Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  Leaving Rosie Rightly hunched on the low hill, hands clasped over the radiant wounds on her wrists, painted head bowed, Beatrice descended.

  The incline had quickened her pace, or perhaps it was her body that seemed to grow lighter. The stone elephants were the first beautiful things Beatrice had seen in the Big Bah-Ha. Regal and welcoming, they seemed to smile. They made her stand straighter and remember one of Dad’s favorite words. Dignity. Right up to the mirror she walked, patting a huge hoof nail on her way, and stared into it.

  At first she saw only a crack. It was small, a golden ribbon against the gray. Dancing light reached out from the crack and tickled her face like a breeze. It gladdened her eyes, made her skin feel a flush of true warmth. She wanted to put her mouth to the crack and suck the joy all the way into her. Put her ear to it and hear Dad’s voice again. Because he would be there, where the gold was. She knew he would.

  But Beatrice thought, No. I must focus. I must look at myself. So she took a half step back.

  And cried out at the dead thing she saw.

  She was really, truly dead. Cold, small, lightless, breathless, heartless, quenched. Indistinguishable from anything else that had ever lived and died. There was nothing luminous about her except the ugly red handprint mantling her gray face like some hellish lobster. Beatrice scratched it. She scraped and clawed, but the handprint would not come off, and Beatrice fell to her knees and covered her eyes so that she would not have to bear herself, her dead self, her never-to-be-anything-else-ever-again self, one second longer.

  A gentle hand touched her shoulder. It’s Dad, she thought, and flung herself into his arms. She pressed her face into his silver scales, sobbing without tears.

  “Oh,” she said a moment later, edging away. “Sorry.”

  “Do not be ashamed,” the creature answered. “I am here to succor you.”

  “You’re the Gray Harlequin.”

  “Yes.”

  Slim and supple as the Flabberghast, not quite as tall perhaps, but tall enough. Skin that glittered as if a million silver sequins overlapped him. A black velvet ribbon wrapped the upper part of his face like a bandit mask—only it had no slits for eyes.

  Beatrice wasn’t sure he had eyes, although she felt certain he was watching her. A cloth of diaphanous saffron silk wound his body like a toga, clasped at his left shoulder by a glass bird that glowed from the white light inside it, and knotted into a saffron rose at his right hip. The rest billowed to his feet.

  The crown upon his brow was part thorn, part berry, part leaf-bell-branch-bird’s-nest, part flower, part pale pink seashell. Wings grew from it, and antlers, and the soft ears of some small brown creature. This must be, then, what Rosie Rightly had called the August Crown. It proclaimed the Gray Harlequin Lord of the Big Bah-Ha. King of Clowns.

  To see that crown was to feel its weight. Beatrice fell to her knees, thinking even as they scraped down, I never kneel. Not in defeat. Not to anyone. I pummeled Aunt Oolalune when she tried to make me. Why now?

  “Do you come to ask a boon, little one?” The Gray Harlequin’s voice was warm as maple-flavored corn syrup on a cold December morning.

  “I want to leave.” Beatrice spoke to the ground, hating herself for muttering. “I want to see my dad. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

  The Gray Harlequin made a sound between a cluck and a tsk. She risked a look up at him. He shook his glittering head to and fro.

  “I am afraid,” said he, “that rules are rules. You looked into your own face, but you did not laugh. The best I can offer you now is a place here in Chuckle City. You might join the tramps under the Big Top. Ride the tigers. Learn to walk the wires.” He chuckled. A splatter of hot syrup. Bodies falling from a burning building.

  “Or perhaps the Eleven Lovely Emilies will take you up, up, up into their webs and teach you how to spin. How to measure time by a red hourglass. How to eat what falls into your snares.” He stooped to cup her chin before she could jerk away. “Or you can blow balloons with the rustics, or immolate yourself with the grotesques. Although, from the look of you, I’d say you’ve seen enough burning.”

  He laid his hand over the handprint on her face. She could feel the fit, how his fingers conformed to the slaprash’s shape exactly. This time, Beatrice did flinch, but he grasped her by the jaw and did not let her go.

  “But you cannot leave my city, little Beatrice,” said the Gray Harlequin. Beatrice closed her eyes when he smiled. “And you cannot move forward through the mirror. Unless you want to take another look? Go on. Of all the children who have passed through the Big Bah-Ha, surely you are neither the most wretched, nor the saddest. Go on.” His ruby lips curled like vipers. “Look. And smile at what you see.”

  It was a dare and a command. Releasing her jaw, he flung her forward. Beatrice dragged herself to her feet, pressed both fists to the glass, leaned in, looked. Her reflection sprang at her like a monster. She flung herself back, once again tearing at the slaprash on her face, trying to dig it from her flesh.

  “Make it go away!”

  “That,” smiled the Gray Harlequin, “I can do.”

  So he pressed her once more to her knees, and she went, docile now. And he smeared white paint on her dull gray face, and painted a single blue tear beneath her right eye to represent all the tears she could no longer cry. From his saffron robes he drew a round red sponge attached to two white strings, and he placed the sponge over her nose and knotted the strings behind her head. He told her to look into the mirror a third time, now that he had made all things well.

  Beatrice obeyed. Her reflection had grown bearable, although in wearing the red nose, she could no longer smell the warm gold wind pouring through the mirror’s cracked surface. She reached up to unknot the strings that held the nose affixed. The Gray Harlequin slapped her hand.

  “Now, Beatrice. That’s no way for a clown to behave!”

  Once more he began securing the strings behind her head, but before he had quite finished, the Gray Harlequin gave a loud shout and jumped back. The red nose tumbled from her face. Beatrice made only a half-hearted attempt to catch it, ashamed for being so relieved at its absence.

  Above her, the Gray Harlequin hissed, shaking out his hand like it had been stung.

  A sharpened shell casing bounced off Beatrice’s foot. She began to smile. Then the sky opened.

  Overhead, thirty-three ravens exploded into being. Dropping to the ground around the Gray Harlequin so quickly they drew from the air a thunderclap, they threw back their gray feathers and became young men. Hangman’s hoods were thrust back, revealing ivory eyes and ebony teeth and coxcombs that writhed like Medusa’s snakes. Instead of clothes, their bodies were wrapped like mummies in gaffer’s tape. One wore half of a pair of handcuffs like a bracelet. Another, a length of heavy chain for a belt. Their throats were as radiant a red as Beatrice’s nose, red as the wounds on Rosie Rightly’s wrists.

  “Well?” asked the Gray Harlequin. “Where is my meat and drink? In all of Chuckle City, did not one of my little subjects relinquish their last hope?”

  The Gacy Boys spoke in a ragged chorus of whispers and whistles. Their voices ran together. Beatrice could only pick out fragments.

  “A nice, fresh one, sire—a grotesque from the tenements, but…”

  “Intruders—”

  “Driven off—”

  “Three heartbeats, with weapons. Rocks. Knives. Sticks—”

  “One, tarted like a clown, but far too tall—”

  “A dog, sire, with terrible teeth—”

  “A dog?” Beatrice pushed past the line of Gacy Boys, would have marched right to Chuckle City to see for herself, but the Gray Harlequin shoved her to the ground.

  “Stay where you are!” he growled.

  “Sire,” said a Gacy Boy, “they were right behind us.”

  Beatrice, choking on a mouthful of dust, tried to raise her head. But the Gray Harlequin had stepped upon it. She could only turn it to one side. Beyond the for
est of Gacy Boy legs, several familiar pairs of feet moved toward her.

  First: white tennies, worn with more grace than a pair of satin ballet slippers. Second: scuffed and scarred combat boots, boys’ size eight. Third: a pair of pink patent leather Mary Janes smaller than a Snickers bar. Fourth: four brown paws, dusty and dear. Fifth and last: two banana-yellow boats.

  “It’s my Barkas,” Beatrice whispered. “But how did…?”

  “Oh, hallo, Harlequin!” cried the Flabberghast. “So good to behold your blindfold again! A few of us wondered where you’d gone when the hills opened up and the world was ours. How is your hand? Necessity demanded the damage; we hope you will forgive. By the way, Young Texas, you have a most excellent arm!”

  “Thanks, Flabby. You in there somewhere, Queen B?”

  Beatrice spat dust to bellow, “Down here! Tex! Di! Granny! Sal!”

  The Gray Harlequin’s velvet-shod foot pressed hard upon her skull. Her mouth filled. The dust of the Big Bah-Ha tasted like ash.

  “Had I known, my friend,” said the Gray Harlequin, “that you intended to visit, I would have prepared a welcoming party. Ceremonies, parades, cannonades…” His rancor ground Beatrice beneath his heel.

  Snorting, the Flabberghast noted, “Nothing in this blasted heath remembers how to throw a party, Harlequin, least of all you. You brought the Big Bah-Ha to the brink of ruin. Cannons could only improve the place.”

  The Gray Harlequin grinned most redly. “Perhaps. But who is left to care? Only the dead come here, and those are all mere children. They don’t know any better. They barely know their own names. The wretched brats needed a keeper. Who better to wear the August Crown than myself?”

  The Flabberghast rocked in his yellow shoes. “Let us set aside for the nonce a debate regarding the befitting resettlement of souls, the governance of the deadlands, and the corruption of the August Crown. Let us instead, dear Harlequin, turn to the more important question of aesthetics. The plain truth is, Harlequin, you have made the Big Bah-Ha far too ugly. And I cannot abide ugliness.”

  “You live in a cardboard box,” sighed the Gray Harlequin. The tension in his toes did not ease. Beatrice thought that if he pressed any harder, her skull would explode.

  “It only looks like a cardboard box,” the Flabberghast retorted. “Anyone who enters knows it for a palace. But this place?” He shook his head. “Last I visited the Big Bah-Ha, the skies were endless and sapphirine. Where now only thin grooves mark the dust, there once flowed seven mighty rivers. Manticores, glatisants, silver-bearded unicorns abounded, offering songs, riddles, rides to the young newcomers, who looked upon them with awe and wonder. Green was the grass, sweet were the flowers, and everything smelled of something even better blooming in the distance. Such wild, clear music rang from dryad lips and satyr horns. Such dancing gadabouts were held, such glad feasts. Chuckle City, your degraded city, was a city of silken tents, not tenements, each flowing canopy woven of silver silk spun anew every morning by the Eleven Lovely Emilies. And how lovely they were, the Keepers of the Hourglass, the Guardians of the Gate. How lovely they were, but see what they have become!”

  The ring of Gacy Boys hooted and cooed uneasily. Perhaps they remembered such a time, remembered too how they had forgotten it. But the Gray Harlequin only sneered.

  “They are all still here, Flabberghast—the monsters of whom you so fondly reminisce. Glatisants, manticores, centaurs, tra-la, tra-la, et cetera, they are all to be found in my petting zoos. As for your Eleven Emilies—it is a stretch, is it not, to call them lovely?—they work for me now. In exchange for food. I do not think there is a prettier sight than an Emily feeding on what falls from the wires to her web.”

  “What is the food?” asked the Flabberghast. Beatrice thought she heard a thread of nervousness and longing running through his words. “This is the Big Bah-Ha. It is the last and lowest of the deadlands. There is nothing to eat here but the souls of those who died too young.”

  “Exactly so,” hissed the Gray Harlequin. “Can’t you smell them, Flabberghast? So sweet, so rare, so plump with potential. So much finer than the coarse stuff of carbon.”

  “Souls!” That one word was almost a wail. Beatrice squirmed beneath the Gray Harlequin’s crushing shoe. “What need have you of souls, when all the bones of a dead world are ours for the digging?”

  The Gray Harlequin’s laughter was like a cougar sharpening its claws on a hollow tree. “Digging in the dirt like worms, like maggots, like old blind moles under Hillside Cemetery, where we voluntarily entered a debasing confinement until the last human falls. The whole world is not ours for the eating, not for years yet, my Flabberghast, not unless you’ve sped along the deaths of all those little ones running wild in their packs. Have you, Flabberghast? You alone among us had the freedom to do so. You alone of the Tall Ones were allowed passage beyond the gates. Our great ambassador to those little human meat lumps. You, who were once our jester! Our fool!”

  “No one objected at the time.” The Flabberghast had smoothed his voice again. If the Gray Harlequin was syrup, the Flabberghast was a rich, tasty grease of butter, and Beatrice, squashed flat between their voices, was beginning to feel like the pancake.

  Then she heard Tex shout, “Hey, Flabby, is that snotbum another of all y’all Tall Ones? Thought you said only kids were allowed in here.”

  Diodiance asked, “How’d he even get in?”

  At Granny’s behest, Sheepdog Sal barked, and at the sound, the others of the Barka gang hushed, remembering how they’d gotten in. They fingered the half-healed holes in their wrists. Somehow they couldn’t see the Gray Harlequin asking a living child politely for his blood. He’d just take it and paint his red doorway on any old skin. He wouldn’t even have bothered bringing a living child in with him, for he’d never planned on coming back out. The Flabberghast spoke into their awful silence.

  “Our prison term, if that is what you wish to call it, Harlequin, is only a matter of a few short years. The slaprash lingers. When the last human remnant comes of age…”

  Here he stopped, but Beatrice knew how the sentence would end. They all did, back home.

  “Breath starts to rattle

  Like dice in a cup

  And the slaprash’ll getcha

  When—you’re—all—growed—up!”

  Even for the youngest among them, even for Granny Two-Shoes, it was only a matter of time. Till they grew up and died dead, slapped red. Beatrice closed her eyes against the pain of it, the futility, the hopelessness of such a future. What was the point?

  And, as if summoned, Granny’s face appeared between one of the Gacy Boys’ sticklike legs. She waved at Beatrice and smiled. Her one gray tooth was like a keyhole amid the bright glare of the whiter ones.

  “Hey, Granny!”

  Granny Two-Shoes slid something across the ashy ground. Beatrice crept one arm out from her side, slowly, so slowly, hoping she could snatch the slingshot without the Gray Harlequin noticing. But he was entirely caught up in his indignation, she saw. Just like Aunt Oolalune back in the land of the living. So marvelously self-absorbed and easy to distract.

  That’s what the Flabberghast is, Beatrice realized. A distraction. One I’m meant to use.

  Still the Gray Harlequin argued. “A few years, you say? A decade, perhaps, if we’re lucky. A decade of gnawing flavorless femurs and sucking stale marrow in some moldy old Midwestern cemetery.” He laughed bitterly. “Do you think I—I, who witnessed the Black Death and the birth of Pantalone—wish to spend my hard-won perpetuity scrabbling for sustenance and listening to your infernal jokes, Flabberghast, all day and all night, until the stars burn out, when here, here in this place where there are no stars, I can be God and King together, presiding over an eternal feast?”

  He reached a long arm to stroke the feral head of a Gacy Boy. “Here, among my little friends?” he asked, more softly. “Who require my guidance, welcome my tutelage? I gave them wings to fly. They deliver my messages. They capture monst
ers for my entertainment. They hunt the deadlands for the souls that are my meat and drink. They are very useful, and so very grateful to be of use. To have a little power, where before they had none.”

  The Flabberghast hesitated before replying, but Beatrice watched the rocking of his yellow shoes come to a standstill.

  Be ready, she thought. Be wary. Be watchful. Take your best chance.

  “You guide them nowhere but over their own dusty traces time and again. You offer them a little glamour, and they mistake it for power. You have turned the children’s only door, their rightful door, into a distorted mirror where they must see themselves marked with murder, disease, accident, neglect, lack, with no hope of anything better. You lock them in perpetual despair until their souls wither, and then you devour their souls. No God or King, you, Harlequin. Jailer. Tormenter. Executioner.”

  The air filled with whistles and whispers as the Gacy Boys turned to the Gray Harlequin.

  “You said it was a magic mirror.”

  “You said there was no way out.”

  “You said we must look at ourselves.”

  “At our own dead faces.”

  “Into our own dead eyes.”

  “Acknowledge what was done to us.”

  “And laugh.”

  “You said,” keened the smallest Gacy Boy, whose cap and bells sat a bit awry, “if I could laugh, I would see my mother. But I couldn’t look—I couldn’t look at that again! I’ve done everything you said…” He bent his head and sobbed. His ivory eyes spurted tears like crude oil.

  The others broke formation to comfort him, handcuffs dangling, chains clinking. They drifted off together in desolate clumps, leaving the Gray Harlequin exposed. He turned in sudden fury to the Flabberghast, his foot slipping from Beatrice’s skull.

  “You’ve upset them!”

  The Flabberghast shrugged.

  “Tell me,” said the Gray Harlequin, “you who’ve traveled all this way. Did you even wait until she died to peel off her skin and nail it to your wall?”

  Beatrice breathed without breath. She remembered the flensing tool. How the Flabberghast had started with her foot. Her left foot. Just as the last blood oozed from her pores and the last of her convulsions ceased.