Constantine laughed. “Just for an instant I did wonder. But you’re right, it does sound absurd. Though I’ve never understood why you left Paris to come here.”
“Ravachol had something to do with it,” his half-brother said. “In a manner of speaking, that is.”
That moment a girl of fifteen or sixteen arrived with their soup. Her hair was long and black, heavy as a helmet, her eyes accented in an Eastern way. She brushed against Anthony as she served his consommé, and her sullen face lit up with a smile. “My occasional mistress when I feel the need,” he explained after she was gone. “Half-Arab. Almost as good as a boy.”
Constantine blushed. “Don’t talk rot.”
“I was only making an observation from experience, dear brother. You’re on the other side of the Channel now, so you don’t have to maunder about the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The sort of phrase that poor silly Oscar would coin. I read he’s in France too, now that he’s out of gaol.”
“Yes.”
“Come, come, Constantine. Enjoy your bouillabaisse—I won’t discuss boys or girls any more.”
“You were saying Ravachol had something to do with your coming to Toulon.”
“Was I?” He spooned up another mouthful of consommé, savored it. “Oh well, explaining that won’t do any harm. I came down here to meet a lady who talked to Ravachol after he was guillotined.”
“After?”
“Repeatedly.”
“A spirit medium?”
“You might call her that. Though perhaps prophetess would be a better description. That’s what her followers called her.” He fell silent to pour himself another glass of wine.
Constantine put his spoon down with an audible clank. “Just who is this prophetess, and who are her followers?”
“Was, dear brother, was. The late Marie de Saint-Remy, vates of the local Universellist sect.”
“And are you one of these Universellists?”
Anthony looked at him, shaking his head in admiration. “Constant Constantine. If not the Church of Rome, then the Universellists ... No. they bore me, though their prophetess was of great interest.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let’s say that she was under the influence of a higher power. Like Ravachol, Vaillant, Henry.” Tony began to sing to himself in French, just loud enough for Constantine to hear the words:
“In the past our forefathers
Danced to the sound of cannon.
Now the tragic dance
Needs a louder music:
Let us dynamite, let us dynamite!”
Outside, the rooftops swan in violet light. Anthony suggested it was too fine an evening not to walk, that his room was just far enough to allow a breath of air.
Ahead a pair of sailors haggled with a woman under a streetlamp. Anthony laughed to see Constantine look away in disgust. “If you feel this way in Toulon, how can you go anywhere in London?”
“One knows where to go.”
“Your club perhaps. Otherwise they’re ubiquitous. Ask the French; they come to London and they are shocked at our regiments of soiled doves. And there’s a new recruit every minute—the Ripper was Fighting the tide—a quire of whores made for every one he killed.”
“Tony!”
“But Jack knew what he was doing—”
Constantine stopped dead and glared at his brother. “I’d rather you didn’t indulge your morbid taste in humor just now.”
Anthony bent his head apologetically. “No humor intended. Just that the Ripper was serious—”
“Most madmen are.”
“Not mad, Constantine. Only doing what was demanded. Like the judge who sentenced the Haymarket Martyrs, like whoever actually threw the bomb in Chicago ... But Jack was the one who gave the clue.”
“Clue?”
“That there was something preternatural involved—”
“There’s nothing preternatural about butchering prostitutes.”
“No so much that, though some of the mutilations and dissections were unusual. No, what I’m talking about is his invisibility.”
Constantine shook his head bemusedly. “You should write for the shilling-shockers.”
“You haven’t studied the reports,” Anthony whispered. “Blood was still pouring from Long Liz Stride’s throat when the carter found her in the yard, and he’d come in by the only gate. And Catherine Eddowes was dead as well within the hour. Then think how often he struck in areas where the police were hunting him in force—”
“So he said the magic word and disappeared?”
“Nothing so puerile. But nobody knows his name after a decade, and he may not know he was the Ripper.”
Constantine grunted irritably. “You always had a taste for paradox.”
“Not a paradox, dear brother.” Anthony stepped around a melon rind on the pavement before continuing. “Jack was a tool. Or a toy. Like his victims. Like the judge in Chicago. Like Ravachol and his executioner. All of them tools or toys.”
“At least your speculations are entertaining, Tony. But a tool or toy demands a user—”
“Exactly. A user. I had communicated with it before—or maybe them. There’s really no way of knowing whether it’s plural or singular—”
“Our name is legion, eh?”
Anthony slowed his gait and glanced sideways at him. “You mustn’t translate everything into familiar terms. What I was in communication with—or communion, perhaps; difficult to find the right word when the contact was so glancing and oblique—was nothing you’d call God or Devil, though it has powers like one or the other, and in its detachment—”
Constantine stared back. “You seem to have settled for the singular.”
“Only for convenience.” Anthony picked up his stride. “And its detachment is demonic or divine—who can say? But detachment transcendental, absolute as its power. That may be the real terror—it or they don’t understand us any more than we can understand them or it. But it can manipulate us.”
“I am not convinced.” Constantine looked up at the narrow strip of night between the facades. “There’s nothing there in the dark except more nothing. Zero has no singular or plural.”
Anthony’s laugh was dry as a cicada’s cry. “Not unless zero comes in its full weight.”
When Tony unlocked his door and struck a match for the gas fixture, the tiny flame made the room distorted and enlarged, as if it were only the antechamber to the huger darkness pressing on the skylight. But with the gas mantle lit and adjusted, the room’s drab normality returned.
“Sit down,” Anthony said, and went to the table with the glasses. “Want one?” he asked, pouring himself an absinthe.
“Not for me,” Constantine said. “I can’t stay; I’m taking the early train tomorrow.”
“Too bad. Then I’d best convince you quickly.” He sat down, his eyes glittering in the gaslight. “After leaving England so precipitously, the power which had instructed me withdrew from all communication. I was only one step up the ladder, so to speak. Paris seemed the only place to go; it was a center of occultists, some with genuine abilities, perhaps. I read Eliphas Levi, I involved myself with Sar Peladon and his Rose-Croix, I attended Black Masses, and found no clue to the next step. But with the capture and trial of Ravachol, Vaillant’s bombing of the Chamber of Deputies, the explosion in the Cafe Terminus, I recognized my instructor again. It had demanded sacrifice of me, now it was taking it through its priests of dynamite, and countersacrifice through its priests of the guillotine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tony.”
“No, it uses men as toys. And it likes to break its toys—or rather, have them break each other. This was only a suspicion, only an intuition, until I heard of Marie de Saint-Remy, and came here. The first time I spoke to her, I knew, and with my help she learned more, and soon I was back in communication with the power. She was a bit mad, of course—sensitives often are. What comes in from outside is so out of scale, so foreign.”
“Then what makes you so sure this isn’t all madness?”
“Let me read you some of the things she said.” Anthony raised himself, walked over to a corner. There were magazines stacked on the floor, and he searched through them quickly, to return with five or six. “These are Universellist journals, Le Christ anarchiste, L’ Antechrist, Le Journal d’ outre-tombe. Le Jugement dernier.”
Constantine snorted. “Impressive names, if one has a taste for melodrama.”
Anthony opened the first one. “I marked the passages of special interest so I could study them ... ah, here we are.” He read in a slightly unnatural voice. “ ‘The authors of anarchist attacks are the harbingers of the movements of final destruction ... These beings do not have names in any human language, and the title of God is too feeble to apply to them ... They are the most divine and elevated powers that have existed up to the present. To make it clear, we can say that they are the Soul of souls, the Just.’ ”
“This is supposed to convince me? She’s talking about Ravachol, Vaillant, Henry, not your unknown powers. High-flown, perhaps, but then you said she was a trifle mad.”
“What about this?” said Anthony, leafing through another journal. “She says she ‘will find the secret that will clear the earth of the unclean to make way for the pure.’ She goes on to say she used her occult abilities to inspire bombings, and distributed magical forces among her disciples.” He picked up a third issue; “ ‘Hecatombs without precedent are needed to break the driving force of this society, fortified by the entire accumulation of its crimes throughout the ages ... great cataclysms which we have called down!’ ” He put the journal down. “Well?”
“Fortissimo doesn’t make the tune any more worth listening to, Tony. I’ll believe in your outside power when I’m introduced to it. Or is it a them?”
Anthony flushed slightly. “It could be either.” He gestured helplessly to the journals at his feet. “You want more than this?”
“Precisely.”
“You realize it’s impossible to introduce you to the power in the usual fashion. It’s impossible even to see it. But you’ll know it’s here, though I want to warn you that the very presence of the intelligence is dangerous to the unprepared mind.”
Constantine chuckled. “Fi fo fi fum, et cetera.”
“I’m deadly serious, Constantine, not a stage magician building up his tricks with patter.”
“You sound quite similar.”
“All right, but on your own head be it.” Anthony went over to the table, poured himself a finger of absinthe, drank it down neat. He was pale and sweating when he sat down again, though Constantine suspected it was more alcohol than terror.
“Aren’t you going to turn the light down, Tony? It seems prerequisite to a séance.”
Anthony smiled wincingly. “You’ve heard of the noonday devil? This presence is like that. Midnight or afternoon in the Sahara are the same to it.” He reached into his open collar, pulled out the plaque with the crucifix.
“Going to command the demon by the power of the cross?”
“Not exactly. A bit of protective coloring.” He turned the plaque around on its cord. The back was covered with a patternless swirl of fine lines, parallel, zigzag, concentric, but even at this distance in the gaslight. Constantine began to see a pattern starting to emerge, a pattern that hinted at a meaning so strange and unendurable he was able to throw up his hand and twist aside before he saw too much.
He could feel himself shuddering as Tony exulted: “Now you begin to believe. These are Marie de Saint-Remy’s invention—or rather, what she was commanded to have made. Only two were cast. And the artisan who made them for us went out one night and drowned himself in the harbor. The power uses any means to hide itself from the uninitiated.”
Constantine ventured a glance between his fingers. His half-brother was stroking the plaque again, eyes staring. His face went dead, meaningless, as empty of personality as the frayed mask of an anatomical diagram.
Then the presence was there. Anthony dwindled and twisted. Gravity seemed to tilt, though he was still in his chair with the walls behind him, and everything remained vertical. It was as if the center of the earth was no longer the reference point, as if the presence made its own rules. For the first time in his life Constantine realized how rapidly the earth was wheeling through space, felt the giddiness of its multiple motions rather than accepted them intellectually. Only the great being in the room with them was still, somehow impinging on this small rushing locus.
Tony had been right about his knowing the intelligence was there even when he couldn’t see it. The way Constantine shrank instinctively from its foreignness, the automatic horripilation of the back of his neck, and the breathless, metallic taste in his mouth were testimonies. Worse was the sense that what was there was cold, so cold as not to be living in the usual terms, so intelligent it went beyond or beneath what intelligence usually meant.
If it stayed much longer he would die spiritually, blasted and crushed by the mere proximity of something so massively inhuman.
Tony’s mouth opened as if it were being worked by levers, breathed in like a pump. The voice that emerged was strange in timbre, the rhythms of the words misplaced. “You have been told more than you understand—” It stopped, and breathed mechanically, waiting. “More than you should know. But your co-organism—the other branching—is the one who should be pruned. You know nothing—” The mouth pumped again. “Important. No co-organisms more distant—none who matter—will believe.”
Tony’s face writhed in what might have been meant as a smile. “Say goodbye to your near-branch. For now. You will join him ten years and eleven months toward us. Be part of us forever.”
Constantine gasped as the weight of its presence vanished like a blown-out candleflame. His half-brother leaned bonelessly out of the chair, striking the floor with a sound that would haunt Constantine to the end.
Turned face up, Tony looked like he had been dead for hours, but when Constantine rushed down he asked the concierge to faire venir le medicin before his brother died. Let the physician explain—if he could.
Then Constantine climbed back up to take the plaque off his brother’s neck and hide it. With so many arrangements to make, he wouldn’t be taking the morning train. Except for Anthony and other objects, the room was empty. Nothing but darkness stared in through the skylight.
JOHN’S RETURN TO LIVERPOOL by Christopher Burns
“John’s Return to Liverpool” is one of two extraordinary stories Christopher Burns published during 1985 in England’s avant-garde fantasy magazine, Interzone. The other, a post-nuclear disaster mood piece, “Fogged Plates,” seems appropriate from one who lives about a dozen miles from the Sellafield nuclear plant.
Born in 1944, Burns makes his home in Cumbria, on the coast of the English Lake District. Burns considers his writing to be more mainstream than in the science fiction or fantasy genres, and most of his stories in recent years have appeared in such places as the London Review of Books, London Magazine, and the New Stories anthologies from Hutchinson. His first novel, Snakewrist, “about an English book cataloguer who gradually becomes drawn into the world of a vanished adventurer,” was published by Jonathan Cape in London this past May.
He came to the door during the first frost of winter. Straight away she knew who he was.
“You’ve come back,” she said.
In the streetlight he looked bloodless. Behind him frost began to settle on the grass and blind the windows of parked cars. Children in heavy boots careered between the houses, turned corners sharply, yelled to each other through the drifting cold.
His hair was damp and his nose was thinner than it should have been. She thought of how she’d read that sniffing cocaine destroys the bridges, then felt guilty that such a small thing should have crossed her mind. It was nothing compared to the magnitude of his return.
His skin was waxen, as if it had been newly laid across the bones. “Can I co
me in?” he asked simply.
She didn’t feel she had to say anything.
He sat down beside the coal fire but kept on his thick blue coat. Its shoulders sparkled with frost. His glasses misted up with the temperature change and he unhooked them from his ears, cleaning them absentmindedly with a handkerchief. They were the familiar round frames. She noticed his hands were thinner and bonier than she remembered or expected.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she said quietly.
He nodded.
Dorothy got down on her knees in front of him and looked straight into his eyes. Without the glasses they seemed shortsighted and introspective. “The pounds have dropped off you,” she said, “you can tell just by looking at you. Your face is a lot thinner than it was. You were quite beefy when I knew you. There are lines under your eyes and your nose is so thin it looks like a blade.”
“I was too fat a lot of the time in the early days.” Despite all the years his voice was still flat and nasal.
“That may be, but now you’re much too thin. I used to think that, you know. All that macrobiotic food isn’t for you.”
He smiled.
“John, you need a good feed.”
He shook his head. “No. No food. I can’t. But I still need sleep.”
“Are you tired now?”
“I get tired very quickly. It’s as if everything has drained away. All those energy levels just aren’t there anymore.”
“They’ll come back,” she said comfortingly. The firelight danced in his eyes. “You can have the spare bed. But first you must have a hot bath. The fire’s been on all day so there’s plenty of hot water. Don’t argue, you need to get the cold out of your bones. It’s been a long time, John.”
“More than twenty years.”
“I’m pleased you remembered me. Honored.”
“I was never any good at keeping in touch. You know that.”
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