The article reiterated most of what Maxim already knew. Kaleet had visited the Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito Museum alone that day, apparently, and had taken down from the wall of the Nautilus Chamber drawing No. 8 of Narik Guul’s series The Summoning of the Outsider, thus setting off a security alarm. Before security guards could reach her on the staircase, she had sprayed an accelerant on the artwork—which she had removed from its frame—and set it, and herself, on fire.
Kaleet had been a member of a group of young Kalians, several of them students at Paxton University like herself, who had devoted themselves to challenging the patriarchal and oppressive traditions of their native culture. Kaleet had lived in a flat she shared with a number of these friends at a Punktown apartment complex called the Octoplex, which Maxim was superficially familiar with: it consisted of eight tower blocks forming a circle.
Her friends had denied any advance knowledge of Kaleet’s intent to destroy Narik Guul’s drawing. They hadn’t been able to confirm one way or the other whether Kaleet had intended to burn herself along with the drawing.
Maxim did indeed raise his glass to her. “You were a brave woman, Kaleet. Pretty, too. Thanks for the forty thousand munits.” But he regretted his frivolous tone, felt guilty, and banished the news story so Kaleet Dukenna-Ir no longer stared at him from his array of virtual screens.
He wondered what she had hoped to accomplish by destroying that one illustration. It seemed to him an odd gesture, especially if she had given her life purposely in order to make it. With her advanced attitudes and her rejection of the bonds of religion, could Kaleet really have believed that she was removing one vital gear from a kind of spiritual machine, such as Nhil and that guard had claimed The Summoning of the Outsider to be? Were the primitive superstitions she had been raised on still that much ingrained in her mind?
His gaze trailed idly to related results his computer had dredged up when he had been looking for the story on Kaleet, the key words being Kalian woman . One news headline caught his eye, and he opened up the full article. As he started reading it, he wondered how he had missed hearing about this crime, too—especially since it had taken place right here in Punktown.
Early last week, the bodies of four young Kalian women had been discovered by children playing in an abandoned factory on Warehouse Way. The women were found naked, but medical examination had determined that not only had they not been sexually assaulted, but all four of them were still virgins. As of the time of this article, the identities of the women—who had all died within seconds of each other, it had also been established—had not been determined. Scans of their faces didn’t match up with the records of any legal Kalian immigrants, though they may have been born and raised in Punktown.
The women were found hanging from ropes, their necks broken, and the femoral artery on the inside of their thighs had been sliced . . . though only a minimum of blood had dripped on the floor of the factory beneath their dangling feet.
Maxim realized his drawing hand was quivering, and he set down his glass of celebratory whiskey.
6
When he began inking black flesh onto the bare skeleton of his pencil sketch, Maxim wore a pair of digital spectacles that permitted him to magnify his viewpoint. It wasn’t that he felt he had to replicate every last pen stroke of the original artwork—he hardly believed the museum or even his Kalian clients expected that—but he wanted to achieve the same style as best he could, and the closer he saw the strokes used in the original the better he could plan his own strokes to capture a similar overall effect. Even had he not been using another artwork as his model, he preferred to wear these magnifying specs when working with extra-fine detail in a drawing or painting.
He started toward the top of the drawing, working down, so that he wouldn’t be resting his hand on portions he had already inked. That meant the sky of strangely twisted and knotted black clouds, and the emblem-like representation of Ugghiutu that hovered over his earthly avatar, having taken the form of a black city . . . overrunning and assimilating the stone city of his vanquished faithless enemies. In Narik Guul’s drawing, even the darkest areas were still composed of uncountable tiny marks of the pen rather than, say, having been solidly filled in black. The only exception was the disk that symbolized Ugghiutu, which aside from the white spiral was pure black. For this area, Maxim used a brush with a very fine tip instead of the scratchy nib of his dip pen.
At one point his brush betrayed him and he accidentally painted into the outline of the white spiral, breaking one of its coils. He didn’t panic or curse himself. He had a pen-like device with a delicate beam, which could burn away the ink without affecting the paper. He directed the pen’s beam carefully, erased the ink, and then went to work with the brush once again. This time he didn’t intrude upon the white spiral.
As he gradually worked his way down over the next few days and began inking in the corporeal manifestation of Ugghiutu, through the enlarging lenses he wore he began noticing a very curious detail incorporated into Narik Guul’s drawing, which would never have been visible to the naked eye of its viewers (except, Maxim considered, Tikkihottos with the sensitive ocular tendrils they had in place of eyes). Here and there, among the dense pen strokes that comprised the organic city’s black body, Maxim discovered words written in Kalian characters. Of course he couldn’t decipher them himself, but he at least recognized that was what they were. He was tempted to copy one of these hidden phrases onto another piece of paper, then scan it and submit it to the net to search out its meaning, but then he remembered some of the other features of his spectacles. He tapped a key on the frames of the specs, establishing a connection between them and his computer. Next he zoomed in on one line of Kalian text and brought that up on a virtual viewscreen, using an art program he utilized only for his commercial, not personal, projects. Therein he highlighted the characters and dropped out the background. Then, as he had planned, he submitted the text to the net with a request for translation.
It was nothing that surprised him, in context. The line read: “Ugghiutu will expand His greatness to absorb and extinguish every last infidel.” Maxim simply thought it was intriguing that phrases or prayers such as this would be buried in the drawing—not, obviously, to be appreciated by those who viewed the piece but with the intention of imbuing the work with more potency.
Late the following night, after another arduous stretch of unbroken hours bent over his table—riding his creative momentum and eager to claim the second half of his payment—Maxim reached the bottom quarter of the drawing. Here, on one of the serpentine roots that spread from the base of the sentient black city, Maxim discovered the longest line of text yet, curving along the rubbery limb. As he had continued to do, he had his computer translate it, and found it possessed none of the previous pretense of eloquence. It only chanted deliriously: “Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all Ugghiutu swallows all.”
As Maxim inked in these words himself, meticulously replicating every nuance of every character lest he get one wrong and disappoint his patrons (assuming they were even aware of Narik Guul’s little trick), he found himself counting how many times he wrote the same phrase.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
Ah, of course.
Five . . . six . . . seven . . .eight.
Having at last completed the wavy line of text, Maxim sat back from his artwork and pushed the magnifying specs up onto his forehead. He realized he had a spiking headache, though he didn’t know for how long it had been there.
He stared at the artwork through naked eyes, no longer enlarged. After these many hours in which he had all but dwelt within the scene, it looked so small. He tried to imagine how it would look on the curved wall of the Nautilus Chamber.
He predicted he’d be able to finish it tomorrow. Right now, spent, he longed for his bed.
His eyes shifted from the
paper to the little pot of ink that had been delivered to him. It was getting low, maybe three-quarters finished. The same concoction Narik Guul himself had utilized, Nhil had said. Maxim wouldn’t dare switch to a store-bought brand if he ended up running short. If that happened, he’d have to ask Nhil for more. But he was certain Nhil had sent him just the right amount.
Without asking himself why he did so, Maxim reached out, picked up the glass jar, and brought it level with his face. He leaned his nose in over its open mouth and sniffed warily.
He flinched back sharply, though he couldn’t say why. The ink smelled like ink. Only like ink. It didn’t have the coppery, raw-meat smell he somehow thought it would. But the smell had nonetheless caused his headache to flare. He set the jar down and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
After taking a pain pill, he stripped down to his boxers for bed. He switched off his drawing table’s lamp, leaving the ink to dry in the dark.
Since taking the commission, he had had no further dreams that he recollected the next morning . . . but tomorrow he would recall tonight’s dream, with the sharpness of a steel engraving.
He was wandering in some murky underground place, a series of rooms with low ceilings and damp-smelling walls—maybe tunnels connecting the basements of several abandoned industrial complexes, such as those found in Warehouse Way. He smelled incense ahead and crept more stealthily. Following the smell, he poked his head around the edge of a doorway and found himself looking into a room with water-stained walls and a blistering ceiling, which nevertheless served as a nursery. In a row of old plastic crates stuffed with blankets, four Kalian babies lay sleeping. Joss sticks had been jammed into cracks in the walls, smoking. Fluorescent bars in the ceiling fluttered wanly.
Maxim continued exploring, feeling his way through stretches of corridor that were pitch black, then coming upon other areas that were at least dimly lit. He followed that incense smell again and peeked into another room in which joss sticks burned and sickly greenish fluorescents flickered. Here were four cots, in which four adolescent Kalian girls lay sleeping, their beautiful profiles cushioned on their own silken black hair.
Onward . . . more incense beckoning him, guiding him, through more labyrinthine dark tunnels. In the next room, in four more cots, slept four Kalian teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. Maxim stared at them as they breathed slowly, evenly, dreaming within his dream. And somehow, even in his dream, Maxim felt as though he himself were merely a figment moving through the dreams of a mind outside his own—a vast, alien, slumbering mind. Russian nesting dolls of dream.
Maxim realized he’d been hearing a distant dripping sound, and assumed it was water leaking from one of the exposed pipes that ran along some of the ceilings down here. Still, the niggling sound diverted his attention, and he turned away from the sleeping girls to follow it to its source.
He came to a cylindrical shaft, containing an ascending spiral staircase. The dripping sound came from up there, resonating down through the shaft. He mounted the corroded metal steps, which rang with his footfalls, turning tightly around and around as he climbed. At the top of the shaft he entered a short, especially narrow corridor. At the end of this passage was an arched doorway, and he stopped in its threshold to look into the chamber beyond.
It was a spacious room with a single circular wall, like the inside of a dome. From the high concave ceiling, at the ends of black ropes, four young women had been hung by their necks. The dead women wore low-slung white skirts and white blouses that had long sleeves and high collars but were cut short to leave their smooth gray midriffs bare.
Their white skirts were heavily stained in blood. Kalian blood was red, but in the dream the blood was black as ink. Though Maxim couldn’t see the women’s upper legs through the folds of their skirts, he knew that their femoral arteries had been cut. The dripping sound he had heard was their black blood draining into a circular, recessed area in the floor directly below their bare feet.
There was one window in this circular chamber, on the opposite side from the doorway Maxim stood in. Lurid red light issued through it. He timidly stepped into the room and made his way around its perimeter toward the window, keeping clear of the edge of the crater-like pool that collected the life fluid of the dead women. Suspiciously, he watched their slack faces with their grotesquely distended tongues, as if suddenly their obsidian eyes might snap open and fix on this intruder accusingly.
He reached the window, which was circular and without any glass. Gripping its curved lower edge, he looked out upon a landscape that was both intimately familiar and nightmarishly transfigured.
It was the skyline of Punktown, silhouetted black against a ruby red sky that churned restlessly like an inverted ocean of blood, glowing radioactively. But the fact that it was silhouetted didn’t entirely account for the megacity’s utter blackness. Maxim realized the edges of office towers and apartment blocks were ever-so-subtly pulsing, as if life fluids were being pumped through the walls of these buildings, or as if the looming structures were breathing deeply in slumber. Probes that extended from the summits or jutted from the sides of some of these buildings, either gathering information from the ether or transmitting it, rippled slightly as if they had gone rubbery. And no light glowed in any window. The edges of every window, in fact, had a puckered look, as if these innumerable windows were all orifices in one impossibly gigantic living body.
Something had overtaken the colony-city called Punktown. Consumed it. Replaced it.
No neons glowed, no holographic advertisements lent color to the air. No hovercars could be seen gliding close to the streets, no helicars floated like swarms of dragonflies through the air. For all its organic aspects, this was a city of the dead.
The city was no longer Punktown. The city had a new name.
Ugghiutu.
In the foreground of this scene, eight towers were arranged in a circle. Maxim recognized them—despite their black-sheathed, undulating surfaces—as the apartment complex called the Octoplex. This was where Kaleet Dukenna-Ir had lived. This was where her friends and fellow radicals continued to live.
In the small park at the center of the Octoplex, its grass now paved over with a thick black membrane, a large red spiral floated a few feet off the ground horizontally. It glowed laser red, and it spun around and around like a vortex.
It reminded Maxim of a target.
A liquid sound behind him caused Maxim to turn away from the window. Four Kalian males had encircled the pool the dead women were suspended above. They wore golden robes, and the elongated conical turbans of high holy men. Maxim recognized their faces. They were Nhil . . . and the guard/guide from the Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito Museum . . . and the young gift shop worker from the museum . . . and the short, stocky Kalian who had delivered the special ink to Maxim’s door.
They were bent forward and lifting an object from the inky pool. They raised this object reverently, cautiously, as if it were a bomb that might go off if handled carelessly. Streaming viscous blood, the black object did somewhat resemble a bomb, though it was actually something more like a giant pod or cocoon, tapered to a dull point at both ends.
Nhil looked directly up into Maxim’s eyes and smiled. He said, “Thank you, Mr. Komaroff. None of this would have been possible without you.”
7
Maxim purposely arrived about a half hour ahead of Nhil, at the same little unremarkable cafe. He wondered sourly why Nhil had chosen this particular place for their meetings. Because it was so anonymous? It would have been a nice clandestine environment for the sale of illegal drugs, perhaps, but a piece of art destined for an esteemed museum? The drawing rested on the sticky bench cushion beside him, sandwiched between two sturdy sheets of plastic and packaged inside a padded envelope. What if he had been mugged leaving his vehicle and the package stolen? Nhil probably wouldn’t have believed Maxim, but it would have served him right for choosing such a location.
With the steam from his coffee rising ar
omatically into his face, Maxim stared out the cafe’s front window at the street beyond. Immense skyscrapers all but blocked out the sky, with smaller buildings of every stripe huddled around their ankles. Pedestrians—human and otherwise—bustled along the sidewalk in an almost solid mass, some of them glancing in at him as they passed. Honeycombs of windows glowed against today’s overcast grayness, fluidly twisted neons gave off fuzzy pastel auras, and holographic advertisements hovered in place or else floated past or even walked along with the pedestrians like ghosts. Vibrantly alive, the city appeared secure, strong. And yet to Maxim, all this now seemed like a fragile veneer—a thin translucent skin that could be roughly torn away in one motion, leaving only the cold bones beneath. There were forces that dwarfed even this great city. He believed that now. He always had, deep down on some primal level, but had never wanted to confront such intuitions.
Of course, he had always been conscious of the fact that, rather than fostering the organic, the universe was hostile toward living things. Life was just a byproduct of other processes that slipped past the universe’s notice. All this he had accepted, certainly. But he had never consciously wanted to admit that some of the forces that composed the universe, while not life in the sense he understood it, might nevertheless hold sentience.
As he had finished the drawing that now rested beside him, so small and innocuous, he had considered secreting text of his own within it. Maybe a near-microscopic line that read: “Ugghiutu is not coming.” Or: “An infidel drew this picture.” A kind of vandalism of his own work, to defuse the drawing’s imagined power. He had been quite tempted to do this, in fact, but in the end had been too afraid. What if the Kalians were aware of Narik Guul’s subliminal technique and looked closely to see if he had incorporated it? They’d be furious.
Haunted Worlds Page 23
