Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

by Sarah Monette

  Fortinbras says, “Show me.”

  The Danes do not quite know what to make of Fortinbras: the child of their old king’s enemy, but a strong man, a man for whom decisions are easy, policy is clear. After the short and serpentine rule of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, Fortinbras comes as a relief to the court of Denmark. The soldiers and common people are only grateful that perhaps this winter they will not have to die.

  I wear black now, as Hamlet did. The court ignores me, as they ignored Hamlet. In Elsinore, if you do not want to see something, then you do not see it. It explained so much about Hamlet to me, when I came to Elsinore: the frenetic brilliance of his wit, his hunger for attention, the way he would touch me, a light pat on shoulder or cheek, just to get me to turn and look at him. He was not the child his father had wanted, and I could imagine him becoming steadily more outrageous as he grew up, constantly devising new schemes to get his father and his father’s court to acknowledge his existence.

  I am not Hamlet. I do not care if the court notices me or not. I wear black for grief; I wear black for him.

  I bring flowers to Ophelia’s grave.

  I hated her.

  Hated her doe eyes and her little soft grasping hands. Hated her for being able to flirt, demurely, with Hamlet when I could do nothing but stand to one side and watch. The loyal friend.

  And I hated her because she loved him. I hated her for her pain, her grief. I hated her for going mad. And I hated her most of all for dying. I stood, the loyal friend, and watched Hamlet leap into her grave. Later, I held him while he cried, neither of us knowing that he had less than a day to live. I kissed his tear-damp cheeks and told him I loved him and knew he did not hear me.

  If she had risen from her grave in front of us, I would have killed her myself.

  I bring her flowers because she loved him, because she died for him. Because he would not let me do the same.

  I should leave. I know I should leave. Fortinbras has a country to rule, an uncle to placate. He would not stop me, though he would not help me, either. But if I leave Elsinore . . . I cannot go back to Wittenberg, where every hallway, every street corner, will have some memory of Hamlet as he was. I could not protect that bright Hamlet from his father’s dark hand. I cannot face Wittenberg without him. And I have no family, no kin, no place where I can truthfully say I belong. I hoped when I came to Elsinore that it might prove to be such a place, that because it was Hamlet’s home, it might become my home as well. But Hamlet died in Elsinore, died of Elsinore. It will never be my home.

  But I cannot leave. I cannot leave the pain, the cold, the darkness and the damp and the constant stench of death. I cannot leave Fortinbras, for at least he notices that I am alive.

  I want to be haunted. I go up to the battlements at midnight, slipping out of the new king’s bed. The sentries eye me warily and skirt wide. The wind scours the tears from my face, but I taste them at back of my throat, bitter as graveyard dirt.

  I stand there until dawn, waiting, but he does not come.

  The World Without Sleep

  I. In the Night City

  In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep; one of my earliest memories is of my nurse telling me that if I did not go to sleep, the goblins would get me, and of waiting all that night for the goblins to appear. They did not, of course, but even so I am not sure that she was wrong.

  I have always been an insomniac, but in that January ‘insomniac’ itself began to feel like the wrong word. When I slept at all, in sporadic cat naps lasting between fifteen minutes and an hour, my dreams would be vividly senseless, and I would be plagued with images from them for hours afterwards. The other archivists and curators remarked uneasily on my bloodshot eyes and bruise-dark eye sockets; I said truthfully that I often had trouble sleeping, and they left me alone.

  I could not sleep between midnight and dawn. It was not even worth the effort, and I grew to loathe my bedroom, then to loathe the study, the living room . . . Finally, desperate for peace of mind even if I could not rest, on the last Friday in January, I put on my coat and went walking. If I was robbed or assaulted or murdered, I felt vaguely that it would be no more than I deserved.

  But this quarter of the city was antique and genteel; not only were there no miscreants abroad, there was no one at all, no one but me. The only sound was the echoing of my footsteps; the only lights were the street lamps. No one else was awake; they slept the sleep of the just and innocent. Like Satan in the Garden of Eden, I looked at their darkened windows and was consumed with envy.

  I paid no attention to the routes I took, nor to how far I went. Some part of my mind, better regulated than the rest, seemed always to contrive that I should return to my own front door around dawn, so that I could shower, shave, sleep soddenly for three quarters of an hour, and eat breakfast before going to work. One afternoon in early February, I found myself doodling the hubristic Gothic outline of the Nicodemus Kent Building on my desk blotter and realized hollowly that I must have walked halfway across the city the night before. And yet I had no memories of leaving my own neighborhood, no recollections of the poorer neighborhoods, the financial district, the massive Mycenaean bulk of the Public Water Utility, which I must have passed to reach the Kent Building. Could I in fact be sleeping even as I walked?

  The idea was so unsettling that I very nearly locked myself into my apartment that night. But I could not stand the oppressive familiarity of the patterns made by the shadows on the floors, the relentless ability of my ears to catalogue every strange sound the building made in the deep watches of the night. I decided instead to choose a goal and to pay attention as I walked, to prove to myself that I was not slipping into some unnatural fugue state in my perambulations. I further decided that I would walk to the Public Water Utility; it was an achievable goal, and even in the darkness, it was readily recognizable as itself.

  I felt better for having formulated a plan, even a plan as ultimately meaningless as that one. I set out into the nighttime streets, feeling a certain cautious optimism that I could at least contend with this piece of the wider and apparently insoluble problem that beset me.

  I became lost.

  In itself, I do not suppose this is either alarming or surprising. My sense of direction is not particularly acute, and in their dark desolation, the streets of the city all looked remarkably similar. Against this stood the fact that I had known where I was going and that it was a walk I had taken before in daylight. I confess to a certain morbid affection for the Public Water Utility, surely the most graceless piece of civic architecture in America. And, paying attention or otherwise, I had become accustomed to the city’s nocturnal streets; they no longer seemed unfathomable to me.

  And yet I was lost. The buildings did not look familiar; the street signs, when I found them, were for streets named BOULEVARD DE LA LUNE, NYX PLACE, UMBRA ROAD—streets which I had never seen before in my life, and I was born in this city.

  “I must be asleep,” I said to myself, muttering under my breath simply for the comfort of hearing my own voice. I did not believe it, but there seemed no other explanation, no other method by which I could have walked out my apartment door into a city of such absolute unfamiliarity. If I was dreaming, I reasoned—tenuously and uncomfortably—then I must have been dreaming all those previous nights, and the best strategy for finding my way out of the dream was to do what I had done before. I had an uneasy sense that there was a fallacy somewhere in that piece of logic, but I turned down Umbra Road because standing by myself under the street sign was becoming increasingly nerve-wracking, and I knew I was in danger of beginning to imagine that things were watching me from the shadows.

  I decided to keep walking as if I could come to the Public Water Utility, hoping that I might wake up when I arrived there, or that my failure to do so would somehow shake me out of this frightening maze. I knew I would not find it, and so I d
o not know the right words to express my complete bewilderment when I did.

  There it was, looming out of the darkness like a prehistoric temple idol, its entryway looking as always like the lowered head of a bull before the monstrous bulk of the main building. It was incontrovertibly the Public Water Utility.

  And yet I was standing on the sidewalk of—I walked to the corner to check the street sign—Artemis Street, and I knew as well as I knew my own name that the Public Works Utility brooded over the south side of Fairlie Road between Jackson and Godolphin. Artemis Street at this point claimed that it crossed Nocturne Street.

  I sat down, quite without meaning to, at the base of the signpost. It is one thing to suspect yourself of going mad; it is another thing entirely to discover that your suspicions are correct.

  I wondered drearily what would happen if I sat here until dawn. Would I wake up in my own bed? Would I wake up at the corner of Fairlie and Jackson? Would I not wake up at all, but find myself admiring the sunrise from Artemis and Nocturne? Each option seemed more repellant than the last.

  It was at that nadir in my thoughts that I noticed the light. In all the vast darkness of this city, there was one light burning. I surged to my feet and started toward the light.

  I walked a block and a half down Nocturne Street and found myself opposite a church. The light came from a lamp hung over its doorway. The church was brick and homely, and as I climbed the steps, I saw it was dedicated to St. Christopher, patron saint of ferrymen, protector against floods, fires, earthquakes . . . and bad dreams. When I tried the door, it was unlocked. I pulled it open and went in.

  The interior of the church was a great, gloomy vault. I realized after a moment’s bewilderment that it was not fitted for electricity; the only light came from candles, in sconces on the walls, crowning great candelabra on the altar, offered as votives in the two chapels that flanked the nave. I could see stalagmites of wax beginning on the floor beneath the sconces that flanked the front door.

  I was still standing, unable either to sum up the courage to penetrate farther into the tremendous darkness of the church or to maintain the resolve to turn and walk out again, when a voice called, “Is someone there?”

  It came from near the altar; seeing movement, I realized that what I had taken for a deeper patch of shadow was a man, now in the act of getting to his feet from the first row of backless pews. At first I could not make sense of his shape, but then he moved into the light and I saw that he was winged, marble-white feathers rustling softly from his shoulders to his heels.

  “You need not fear,” he said, starting down the aisle. “Our doors are left unlocked for a reason.”

  As he came closer, I saw that he was a young man—probably four or five years younger than I—and that his resemblance to a marble angel in a cemetery did not end with his wings. He had the high forehead with the bar across the supraorbital ridge, the straight, patrician nose, the proportionally weaker mouth and chin, which nonetheless held an expression of great gentleness and sweetness. His skin was alabaster pale; his hair, curly and overlong, was tow-colored. As he passed through a puddle of candlelight, I saw the final, capping, dreadful resemblance: his wide-set eyes were blank, perfectly white, like the eyes of a classical statue whose colors have been washed away by centuries of rain.

  “Are you an angel?” I blurted.

  His laugh was enchanting, self-deprecating and rueful. “A demi-angel, only. But you cannot be one of my parishioners.”

  “No, I beg your pardon. I did not mean . . . that is, I am . . . ” I hesitated, and decided on the stark truth. “I am lost.”

  “Lost,” he said thoughtfully, as if the word had some deeper meaning of which I was unaware. “Will you come sit down and tell me? The nights are long and lonely here, and I,” and his lips curved in a gentle smile, “I am unquenchably curious about travellers in our city.”

  “I . . . I’m not . . . that is, I don’t think I am a, er, a traveller. I’m just lost.”

  “All the more reason to speak to me,” he said. “Perhaps I can help you become found again. I am Clement, the dominie of St. Christopher’s.”

  “My name is Kyle Murchison Booth,” I said.

  Clement found a pew with a light sweep of his right hand. He sat, his wings wrapping round him like a cloak, leaving space for me; I sat beside him. He smelled of vanilla and nutmeg. His hands, folded restfully in his lap, were as beautiful as his face, long-fingered and smooth. I clasped my own hands, with their knobby joints and chapped knuckles and ink-stained fingertips, between my knees, and told Clement as best I could about my insomnia and my walks and the strange city I now found myself in. He listened without any trace of restlessness or impatience, although his feathery brows drew together slightly as my tale unfolded.

  “Do you know, er, the other city?” I said. “Have you heard of Fairlie Road?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I feared as much.”

  “But it is possible that I can help you all the same. If you will help me in return.”

  “I will do anything I can,” I said, knowing it was rash, but also knowing that I did not have a choice in any meaningful sense of the word.

  Clement smiled at me radiantly. “It is not as difficult as your voice suggests you fear. But it is most desperately important. You see, the goblins have stolen St. Christopher’s Glass.”

  “St. Christopher’s . . . I’m sorry. I, er . . . ”

  “It is our relic.”

  “Relic.” I supposed it was foolish of me to be surprised. Clearly the boundary between this nightmare city and the waking world was all too permeable; if random persons such as myself could cross, why not the remains of saints?

  “It’s a glass ball, about the size of my thumb joint. Warm to the touch. It contains one of St. Christopher’s tears, and the sunlight reflected in it.”

  “It . . . I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand you.”

  “This is the night city,” Clement said, his beautiful face sad. “We have no sun. It is why the vampires are so strong.”

  “Vampires? You, er, do mean the blood-drinking sort, not some other of which I am unaware?”

  “They leave the city at moonrise to hunt. I am told it is terrible to witness.”

  “I’m sure,” I said faintly.

  “The city is theirs, you see. The shadows are their thralls, and we cannot travel without protection.”

  After a moment, I realized that his ‘we’ was the demi-angels. “Are you all blind, then?”

  A tactless question, but he did not seem to notice. “Yes. We stay in our churches, where the vampires cannot come, and do what we can to help the shadows.” His wings drooped as his shoulders slumped. “Sadly, it isn’t much.”

  “Why can’t one of these, er, shadows go after your relic?”

  “The vampires would notice their absence,” he said, seeming shocked that I had to ask. “They are very strict overseers.”

  “Ah. And you—the demi-angels—cannot go because of your blindness, and it’s obviously useless to ask the vampires.”

  “Oh, they mustn’t know it’s gone,” Clement said earnestly. “It’s the only thing that keeps them in check at all.”

  He had boxed me in very neatly with the solution he wanted, although I did not think, looking at that beautiful, gentle face, that he was aware of his own manipulation. “Very well,” I said, although I could not quite repress a sigh. “I hope that you can at least tell me where I must go.”

  “Shift ends very shortly, and the shadows are allowed an hour before they have to sign the registers of their dormitories. One of them will show you the way. But, please, I would hear more of your city, if you would tell me.”

  It would have been difficult to resist his shy entreaty, and I reflected that I would probably get more useful information from the shadows. So, shy myself, I told Clement about the museum, and the neighborhoods I walked in on the weekends; the library, the zoo, the Alethea Wing Parrington Botanical Gardens
. I described the Nicodemus Kent Building and the Public Water Utility, and the city’s other architectural marvels, both the beautiful and the grotesque, and some that were both. I told him about the Resurrection Hill Cemetery, where my ancestors were buried, and a little about the old, gracious neighborhood in which I had spent my childhood. I described the city to him as I knew it, and both of us became wide-eyed as children with the wonder of it. I managed to forget so thoroughly where I was and what was being asked of me that I jumped and flinched when the church door opened, and a voice called, “Dominie Clement?” It was a soft voice, a little asthmatic, indeterminate as to sex.

  “In the nave, my child. Come here, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  The patter of bare feet, and I turned to watch the shadow come into the church proper. It was child-sized, very pale, limbs long in proportion to the torso, giving it an unpleasantly spidery appearance. It wore its pale, cobwebby hair scraped into a topknot, which looked incongruously savage juxtaposed with the sober, tidy laborer’s clothes. The face was unremarkable next to Clement’s beauty, the eyes large and dark and much inclined to blink.

  They blinked at me, puzzled and reproachful, and the shadow said, “’Oo—Who is this?”

  “Is that you, D-7-16? This is Mr. Booth, who has very kindly agreed to retrieve St. Christopher’s Glass for us.”

  The look of alarm had to be due to the goggle-eyed blinking, I decided, for D-7-16—if that was indeed the creature’s name—said, “That’s very nice of you, sir,” and sounded sincere and even eager.

  “Mr. Booth is a stranger to our city,” Clement said, “so I need you to show him the way to the Goblin Door.”

  “It’ll have to be now, sir.”

  “Yes, I know. D-7-16 will take good care of you, Mr. Booth.”