The three of them walked past the wall that displayed dozens of framed photographs recording the hotel’s history and ascended the stairs to the second floor.
“Where are the police?”
“They headed for the main road. A lot of people are going to be running this way. We have to keep them safe.”
“I see. And those monsters, the things like Spiders?”
“Yes, they may use the main road to come here too.”
“I hope it all works out.”
“Now, as for the, uh—”
“The VIP lounge is beyond the casino.”
The large doors paneled with all kinds of colored glass were the entrance to the casino. This had been the planned venue for the chess tournament tonight. The tournament was unlikely to go ahead now, Bernier thought. For one thing, the reigning champion Jules lived in the western town.
Beyond the casino lay the VIP lounge.
A set of heavy double doors, each made from a single sheet of timber. By contrast with the dazzle and glamor of the doors to the casino, these were simple and grave. The lounge had originally been reserved for the most exclusive VIP visitors, but there was no need for that anymore. It was now used for a different purpose.
Denis and Bernier pulled the double doors open.
It was dark inside.
There were no windows.
A few lamps were dotted about the room, but the pools of light they cast were small and weak.
The room looked like a jewelry store. It also resembled a museum exhibiting small examples of crafts. There were rows and rows of glass display cases, just a little taller than waist height, waiting for the things they contained to be appreciated.
And there was someone in there already.
She sat on a small chair in the corner, a woman with a generous physique.
Her hands moved rhythmically as she knitted her lace. But there were no lamps around her. Despite almost no light reaching her part of the room, she was executing some fine needlework. Bernier got the impression that she had been sitting where she was for years.
Yvette Carrière. That was her name.
“Looks like we’re interrupting,” said Denis. “I’m sorry, but something urgent has come up.”
“Not at all,” Yvette said with a gentle smile. “I don’t have to work here. I just prefer it.”
“You find it more calming here?” asked Bastin.
“Oh yes, very much so.”
“No loudmouths, either,” said Bernier, then instantly regretted it. “Uh, I mean …pardon me.”
“Yes, you may be right.” Yvette rose to her feet. “I’ll go back to my workshop.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Bastin.
“Why is that?” asked Yvette.
“It could be dangerous. Also, I think we’re going to need your help.”
Yvette was silent.
“I’ll explain everything,” said Bastin. “Before that, though, I want to check the contents of the room against the inventory.”
Denis opened a large, leather-bound account book.
A list of the items stored in this room.
Glass Eyes.
Glass Eyes by the hundreds, every one a jewel.
The collection in the VIP lounge had been gathered from every corner of the Realm of Summer and selected with exacting care.
“There’s no need to consult the inventory,” Yvette said with a smile.
Her cheeks were the color of milk. Her eyes were chestnut brown. But in her eyes there were no pupils. Just unbroken irises. In the Costa del Número, this was a common technique for indicating blindness through character design.
“I know everything that’s in here,” Yvette continued.
As a Glass Eye user, Yvette was unequaled in the Realm.
“We’re hoping your abilities can help us,” said Bastin.
“I understand a little of what you mean… The eyes have been clamoring all morning. It doesn’t sound like good news.”
“It isn’t.”
Yvette rose to her feet. She filled out her light peach-colored knit summer dress well. She stood with her arms crossed lightly over her chest with the quiet self-confidence and sternness of a nun. Bernier was slightly moved.
“If there’s anything I can do to help,” she said, “I’d be happy to.”
Just then one of the hotel’s employees came apologetically into the lounge and whispered something to Denis.
Denis’s eyes widened slightly. He nodded.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said. “Someone has just arrived at our marina, and I believe you will all be shocked by who it is.”
“What is it, then? Just tell us.”
“A woman, accompanied by her children. They fled here by sea from the west side of town. And it seems that they have brought us a rather horrifying house gift.”
“Just tell us who it is, would you?” said Bernier irritably.
Denis ran his hand back over his light bulb–shaped head.
“It is Miss Anne Cachemaille,” he said. “And she has brought the carcass of a monster.”
The three old women climbed the mountain, dripping with sweat.
Jules and Julie followed closely behind.
They ascended the mountainside, following no path, unable to see through the standing trees and undergrowth.
The old women—although that term would surely anger them; they were still only in their late fifties—all wore dresses with the same garish print, and cut from the same pattern, differing only in color. The women were even shaped identically. They were short, and more or less cylindrical from shoulder to posterior. When they were quiet, they looked like three jars of jam, or perhaps something pickled.
“Look out, you two! Watch your feet or you’ll slip.”
“Watch this—see? Hold on to that as you climb.”
“You have to get into the rhythm, or you’ll never catch your breath.”
The three of them were constantly turning back and scolding Jules and Julia with yellowed voices. Jules and Julia were gasping for breath, barely able to keep up. The women were surprisingly light on their feet for their age.
“It’s about keeping in shape.”
“We eat well, too.”
“And drink our medicinal tea afterward.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right.”
The three of them laughed together. They shared the same laugh.
Whitening hair like sparrows’ nests. Round faces and round-framed glasses. Convex lenses that made their eyes look enormous. They were triplets, and they made a living from selling preserves and embroidering souvenirs and aromatherapy. All three were unmarried. The eldest was Anna, the middle triplet Donna, and the youngest Luna. Naturally, they looked completely identical.
The five of them had left the Catwalk to traverse the mountain directly. There had never been any trails through this area. Jules and Julia didn’t have any idea where they were.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the triplets with a laugh.
“We were playing on this mountain as children, before school.”
“Picking nuts and strawberries.”
“Tending secret flower beds.”
“Filching birds’ eggs.”
“We could get you to the Mineral Springs with our eyes closed.”
“And you did save our lives.”
“Have to pay you back somehow.”
Jules and Julia had found the triplets as they were being attacked by a carbon-black, six-legged Spider. Julia had erased it just as she had erased the one at the Singing Sands.
Earlier, after climbing the cliffs from the beach and returning to the road, Jules and Julia had leapt on their bikes and headed for the east bay. One glance at the sky
had revealed that the Spiders were descending in the west—the direction from which the two of them had come. They had been worried about their homes and parents, but if they were being honest, they were mostly just too terrified to go back. Heading east instead, they had run into the imperiled triplets.
“All that jam I made, gone.”
“And the porcini I dried. What a waste.”
“The last wooden brooch I carved was so nice I didn’t even want to sell it.”
Despite what they said, the triplets did not seem particularly wistful. They just kept climbing at their unfaltering pace. They moved just barely slowly enough for Jules and Julia to keep up, silently but clearly indicating to their young companions the best foot- and handholds to use. The group developed a rhythm as it climbed. Climbing and panting, Jules and Julia were able to forget about the western town, their orchards and homes, and what would come next. Jules realized this halfway up, and was immediately grateful. He also felt a new respect for them.
“Hmm?”
“Eh?”
“Oh?”
Suddenly the triplets stopped moving. They turned their sweaty faces to Jules and Julia. Their glasses were fogged with perspiration.
Jules gazed back at them wordlessly.
“Well, this is a fix,” said one of them. “Looks like we’ve lost our way.”
The plaza in the west bay was where the largest volume of Spiders had fallen. You could hardly ask for a better place to strew with the hunger. The colorful, lively plaza and surrounding streets, the heart of the Realm of Summer, were devoured by the hunger in the blink of an eye.
The Spiders came in so many different forms.
There were Spiders like cars, Spiders like tower cranes, Spiders like two horseshoe crabs joined back-to-back, a legless Spider shaped like three globes connected by a cord (it moved by hurling its globes forward, one after another), and tiny Spiders that danced in the air like petals on the wind.
The variety of textures was also astounding. There were Spiders that seemed to be covered in gold leaf, Spiders that looked like wet potter’s clay, Spiders dusted with tiny jade scales like a butterfly’s wing, and Spiders that might have been carved from discolored teeth.
The two things they had in common were their intangible similarity to the Realm’s maintenance Spiders and the hunger they bore.
That raging hunger quickly reduced the plaza to ruins.
A petal Spider landed on a young girl’s cheek and began eating away at her face while those near her watched. She blinked, and her eyelids were gone; she did not even have time to be surprised before everything from her shoulders up had vanished. Her parents, who had been holding her hands on either side of her, looked down to see that they were now holding one dangling arm each, but before they could scream, everything below their jaws had vanished too.
The clock tower, symbol of Town Hall, succumbed to the tower crane Spider’s jib. Eaten away at the middle, it hung in midair for a moment before slowly toppling sideways.
A Spider like wet clay softened itself and spread over the paving stones, then consumed just the ankles and feet of the AIs who trod on it. Winged Spiders the size of sparrows came to devour the rest of its immobilized victims.
Among the AIs fleeing in confusion was the owner of a bicycle shop, just past middle age—the man who had lent the bikes to Julie.
The store he had run for a thousand and fifty years had been crushed by a hand-shaped Spider bigger than a house. The hand crushed the store in its fist, and each time it squeezed, the lane stretched like taffy, reeled further into the Spider’s grip. The road tilted and yawed. Paving stones popped loose. To avoid getting caught up himself, the man bolted.
To the plaza.
He stopped in his tracks.
Was that a pond of lacquer?
The plaza was gone. It seemed to have vanished into the pond, which was smooth and black and undisturbed by ripples.
Then the man realized: it was a hole. The same as those minor graphical glitches that the bustling maintenance Spiders fixed, only much larger. It occupied the entire space where the plaza had once been. Its sharp edges came right up to the end of the lane he stood on.
The paving stones under his feet began to ripple. The hand-shaped Spider was catching up.
But the bicycle shop owner could not look away from the hole—from what he saw at its center. What he saw was beyond comprehension.
A young man was floating at the center of the hole, as if standing on a pitch-black skating rink. The young man raised a little Spider on the back of his hand to his lips to kiss it, then looked at the bicycle shop owner.
The young man’s lips were moving.
Suddenly the bicycle shop man heard a voice in his ear.
It was his own name.
How does he know my name?
The bicycle shop man did not know who the youth was.
This stunned him.
This Realm had been running for more than a thousand years. He knew every AI in it.
Which meant that the youth was not from this Realm.
Who—where—another … ?
An instant later, the bicycle shop man disappeared into the hunger at his back.
The liveliest part of the Realm, with the plaza at its center, was by now almost completely eaten away.
Watching Anne scramble up from the boat’s deck with her adopted children, Bernier was unable to say a word. He was too busy holding back his tears to speak. Anne was filthy, dripping with a viscous, half-dried fluid and cradling her eldest child’s lifeless body in her arms. Why the image came to him at the time Bernier could not say, but it occurred to him that she looked as if someone had dumped a bucket of semen over her. He felt as if his own daughter had met with this treatment, and could not maintain his composure.
For all intents and purposes Anne was his daughter. Her father had been secretary at Town Hall and a drinking companion of Bernier’s, so he had known her since she was a newborn. Even back then, he recalled, she had been strikingly big and very healthy.
By the age of six, all the boys her age deferred to her as their boss.
There was no one in town who didn’t know about her fight with Jaco. He was a little hoodlum five years her senior, and she had laid him out almost immediately. Bernier had been astonished to learn then that her forearms had already been tattooed. By twelve she had lost her father, and from then on she ignored her mother to instead devote herself to mischief with the gang of bad seeds—including Jaco, and some boys even older than him—that were her henchmen.
Bernier had called her into Town Hall and given her a stern talking-to.
“When I turn fifteen, I’ll get work on the boats and support my ma. The pile my pa left behind should be enough to feed her until then. As for me, I can earn my own bread myself.”
Bernier knew well that whatever “bread” she earned was takings from games that amounted to gambling, but the manly glint in her eyes persuaded him to let it go.
At fifteen Anne joined a fishing crew, just as she had said she would. Telling her gang that as of the following morning she’d be a fisher, leaving them free to do as they pleased, she went cap in hand to the roughest captain on the docks. People still talked about how red Jaco’s eyes had been when he came to watch her leave harbor for the first time.
“That was unrequited love and no mistake,” Bastin said fondly, years later. “The—what’s the word?—anguish in Jaco’s face! I’ll never forget it. But you know how Anne is. I don’t think she even noticed.”
Bernier caught Anne in a hug. He had noticed the tear tracks on her cheeks. Her tears were dry now, though. She had cried herself out on the boat.
“Got a house gift for you,” she said.
“So I see.”
The Spider’s carcass was stretched out on the boat’s deck.
“You’ll find a use for it, right?”
“Absolutely,” said Bernier. “Absolutely.”
“I want to lay my little girl down somewhere too,” said Anne. “My, uh …my arms are about at the limit.”
“One thing about this place: they don’t lack for beds.”
“And I want a cup of coffee so strong it could blow your ass out.”
“About a trough’s worth sound good?”
“Might not be enough.” Anne showed her long teeth for the first time. Bernier doubted even she knew whether it was a smile or not.
“You need to get some rest too,” Bernier said.
Anne looked at him in surprise. It was clear from her expression that she hadn’t expected to hear that from him. Bernier felt as if he had somehow made a faux pas.
“Why?” she asked.
He knew that tone of voice, those eyes. They were the same as when she had faced down eleven-year-old Jaco at the age of six.
At the time, Anne and her gang had adopted a kitten as a kind of mascot. Anne would do the rounds of the fishmongers every night with an empty can, asking politely for something for the cat (rather than just swiping it, as she did to ease her own hunger pangs).
When Jaco took the kitten and threw it into the sea to drown, Bernier had tried to comfort Anne. That was the first time he had seen what was in her eyes now.
Anne had no intention of getting any sort of rest.
“Hey,” she said, as if suddenly remembering something. “Where’s José?”
She was conscious. She could see the light.
But she couldn’t make out anything more.
Her eyes couldn’t recognize anything they saw as an object with meaning.
A fit of panic had shredded Odette’s bodily senses and cognitive function. Her identity was in disarray.
She heard a voice calling her, but whether it was a student, one of her parents, or a guest come as her husband she did not know.
Despite her ragged breathing, she felt suffocated. Her heart beat out an irregular pulse.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 6
