet hoping that perhaps Sean was working around to asking her to read his poems.

  “The city,” Sean said. “I want to capture the truth of the city.”

  And when she asked him what he meant, Sean told her about the seraphic trains and the river and the city’s tenebrous history. But he did not show her his poems.

  her blood

  Things Lost in the City and Never Recovered:

  • 3 canvases by the American surrealist painter, Frank Attwater: The Sum of All Objects in the Room, The Dirigible Eaten by Stars, The Andiron

  • the diary of the novelist Susan Kempe (burned by the author before her suicide in 1988)

  • St. Roque’s Hospital (destroyed in the fire of 1922)

  • a key to the secret room in the house at 549 Grosvenor Avenue

  • 7 life-size wooden marionettes, representing Henry VIII and his 6 wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn (with detachable head), Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard (with detachable head), Catherine Parr

  • a packet of Agathe Ombrée rose seeds

  • a stained kidskin left glove missing the index finger, said to have belonged to the Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow

  • the Maupin Boulevard subway station

  the moon’s pyre

  Bram climbed the stairs from the subway station and emerged in the middle of a brick-paved plaza. There were benches around the edges of the plaza, and tall, ornate streetlamps; the plaza was almost disappointingly normal, except for the fact that it was underground. The air was cold, but stuffy, and the sweetish scent of dust was everywhere.

  She looked up, but the streetlamps did not cast enough light for her to see if the ceiling of this place was natural or man-made. She squeezed the handle of her guitar case, for reassurance, and started to walk toward the edge of the plaza opposite the head of the stairs. She wished, a tired, aching thought, that she had any idea of where she was going.

  Bram walked through the Court of the Clockwork Kings. The houses loured on either side, crammed cheek-by-jowl, tall and narrow-fronted and stern. There were no lights behind any of the windows, but she could not shake the faint, frightened impression that the houses were not deserted, that the rooms behind those staring windows were not empty, and that those who waited in those airless, dusty rooms (and waited for what?) were watching her as she went past. She walked a little faster, but that made the echoes of her footsteps mime the increasingly rapid and panicked rhythm of her heart, and she had to slow down again.

  After a time—she did not know how long, and she was afraid to look at her watch—she saw a different kind of light up ahead. It bloomed like a rose against the darkness, not the right color for a fire, although it was naggingly familiar. She got a little closer and realized it was pink neon, as lurid and tasteless as anything one might see on Jefferson Avenue. Bram stopped, bewildered, suddenly afraid in an entirely new way.

  And it was at that moment that she became aware of a hand on her arm.

  She jerked away and turned, in one motion, and found herself staring at something that looked like a man but wasn’t one. It was tall and deathly white—not the same white as the chalk-white gentlemen in the train, this was a dead white, like the undersides of rotting fish—and wrapped in trailing black that might have been a cloak or a shroud or a pair of nebulous wings. Its eyes were blood-red slivers of glass.

  “What are you?” Bram said, her voice shrill and shaking. “What do you want?”

  “We are the noctares,” said the creature, and Bram looked around wildly, but there was nothing like it in sight; its words, though, were blurry, echoing, as if it spoke with more than one voice. “We serve the Clockwork Kings. What do you seek, you who breathe, in the Court of the Clockwork Kings?”

  “I . . . I’m looking for someone.”

  Its head tilted, slowly and jerkily, like a rusty piece of machinery, to the left. It said, “You do not belong here, you who breathe. Go back. Go home. Walk beneath the sun and stars and taste the air of the world. Do not walk in this city of darkness.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. I have to find him.”

  It stared at her, its red glass eyes unfathomable, and said, “If you will not go, we must take you before the Clockwork Kings. We who do not breathe and never have, we beg you: go now. Do not look back. Let go of that which does not breathe.”

  “Wh . . . what will they do to me?”

  Its head tilted, with the same slow jerkiness—clockwork, Bram thought and then wished she hadn’t—to the right. It said, “The Clockwork Kings do no harm.”

  “Then I will see them. I am not afraid.” A lie, a lie, but she could not go back, not without Sean.

  It bowed its head. “You have made your choice. Come with us.” And its hand, as white and cold as death by freezing, took Bram’s arm just above the elbow. This time, Bram could not pull away.

  those cold mirrors

  Clair was the only person Sean had ever loved. When she kissed him, when she smiled at him, he felt almost breathless with awe. He told her things about himself he had never and would never tell a living soul. The first time he had seen her, the first time he had looked into her eyes, he had thought he saw his Stag of Candles reflected there. He had been trying to find that reflection again ever since, but all he ever saw was himself.

  bone needles

  Sean sat in the dusty dimness of St. Christopher’s small parish library. He was working on a poem about St. Christopher’s, his own parish church, for The Stag of Candles; he had spent the afternoon looking through the contents of a box labeled simply FROM CONVENT. Most of it was incomprehensible to him, but down at the bottom, he found an accordion file of documents relating to the case of a nun who was committed to St. Catherine’s in 1942. She claimed she heard angels singing in the roofs of the transepts—this, the last in what was apparently a long history of visions and voices, some of them distinctly secular, all of them highly suspect. Moreover, in a letter written to her sister but apparently never sent, she gloried in the fact that only she could hear the angels, her tone that of a spoiled child gloating over a birthday present. When she would not recant—when she became blasphemous and violent before the Bishop—she was committed to St. Catherine’s. She died of pneumonia nine years later, insisting to the end that angels had sung to her from the roof of St. Christopher’s.

  Sean jotted down some notes; as he was starting to tidy the contents of the box, the ancient and almost senile Sister Mary Bartholomew tottered over to the table, peered at Sean’s pile of documents, and nodded to herself.

  “Did you know her, Sister?” Sean asked, not hopefully.

  “Her and her angels.” Sister Mary Bartholomew snorted. “We all heard them—but only Sister Mary Jude was fool enough to say so.”

  And she tottered away again, leaving Sean sta
ring after her. He was suddenly very cold.

  long-held breath

  It was past eleven on the fifth night after Sean’s death. Bram crossed the campus without seeing the stark, strange beauty of the bare oak trees against the sky. She made for the nearest Metropolitan Transit stop, bought a ticket she had no intention of using, and climbed the narrow, scaffold-like staircase to the platform.

  She was following Sean as best she could. Her grief was too raw and black to admit of any other course of action. But she intended her suicide also to be a memorial, a testament to the tremendous jagged void Sean left in the world. Sean had told her about the seraphic trains, had told her some of the stories about them, and she had heard the longing in his voice. She could not end things until she, too, had watched a seraphic train sweep by and leave her behind, scorning her offering.

  She lifted her guitar out of its case, tuned it, and began to play. She paid no attention to the passengers waiting for the next train, no attention to the cold air or the bad lighting; nothing existed except the music and the trains that roared and howled and gibbered their way past. Each of them was an ordinary train, and Bram kept playing.

  She started with folk songs, some Bob Dylan, Beatles songs that she’d been playing since her first guitar lesson at the age of eight. She segued into her own stuff when fingers and voice were warm, when she could feel the strength of the music all the way down her spine. It would be cheating not to play her best, and she knew it would make no difference. No seraphic train would stop for her. Midnight came and went, and she was still playing. She stopped only to get drinks of water. She felt that her heart was opening wider and wider, that it was pushing open the stone carapace of grief and her music was soaring out like dragons.

  There was no self-consciousness left when she started playing “Why Do You Linger?”, a song she had half-despaired of ever finishing. But tonight she understood it; tonight it was as clear and brutal and precise as a glass dissecting-knife. Tonight she understood what the song was trying to say, that the truth was still beautiful, even if it came out of something painful and ugly and heart-breaking.

  The song ended; she looked up, arming sweat off her forehead, and saw the train standing at the platform, doors open; there were faces at every window, looking at her, and not a single one of them was mortal.

  A seraphic train had stopped for Bram Bennett.

  my love waits for me in green

  The Fairlawn Memorial Garden is always deserted. Funerals are held here, the grounds are immaculately kept, but, no matter when you visit, you will never see another living soul.

  The Thiboudeau Hill Cemetery is noted for the yearly funeral procession of the city’s fifth mayor, Henry Hamilton Carr. Cemetery workers from all over the city gather at sundown on March eleventh to watch the spectral procession, though no one now knows who the mourners are.

  The city’s most famous (or infamous) resident, the poet and critic Francis Burnham, is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Stories were whispered throughout the city of his debauched ways: his orgies, his absinthe and opium, the fortunes he squandered and the young men he ruined. He went mad at last—and the reasons given for his madness are as many and varied as the people who tell the story—and hanged himself in the cupola of his house on Grosvenor Avenue, where his last sight would have been of the city below him. His house now belongs to the city’s most influential judge, who does not welcome sightseers.

  The Three Oaks Cemetery, though sadly neglected, has some of the country’s finest examples of nineteenth-century funerary sculpture. The weeping angel on the tomb of Hester Lyall repays the effort it takes to climb the overgrown path, and the sad, somber dignity of the family group which marks the Addison graves is undiminished by the ivy which twines around their lower bodies. Some long-ago vandal made off with Mrs. Addison’s head, and every St. Valentine’s Day a posy of belladonna is left by persons unknown on the stump of her neck.

  The city has one crematorium, which operates only at the dark of the moon, and what is done with the ashes it is better not to ask.

  singing home the rooks and ravens

  Sean stood at his dorm-room window, staring out at the quad-

  rangle. Behind him on his desk, a poem lay abandoned in the middle of a line. He was thinking about Clair.

  More and more frequently these days, as he tried to work on The Stag of Candles, he found himself thinking about Clair. Her delicate face, her Medusan eyes, came between him and the page, leaching the strength out of his words. He was aware that he was writing less, and what he wrote came harder, and, when it did come, it was feeble, thin, twisting restlessly away from what he wanted it to be.

  It’s Clair, he thought, and although his eyes were looking at the fountain in the quadrangle, mute and desiccated with the winter, and his hands were clenched white-knuckled on the window sill, in his mind he saw only her, felt the silkiness of her hair beneath his fingers. Somehow, in some way he could not describe or explain, he was losing his poetry to her.

  He had felt this, uneasily, not quite consciously, for months; although he could not stay away from her for long, he had been trying to find ways to distract himself from Clair. He had even, in the extremity of his desperation, starting going to open-mike nights at Café Xerxes. Everyone was tremendously impressed with his poems, and although he loathed himself for it, he could not help being flattered, gratified. One of them, hero-worship all over her face, had even made a shy, clumsy, stammering pass at him the week before. He had turned her down, but not unkindly. Bram Bennett was actually a pretty good songwriter, and she was a fierce little Goth; she made a good shield against the talentless and overwrought.

  But no matter how he felt about them, their reaction was so different from Clair’s, the difference between water and salt. Clair let him read his poems to her, the poems that awed the children at Café Xerxes, but her cold indifference was never shaken. And that hurt—it was the slow torture of the rack—but he also knew those poems weren’t his best work. The Stag of Candles was stronger, stranger, unafraid. But he had shown that to no one.

  And he couldn’t stop thinking about Clair. I have to break her spell, he thought. I have to win free, face her as an equal.

  There was an open-mike at Café Xerxes that night. Sean decided he would go and read, and if Bram Bennett was there, maybe he’d buy her a drink. And maybe, when The Stag of Candles was ready, he would give it to Clair to read.

  dead leaves

  The most notorious case of suicide off the Liliard Bridge is that of Mr. Horatio Prynne. On the night of Friday, November second, 1894, dressed in complete and impeccable evening wear, Horatio Prynne started across the Liliard Bridge from the west, stopped at the highest point of the bridge’s arc, set down his cane, removed his hat and overcoat, and without visible distress or hesitation, stepped up to the parapet and leaped off. A cabman witnessed the event and summoned the police; when the body was at last recovered, at two a.m. on Saturday, November third, it was discovered that the deceased was wearing a money belt laden with silver dollars. There was no doubt that his death had been intentional.

  As the Prynnes mourned, the police set about retracing Mr. Prynne’s movements on the last day of his life. He had gone driving with his sister in the morning, and had seemed quite normal. He had lunched with friends, who likewise testified to his calmness and good-humor. He had then gone to visit his fiancée, Miss Lucasta Fremont, and had spent much of the afternoon walking with her in the gardens of the Fremont house on Grosvenor Avenue. Miss Fremont, though prostrated with grief, explained that she and Mr. Prynne had talked of their upcoming wedding and that she had told him details of her family history in which he had expressed an interest. Nothing had occurred to upset or alarm him, and he had left very much in his usual good spirits.

  The Fremont butler remarked that Mr. Prynne had appeared to be in a great hurry.

  At a quarter to five, he walked into the First Municipal Bank on Sheldon Avenue. The bank-teller testified
that Mr. Prynne was “visibly agitated” and “very white about the eyes.” He had withdrawn four hundred dollars from his account and had insisted that the money be given him in silver dollars. The teller counted out the money, and Mr. Prynne took it away.

  That evening he attended the opera with his fiancée, his sister, and his cousin, Mr. Tobias Kingsley. Although Miss Fremont claimed to have noticed no difference in his attitude toward her, Miss Prynne and Mr. Kingsley agreed that he had seemed less attentive to Miss Fremont than usual, and both of them remembered wondering if the couple had quarreled. Mr. Kingsley further testified that on one occasion when Miss Fremont’s hand brushed Mr. Prynne’s shoulder, Mr. Prynne quite visibly flinched. Miss Prynne had not witnessed this awkward moment, and Miss Fremont explained that Mr. Prynne had apologized in the intermission, telling her that he, not expecting the accidental touch, had believed it to be a spider.

  After the opera, the three agreed that Mr. Prynne had mentioned a headache and a desire for fresh air. He told them to return home and that he would take a cab when he was ready. No further witnesses to Mr. Prynne’s actions could be found until he appeared at the west end of the Liliard Bridge at a quarter to midnight.

  Horatio Prynne left no note, and the final verdict was suicide while temporarily unbalanced in his mind. The Telegraph-Clarion described his death as a great loss, both for the Prynnes and for the city, and a custom was established of leaving flowers at the spot from which he had leapt. This custom eroded with time and had ceased entirely by the end of World War II.

  In 1896, Mr. Tobias Kingsley married Miss Lucasta Fremont. The wedding was small and private, but the guests remarked that both Mr. Kingsley and his new wife seemed radiantly happy. They honeymooned quietly in the Kingsleys’ summer home on Lake Michigan. It was when they returned that Tobias Kingsley’s slow decline began. He became quieter and more withdrawn even as his wife, blooming and vivacious, gained a reputation as a sparkling society hostess. Finally in 1905, he was committed to a private rest-home, where he quickly lapsed into catatonia, dying in 1910 at the age of forty-two. The last words he was known to have spoken were to his lifelong friend Mr. Barnaby Munroe, who visited him in the rest-home in the autumn of 1905.