by James Dorr
Even as Earth and its sun go on spinning, the days ever hotter. For how long can that last?
As long as I? As my soul? Come, gaze upon me! I love the dead, you know—and you who see me now, you who dead, too, shall be. It is but a moment. An expectation.
As, meantime, I stand, here, my own soul emblazoned, exact in all detail, just as I looked up then into that bright shower. Knowing, you understand.
That rat- and ghoul-kind go on, those that survived the storm, possibly not so fortunate next time—the storm that may finish all. That the Tombs still receive dead from the New City, always expanding, for dead, too, proliferate.
These, perhaps, most of all.
That Earth and sun still spin, while I stand here, fixed, for even tomb-guardians to visit and gaze upon. I, the ghoul, Mangol, to hold your soul, too, in its own fascination. Whispering the secrets of Death the most Intimate: I, who now know them.
THE LAST DANCE
One must not envy too much those who come into power; for theirs is a task difficult enough in just pleasing the living.
• • •
FOR FIVE NIGHTS AND days the great storm had raged. I, Nocturanne, saw this, the mayor and I watching it from the work-room in his high tower as lightning cascaded over the only slightly less-lofty spires that surrounded ours. For five long nights we received the reports—I first, as I am the mayor’s assistant—that others brought to him: Of rats and serpents that coursed from their burrows beneath the New City’s streets. Of spiders, their legs tucked tightly around them, thus blown between buildings as chitinous balls, spattering in thousands on windows like hailstones. On one of the streets of a boat seen sailing—a gypsy boat, fully crewed, storm sails straining against wind-bowed masts as if it still plied the swollen river that swept to west past the Tombs.
I, who in part am myself of the river, twinging at this last.
Of elsewhere, in Old City, ghouls that were drowning. In hundreds and thousands—their blue lights extinguished. The Tombs itself, safe enough, nestled on high ground, the lowest alone of its catacombs flooded—and those, after all was calm, after the worst of the storm had been weathered, seen to have suffered at most minor damage, those “tenants” that floated up soon enough set back to rights in their niches—but farther to west of that where the Old City spread, and south of our city where it lay also, the most ancient of its ruins where the land puddled low, torrents foamed from the earth flushing out all who dwelled cringing in ruin-cellars. Children and elders first, then adult ghouls as well, strong in their ghoulhood. Rife in their death-hungers.
Ghouls, the death-eaters—dead.
All but a few of them.
And so the storm blasted both Old and New City, both river and Tombs beyond, lightning illuminating the nights as brightly as daytimes, a hot rain, a caustic rain, sizzling the planet as surely as calmer days’ bloated, redding sun made of its own glowing light a dire poison—a thing to be guarded against with thick chadors to cover one’s soft flesh, with day-masks to cover the nakedness of one’s face, when one must journey outside by day. Or, in rain, that too to be stayed indoors from as, even then, yet more lightning struck out from the spires of the New City into exposed metal ruins in the Ghoul-lands, melting its way through brass dome and iron girders. Shattering brick and stone.
I, who have been bred for the mayor’s pleasure, as well as assisting him in city duties, seeking for him to clutch me within his arms. As was my duty.
Until, at last, on the sixth dawn came silence.
• • •
That day all people slept, ghoul-kind and person-kind, gaining such strength as might help, on the sixth night, for them to distinguish themselves from the not-living. And thus, even in New City, finding the dead to outnumber them.
The river choked with them.
• • •
And then, at the seventh evening’s first darkness, a delegation of the New City’s poor climbed up the stairs of the mayor’s tower, resting on landings, then taking their journey up anew another flight higher, then one more, higher, always rising by stages in that manner until they reached the top. The halt, the lame with them, those that were old as well as their few children. Then, entering the mayor’s work-room at last, they bowed. As is the custom.
“Monsieur le Maire,” the spokesman among them said, using the formal French. “Monsieur le Maire, a plague has struck Old City’s ghouls. This has been told to us. So many of them were drowned in the storm that there have been few left to eat their own deceased, much less those of others. And so now a pestilence has come among them, striking them down anew. Killing off ghoul-kind.”
“Quelle tragédie!—if one is a ghoul,” my mayor answered them. “That is, the ghouls have been often drowned in storms. Often struck down by plagues in the past, thankfully ones whose effects strike ghouls only, but, always, they come back. First there are the ghoul-children, and then full-grown adult ghouls. They are prolific … ”
“Yes,” the New City poor’s speaker agreed, “which is a blessing—if one is a ghoul. But we are not ghouls, mon Maire. We are no more than men and women, many of whom have lost family and lovers in the storm as well. And, therefore, what now of our own New City dead? There are far too many of these for the Tombs to take from us, of our own deceased, all in a mass at once as they have perished—even for those of us who might afford the corpse-fare to bring them. And there are no ghouls for all practical purposes. We cannot simply leave them on the boundary stones leading to Old City, for them to take the slack. Nor can we store them … ”
The mayor held up his hand, smiling sardonically. “Legally, that is. Is that what you mean to say? Oh, I know you poor people well—how you cheat, how you steal. My family was poor once. How you rent cellars and extra rooms out for other people’s dead, thus to deprive honest corpse-train masters of their well-earned profit. The Tombs of its offerings. And now, if you say that even the ghouls won’t receive your dead from you, then why not just stuff them doubly deep into your basements and under-stairs? Sleep with them in your beds, sit them at your tables—two to a chair, perhaps?—these things we know you have already done before.
“We look the other way … ”
“So it would seem you do now as well,” the poor’s spokesman answered back. “Do you not know that cellars even within the New City, in its poorer sectors, are flooded as well? Such dead as might already be there have floated out, adding, you see, to the problem at hand. And, yes, some rent their bedrooms, sleeping themselves among neighbors’ corpses—just as they do in the Tombs, as you well know, save that here we do it more often for friendship than offerings of jewelry and brass coins—but such rooms are never large. Especially not in the New City’s poor sectors. And so there is no space left even for these things, these bendings of law that you claim you can see even with your eyes purposefully averted, and thus the dead lie in the streets where they fell, with nothing to be done until, like the ghouls’ dead, they start a plague of their own … ”
“Ah, then,” the mayor said, seeing the problem now.
“Mais oui,” the spokesman said.
“And, too,” the mayor said, “we are not boat-gypsies. We cannot simply push them in the river—it violates our custom. Nor could we in any event since the river is already filled with dead … ”
Slowly the mayor rose, signaling for the poor’s delegation to finally be dismissed. “Come back tomorrow evening,” he told them. “I must give this some thought.”
• • •
So it was that night, and much of the next day, that my mayor, chadored and sunhatted against the day’s poisons even with thick clouds still speckling the sky, paced the New City’s streets, checking the progress of its repairers. Of awnings resewn and patched so, when the sun did shine, the broad streets and squares of the wealthier sectors would be thus protected. Of corpses at least stacked in heaps in the poor sectors, so as to minimize their impeding of traffic within those streets.
He asked, and was sho
wn, the course of the gypsy boat that had become lost and left the river, and saw its torn planks where it came to rest, finally, at two of the New City’s widest streets’ crossing—a crossing itself enlarged to what, in time, had become one of its sector’s most opulent squares, though one to the north, still trafficked by wealthy though lacking now somewhat in the latest fashion. And seeing that, I wept, I who had river-blood in my own veins as well, who had been bred thus so as to assure an exotic beauty deserving my mayor’s love, white-skinned and delicate, yet somewhat hardier, healthier than river princesses’—they who die young from breathing the river’s mists—I, so adorned in my jewels and the thinnest silks always accompanying the mayor for his pleasure as well as to help him, I wept for the first time on that dreary journey. And I saw him cry, too, but knew it was not for me, nor for the occupants of that doomed river-ship, but for his city. The city that he loved more even than me—I, who had been bred for his love.
And, so, I wept harder.
And yet from that, too, an idea came to us …
• • •
I asked him, you see, when he finally turned toward me, that question that woman will: Why he did not love me more than the others, the people of New City? Knowing the answer—that it was his duty to love all equally—yet I carried on. I complained. I wept harder. Why must he, at festivals, dance always with the wives of the New City’s most powerful citizens, even if creeping back to my bed the next day? Why could I not be perceived with him in public, save as his assistant?
Despite my bare thighs, peeping through the slits in my skirts. My soft white breasts straining under the fabric that gaped between them.
So others might lust for me.
• • •
Thus the eighth evening after the storm began, the New City’s mayor again received delegates of the poor within his tower office. And with them, also, he summoned news-gatherers, tale-tellers and rumorers so what he would say would be spread throughout all the city’s sectors.
“I will issue a proclamation,” he stated, “that we honor those who perished in this, the worst storm in at least a thousand years, with a last public celebration. Un dernier bal—a final dance. And this shall be a dance not for the living, but all for the dead themselves, to be held”—and this he said in deference to me, or at least to that part of my genetic makeup—“in the ‘Square of the Lost Gypsy Vessel.’ A Dance of the Dead, for the corpses of poor people as well as wealthy, all to be dressed in their finest clothing. For those that were ugly as well as the beautiful—all to be decked in the best of their jewelry, their favorite adornments. And this in three nights hence … ”
And so the New City buzzed, first with questions, as one might well ask: “A dance for the dead? One at which the dead themselves will be the dancers?”
And then, too, with answers: “Yes. One at which they may dance if such is their desire. One at which they will have partners also, deceased, too, as they are. And not necessarily those they were with in life, but rather those which they would have danced with—or at least wished to—had their lives been different. Poor with rich, sometimes, or women of beauty linked with impoverished, but strong, handsome young men. And not always just one. And not always just men, but women with women, had that been their true wish, or men with their fellows, or, sometimes, in groups. Or sometimes with mutations … ”
And the next night as the word spread further, the city began to hum. Seamstresses, suddenly, found themselves new work, repairing and furbishing water-soiled gowns. Sometimes sewing new ones. Jewelers created, while cobblers, in hundreds, brushed mud from their finest shoes. Carpenters built a bandstand on the square while the New City’s most sought-out musicians sought, in their turn, those of their fellows who had perished also—for those who would play for the dead must be dead too, for it would be corpses alone who would hear them—seeing to it that their instruments were tuned. Others collected chairs for the square’s sides for those who, occasionally, might as the night progressed seek to sit some dance out, for the dead, too, could tire.
While others strung lights, both flood lamps and lantern lights, so that the square might be lit up as bright as day when the dancers should finally assemble, or so be assembled, while others built sound systems so that the music could be heard in all parts. Heard, that is, by the dead. Others made tickets and placards and handbills, passing them all about for those who hadn’t heard: “Un Bal du Maire, you say? One by the mayor’s own proclamation? But only for those deceased?”
“It is what mayors do, yes. They proclaim things. And, yes, this festivity has been proclaimed especially for those deceased, but those of us who are not may watch as well.”
“But may we dance as well? That’s the point, isn’t it?”
“If the dead ask us to … ”
And then, at last, the dead were assembled—the mayor having himself been everywhere, or so it seemed to me who was his helpmeet, those last three nights and days, seeing to everything—so, thus, the dead were there, packing the open space. Arm in arm, coupled, the comely, the ugly. All in their best clothes, according to station, the wealthy in finest silk, naturally, trimmed with yellow river-pearls, but the poor, also, in second-hand satin. And some better than that. The wealthy with diamonds, the poorer with rhinestones, perhaps, setting off their hair, but all still sparkling under the lantern lights. Often, surprisingly, rich man and poor woman dancing together—or vice versa—as in life, possibly, they could have wished to.
Now in death so they might.
Some dancers costumed. Just as, in life, they may have seemed different from those that surrounded them.
Now they expressed themselves.
Swaying in couples, in groups, to the orchestra’s phantom music—once in the spirit, as many swore afterward, those of the living who came to watch, or, perhaps in some cases, hoping to be asked to join in the dancing too, “Once in the spirit,” they said, “it was if you could almost hear it”—propping their fellows up.
The dead, thus, concentrated.
And given let to continue the next morning: As the sun came up, its first brightness touching the eastern building-tops, the mayor appeared and climbed onto the bandstand, me standing behind him. He bowed to the orchestra, then turned to face the crowd, the sea of dead faces looking up to his own. Once more he offered a proclamation:
“Let the dance go on. Let the ball continue as it is now for the rest of time, for those that it honors—while we, the living, flee back to our own houses. Let us now, hastily, put on our day-masks, our chadors and sunhats, and seek the protection of New City’s awnings, the life-saving coolness of its shaded homes and stores, while these, here, revel on.”
And so the sun rose, full, hotter that day even with clouds still in the sky, hotter than anyone could remember even though the season was winter—the start of the month of the Moon of Land’s Starving. And so the dead baked there, their fine clothes adhering to flesh softened by the heat, bare arms to bare shoulders, flesh melting into flesh. Just as in life, in some instances, flesh had tried.
But then, also, what passed for a freeze the following night, a snow of chemical salts inundated the square and all who danced, all who still played the music for dancing, leaving all now a soft gray-white.
And so, the next day, the hot sun again now baking salt into flesh, for all who still danced and any, indeed, who ventured, un-chadored, out into the city’s squares. And, again, snow that night …
• • •
So it continued until, at last, the weather settled. The time of storms ended and winter continued, such as it was, with the Death Moon and Crow Moon, then spring with its Moons of First Budding and Wilting. This spring, too, was hotter than any remembered. And people still died, but not so fast now for the Tombs to not be able to receive them while, in the Old City, the ghouls had rebounded and once more were willing to take their gifts from the poor, these ghouls that still lived now fat and prosperous. And very prolific.
Just as the ma
yor had said that last winter.
But he, too, had died by the coming of summer—some said of overwork, possibly much of it pertaining to that final festival. Be that as it may, they took him, at his request, back to the square where the dancers still danced and placed him again at the podium above them. Behind him, the orchestra, frozen in time too, continued to play on, its musicians’ instruments as frozen as they were—their violins turned salt-white with the passing of seasons, their flutes and bassoons beginning to show the verdigris stain of long-aged arm and leg bones—while, at the fore, the mayor stood facing the crowd as he had at that last proclamation. Except with one difference, a difference that I ordered—I who refused to be bound to the next mayor, for it was this mayor that I had loved, yet not without influence still in retirement—that his arms be opened, as if encircling a phantom something. A thing that was not there.
And, thus, on the dancers danced, faded and all-white, their hair stiff and hard as stone, clothing and flesh hard and smooth as if armor, their jewelry still glinting—as if the mayor spoke to them all once more, ordering again that this Final Ball of the New City’s Corpse-kind should last forever.
As if he addressed a statue-hall of death, yet death and frolicking, gaiety, dancing, too. As some of the New City living now swore, as they came in their twos and threes, sauntering by moonlight to pay their respects to him, that they too heard music.
And one more change as well, again at my order, as soon enough, softly, I began hearing the music also—and knew what this hearing meant: That the square now be named “The Mayor’s Plaza,” or in the French, simply, la Place du Maire, and that when the time came my body should be placed within the mayor’s arms—as it had not been in life—so that, at last, it might join in the dancing too.
SARGASSO
