Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

by Sarah Monette

  I looked at the blinking eyes, the sly thin-lipped mouth, and was not so sure. But there did not seem to be any way I could say so; therefore, I got up—this time the blinking was definitely in alarm, as D-7-16 backed hastily away from my gangling height—and said, “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will succeed,” Clement said, almost gaily. “The goblins are nasty little brutes, but they’re not really dangerous.”

  How would you know? inquired an unpleasant voice in my head, but I bit my tongue and did not say it.

  “This way, sir, please,” said D-7-16, making urging motions without actually approaching me. “There’s not much time.”

  I wished I had a better option, but I did not. I followed D-7-16.

  The night city, as Clement called it, was not less unheimlich for having a companion. D-7-16 padded unspeaking on long pale feet, only nodding in a self-important manner at the other shadows we met or passed. They were all indistinguishable to my eyes, with their pale topknots and subfusc clothes and fish-like blinking eyes. And no less so when the street lamps were lit, as they were by other shadows, just as pale and goggling—though I could not tell if the lamps were meant to signify day or night.

  I felt terribly tall and awkward and out of place—which differed from my waking life, I supposed, only in that no one here would expect me to feel otherwise. The thought was queerly emboldening. I said to D-7-16, “Do all shadows have, er, names like yours?”

  The blink this time was clearly contemptuous. “That isn’t my name.”

  “Oh. I beg your pardon. Then, er . . . ”

  “It’s my designation. Factory D, seventh level, technician sixteen.”

  “Oh. And your real name?”

  “The vampires have that,” D-7-16 said, sounding scandalized that I would feel it necessary to ask.

  “The vampires have your name?”

  “Shhh!” D-7-16 said, rather frantically. “Never know who’s listening.” But oddly—for I knew it did not like me any better than I liked it—it must have wanted to answer my question, for it said, “It’s why we work for them. Earning our names back.”

  “But how did they get your names in the first place?” I was wondering if I had been mistaken in what type of vampires these were. Onomastic vampires?

  “Protection,” D-7-16 said. “We give ’em our names when we’re born, and they protect us from the dragons. And we can earn our names back working in the factories—as adults, of course.”

  I firmly put aside the temptation to ask about shadow child-labor laws. “And, er, what happens when you do?”

  “The dominies have a system. We give them part of our wages every month, and whenever anybody buys their name back, the dominies take money out of the kitty and buy ’em passage on a ship to Heft Averengh.”

  I was about to ask if that happened very often when D-7-16 stopped short. “If I go any farther, I shan’t get back in time to sign the book. Just keep following Clair, though—”and it jabbed a long skinny finger at a sign proclaiming this to be CLAIR STREET—“and you can’t miss it.” And it bolted like a rabbit, not so much as pausing to wish me good luck.

  But when I turned to continue in the indicated direction, I saw why D-7-16 had been in such a hurry and cursed it as not only a rude and sullen rabbit, but a cowardly one as well.

  It must have smelled the vampire coming.

  I cannot describe the vampires of the night city in any way that will truly convey the experience of meeting one. To begin with, the miasma that surrounds them if one gets too close—a stench of blood both fresh and very old, compounded by a cloying reek of roses that I guess to be the scent of the vampires themselves—is like nothing I have ever encountered, before or since.

  They are somewhat like the demi-angels in shape, being tall and well proportioned and winged. And they are pale-skinned, pale-haired: albino.

  But their wings are the naked leathery span of the bat, and their faces, too, have nothing that is human or beautiful about them.

  Round faces, almost chinless, with a nose that is nothing more than nostrils, and a lipless inverted V slash of a mouth, the sharp teeth plainly visible with every word spoken. They eyes are round and bright, very red and very old.

  I yelped at finding myself face to face with such a creature, the yelp only not a scream because the stench of roses and blood choked me; the vampire winced, its hands going up as if to protect its ears, and said in a lovely, perfectly modulated mezzo-soprano, with only the slightest trace of a lisp, “I beg your pardon. I did not mean to startle you.”

  Somewhat incoherently, I begged pardon in return, chiding myself inwardly for being surprised that such an ugly creature should be female. But I could not help it: I was surprised, as if her sex ought to make her exempt, as if something that hideous could only be male.

  She said, “You are a stranger here, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  Her head tilted, and her mouth moved in an expression that I thought was intended as a smile. “And let me guess. Dominie Clement has talked you into going after that tiresome relic for him.”

  The expression on my face made her laugh, and if her voice was beautiful, yet her laugh was the shrieking, tittering noise her bat-like physiognomy suggested. The passing shadows, all of whom were carefully on the other side of the street, covered their ears and walked faster.

  “But please,” said the vampire, collecting herself. “I forget my manners.” She extended her hand, very long and very white, and the fingers plainly tipped with claws, not nails. “This is the correct observance? And we tell each other our names.”

  “Only if I won’t have to pay to get mine back,” I said.

  “Your name is entirely safe,” she promised, and for some mad reason I believed her.

  It required a considerable effort of will to take her hand. But her skin was warm, her palm furry against mine, and she was very careful of her claws, so that I felt only the slightest tickling scratch against my wrist. “Kyle Murchison Booth,” I said.

  “Mirach,” she said in return, and I hoped I hid my relief adequately when she released my hand. “That is a most charming ritual.”

  “I, er, that is, I’m glad you find it so.”

  “And it means we are not enemies,” she said triumphantly, “so you need not fear any longer that I will bite you.” For one heart-stopping second, she bared her teeth at me, as sharp as if they’d been filed, and I knew she could have torn my throat out in a single snapping mouthful of blood and skin and gristle. And then she relaxed and stepped slightly away from me, and after a moment I was able to relax, too. Infinitesimally.

  “Come,” said Mirach. “Walk with me.”

  I was not certain whether it was invitation or command, but it seemed wiser to obey, regardless. I followed the vampire through a wrought-iron gate, out of which she must have emerged to intercept me, down a long, wide spiral of stairs circling a great empty space like a ballroom in which no one had ever danced, and then through another gate and onto a brick-paved promenade beside a river which, after one glance, I tried not to look at too closely. There were others strolling along the river-walk, but they were vampires, and they did not approach us.

  Presently, Mirach said, “The dominies still think we don’t know, don’t they?”

  “Er, yes . . . how do you know?”

  “This is our city. Very little happens in it that we are not aware of. And the dominies are transparently bad liars.”

  I thought of Clement’s beautiful, expressive face, and nodded my understanding.

  “They also trust the shadows to keep their secrets, and shadows do not keep secrets, Kyle Murchison Booth. They whisper to each other all day long in the factories, whisper whisper whisper like mice in the wainscotting, and what they whisper to each other, sooner or later, one of them will whisper to us. An increase in status, a bonus for the week . . . they fear us, and they will tell you they hate us, but they whisper their secrets to us all the same.�
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  “You don’t seem, er, terribly perturbed about the loss of the relic.”

  “Why should we be? And, yes, Kyle Murchison Booth, I do speak for my siblings in this. It is distasteful to us, this relic, and goblins love bright things. They mean no harm and will do no harm.”

  “Then you’ve, er, come to stop me?”

  “I came to meet you. The dominies are not the only ones who are insatiably curious about travellers from far lands. And, no, I shall not prevent you from going through the Goblin Door.”

  I struggled with it, but in the end said humbly, “I don’t understand.”

  “Let us sit,” said Mirach, indicating a wooden bench beside the promenade. I was not entirely comfortable with the proximity to her this plan entailed, but she had promised not to bite me, and therefore I felt I had no valid grounds for complaint. I sat.

  She sank down gracefully beside me—like the pews in the church, the bench was backless—and after some moments of breathing carefully through my mouth, I began to acclimate to her appalling scent. I do not know if she could tell I was on the verge of asphyxiation, or if she merely needed time to order her thoughts, but it was not until I was breathing more normally that she began to speak.

  “I said that the dominies are bad liars, and they are. But they are very skilled at something which is not lying, but which obscures the truth just as surely.

  “What a dominie does not wish to see is not seen.”

  “But—”

  “I am not speaking literally, although we have sometimes wondered, we vampires, if their physical blindness is a punishment for this other, willful blindness. We are predators, Kyle Murchison Booth. We see clearly whether we wish to or not. But the dominies were blind when we met them. We do not know if our story is true—or merely a story.”

  “What is it that, er, the dominies do not wish to see?”

  “This city,” said Mirach and gestured with her long, white, horrible hands. “They imagine that it is we who rule, the shadows who toil for our pleasure, and they themselves, the dominies, our helpless, passive captives, who do what they can to help the shadows and resist our evil. Yes?”

  It was a not inaccurate summation of what Clement had told me; I nodded.

  “The truth is that without the dominies, the shadows would have revolted against us long ago.”

  I gaped at her; like an animal’s her face was expressionless except when she remembered to contort it, and her round red eyes gazed back at me somberly.

  “It is the dominies who teach the shadows to be patient, the dominies who assure them their service will be rewarded. The dominies taught the shadows how to dream, and it is that above all that keeps them obedient.”

  “You are cynical,” I managed.

  She shrugged magnificently, a gesture that involved her wings as well as her shoulders. “We are vampires. What else could we be?”

  “But you don’t tell the dominies.” For I did not doubt that the vampires could make the demi-angels see this truth, if they chose to.

  “We love the dominies. Though we are cynics. Though they call us monsters. We would not make them unhappy for all the worlds we know. And thus,” and she thought to smile, although the expression was no less disturbing the second time, and I wished she had not, “if Clement wants to send you clandestinely to retrieve his unpleasant little toy, we shall not stop you.”

  “Um,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “It seemed unkind to let you continue fearing us and our potential intervention,” she said, answering a question I had not succeeded in articulating. “We decided we could trust you not to hurt the dominies.”

  “Thank you,” I said, with greater assurance. However they had decided I was not a practitioner of pointless cruelty, I was ridiculously glad to have the vampires think well of me.

  “Very well then,” said Mirach, rising in a single fluid motion. “I will escort you to the Goblin Door. I would accompany you further, but if I did, you would never see so much as a single goblin fingertip. They remember the days when we used to hunt them.”

  I opened my mouth to ask what the vampires hunted now, then thought better of it. I was afraid that if I asked, she would tell me.

  Other vampires watched as we walked, their eyes reflecting the lamplight in flat red disks, and Mirach murmured their names to me: Sadalsuud and Taraapoz, Suhail and Nashira and Menkalinam.

  “Why did you meet me, and not one of them?”

  “We have demesnes—parishes—just as the dominies do, although they would be appalled to learn that we have borrowed their word. Clement is a dominie of my parish; thus my interest was judged greatest. My brother Alhaior was most displeased. He has actually been to your world once—or to what he thinks was your world—and he had a great many questions he wished to ask.”

  “Er,” I said. But the mention of ‘your world’ had reminded me, and I asked: “Do you think the dominies can truly send me back? To, er, my world, that is?”

  “If they cannot, we can take you,” Mirach said, clearly regarding the matter as one of no importance, and I stopped in my tracks as if she had shut a door in my face. “You can take me? Then why—?”

  “Please, Kyle Murchison Booth,” Mirach said, her face screwed up in a wince, “moderate the loudness of your voice.”

  I apologized, but stuck to my point: “If you can return me to my world, why am I going on this . . . this treasure hunt?”

  “Because Clement wants his relic back, and I cannot retrieve it for him myself.”

  There was something terribly stark in the way she said it, an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of the vampires’ love for the demi-angels, and at the same time a resolute dignity that rejected pity. I apologized again, and she waved it away, the graceful gesture of her left arm echoed by an equally graceful gesture of her left wing.

  “We are exploiting you,” she said, and I knew beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that if I asked her what she preyed on, and if she reveled in its death, she would answer me with truth. “You have reason to be upset.”

  We had reached the end of the promenade, ascending back to street level by means of a corkscrew stair, iron and rusting. Mirach let me out through a turnstile and said, “There, across the street, is the Goblin Door.”

  I would not have known it without her guidance, and I wondered again just how eager D-7-16 truly was to have St. Christopher’s Glass returned. It was the sort of door any small commercial establishment might have, wood-framed glass with brass fittings, and a neat brass plaque saying PUSH. I noticed as we approached that the lower portion of the glass was smudged and smeared, as if with the fingerprints of small children—also that, indubitably, Mirach cast a reflection. Her mirrored image was, if anything, more hideous than her physical self, for it looked like a waxwork, some Gothic marionette given animation without life.

  I turned my head with a jerk, almost a wince, and Mirach said softly, “You cannot travel through mirrors if you can meet your own eyes in them.”

  “Is that how you move between worlds?”

  “One way,” she said, with a hard carelessness that told me further questions would be futile. “But your way lies through the door, Kyle Murchison Booth, not the mirror. Someone will be waiting to guide you to St. Christopher’s when you return.”

  For a weak, childish moment, I wanted to beg her to be here herself, but I throttled the impulse grimly and said merely, “Thank you.”

  I did succumb to the urge to extend my hand again; her head tilted, and she said with great interest, “It is appropriate at parting also?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am charmed,” she said, and clearly was. We shook hands; it was easier by far to touch her than to look at her, though I had never imagined finding myself in a situation where I could say that truthfully. But her touch was like the touch of an animal, not like the touch of another person.

  Then she turned, drifting across the street with her easy, unhurried stride, and I took the deepest
breath my nervousness would allow and pushed open the Goblin Door.

  II. Through the Goblin Door

  I had had a nanny until I was five years old. I remembered her scent more clearly than anything else: a warm sweetness of rose water and cornstarch. She had seemed a giantess to the child I had been, though doubtless I would tower over her now. She had been wide-hipped, soft-bosomed, her hands small and chapped. Her name was Martha Mulcahy.

  And I remembered her stories about goblins. They were her method of discipline; as an adult I could see their crude manipulation, the meretricious effects she achieved by playing on a child’s gullibility. But that knowledge, that adult awareness, did very little to dull my childhood fear. The goblins ate naughty children’s eyeballs, Martha Mulcahy had told me. They were attracted by the sound of children crying, and would pinch them black and blue. And, of course, they stole children who would not go to sleep. What they did with the children then, Martha Mulcahy had never said, but my imagination had had no difficulty in filling in the gaps.

  And all those stories, her cautionary tales and my own fevered imaginings, were crowding back now. Neither Mirach nor Clement had seemed to consider the goblins a threat, but of them, one was blind, reclusive, and naïve, and the other was a vampire and doubtless had a skewed perspective on the whole notion of ‘threat.’ Though I was sure they had both been truthful according to their lights, I did not feel their opinions could be trusted.

  The Goblin Door had opened onto a marble foyer, a trough worn down the center of the floor between the door and the head of the stairs with their flanking Corinthian columns. I was finally free of the reek of vampire; the foyer, and the stairs as I started down them, smelt of cool stone and dust, slightly of water and more strongly of the earthy musk that had to be the scent of goblins.

  The stairs were broad and shallow, with the same trough worn down the middle. I descended carefully, holding onto the banister, and realized with a sinking sensation of doom that I should have asked Mirach for some sort of light.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped, unable to pry my fingers off the reassuring marble weight of the banister, and there I stood, as if turned to stone, while around me the darkness settled and deepened. I knew I had to move, even if it was only to go back up the stairs and beg someone for a flashlight or a lantern or a torch, but I had reached the end of my capacity for action; I stood and clung and quailed hopelessly at embarking on any course I could think of.