by Felix Gilman
After the First Expedition
Darkness-Naming-Wounding-Flight
The Stillness Of the air told him he was indoors—perhaps underground. He sat with a brick wall at his back, cool and damp. There was an animal smell.
He wasn’t alone in the darkness. Rustling; breathing. Scraping— scraping of scales? Rattling of bars. Some large caged creature, heavy tail sweeping the straw.
As far as he could tell, he was not sharing the creature’s cage— a small relief.
Time passed.
The rattling of bars, the rough sweeping of the scales, had a kind of off-kilter rhythm. It was peaceful to listen—to contemplate the complexity of it.
Lizard stink, rotting meat, and rust—the thing in the cage was immense. Beneath that there was the smell of gas, of burning gone cold. Stale tobacco? The stones he sat on were littered with the scraps of old hand-rolled cigarettes. Gas—this part of the city was gaslit.
Beneath the creature’s noises were the quiet sounds of distant traffic, hooves, and rattling iron-shod wheels. Distant echoes of market-traders shouting. No song … A man shouting rhythmic commands; a counterpoint of grumbling and groans. A single motorcar roared in the distance—an unequal place, then. Clanging metal and venting pipes. The hiss and groan of steam engines; the creak and sway of cranes and pylons and bridges. A distant panicked moan and bellow; beasts at market? From all over there was suddenly the shrill of whistles and the low mournful complaint of horns.
This is how a city is built. Bit by bit it all locks tight together. When the light comes back the visual world will force itself on him; in the dark he can build the city himself, from these familiar fragments. He closes his eyes tight.
Listen: this is how a city is built from music.
There is something missing in it.
There was a new noise in the room with him. He pressed back against the wall, opening his eyes in the darkness.
A hoarse voice rumbled and hissed, in syllables he didn’t recognize. It spoke in short staccato monosyllables, then in grinding gutturals and long languid cadences. It was working through languages. Each one had a kind of lulling rhythm, until finally there was a language he understood. Then meaning drove out music— but all the voice said was: “It would be courteous if you were to introduce yourself.”
He asked, “Is it morning or evening here?”
“I do not know,” it said. “I hoped you might.”
“I’ll say good evening then, because it’s dark. I apologize if I have intruded.”
“I accept your apology.”
The voice was like glass and stones scraping together. A deeper bass and sharper sibilants than any human voice. “The local dialect,” it said, and it sighed like a rattling buzz saw. “Ugly. I’d hoped …” It fell silent for a while.
He was not sure what to say.
It spoke again: “May I ask how you came here?”
“I don’t recall. Where is the door?”
“You did not come through the door. You appear to have come down the chimney.”
He reached his arm out behind him and felt along the wall. A few feet to his left was a narrow hole, but … “It’s barred,” he said.
“I know,” the creature rumbled. “Hence my curiosity.”
“I don’t know how I came through.”
“I hoped you might know of a way out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ah.” The creature sighed.
“I think I was being chased,” he said. “Hunted.”
It hissed. “It is bad to be chased and hunted.”
“Yes.”
Growling: “It is worse to be trapped.”
“I expect so.”
“Who hunts you?”
“I don’t recall,” he said. “Two men. They chased me all across the city. There was no hiding from them.”
“Are you a criminal?”
He thought carefully. “I don’t think so.”
“You do not smell like a monster. “
“I hope not.”
The beast in the cage shifted and the bars rattled.
He asked, “May I ask your name?”
The beast exhaled deeply; its breath smelled of metals, weeds, the sea. “I have no name. My maker gave me none. He kept all the names for himself. May I ask yours?”
“I forget.”
“You are a young man of average size and adequate health; there are many strange smells on you. I will call you Man.”
“If you like,” he said. “What may I call you?”
“I am in a cage. You may as well call me Beast.”
“Ah. What do you look like?”
The Beast took in a ragged snort of air. “I smell sulfide and phosphor. You have matches on your person.”
He patted his clothes. He wore no jacket and his shirt was torn. He wore a silk tie loose around his neck. There were a number of things in his pockets, one of which was a crumpled and nearly empty book of matches. He struck one. (Quickly and deftly in the darkness—he had strong, dexterous musician’s fingers.)
He started and jerked back. A yellow eye the size of a man’s fist reflected the match’s yellow light. It was only a few feet away. The slit of black down the eye’s center clenched tight in the light like the narrow bars of the cage. The creature shifted its head, coyly presenting itself: a long snake-skull, crudely formed, green scales and dull ridges. Loose lizard jowls on its thick neck. Its body was long and ridge-backed. It scales were cracked and discolored, its hide was lumpy—scarred and stitched? A fat tail swept the cage and rattled the bars. It was the size of a bull, maybe? It opened its jaw to show yellow teeth. The match burned out.
Rack your brain. What else did you see? Think. But the visual world was never his strength. The light did not reach to the back of the room, but I think the ceiling was low. I think: no windows. A wooden door to my right. The cage had wheels on its base. The matchbook was red and from the WaneLight Hotel—that pretentious capital L curving, priapic, subtly obscene. What else?
“You are a remarkably educated lizard,” he told it.
“Thank you. I do not frighten you?”
“I’ve seen stranger things than you. Or I think I have; I don’t know. You speak very plainly, for a monster.”
“You understand me very plainly, for a man. No one else left in these bitter days understands me. I shall have to be more obscure if I wish to awe you. I am the strangest thing on any street of the city for many miles.”
“I meant no offense. I’m sure you are. I’m well traveled but I have heard of nothing like you. Where in the city are we?”
Was he well traveled? He thought so. He felt tired; he carried scars. He remembered nothing.
“We are in the Fosdyke Museum of History and Natural Wonders. In its cellars, to be precise. I was an exhibit once, and now I am a prisoner, and soon perhaps they will kill me. There is nothing else like me left in these last days of the city. And I am in a cage, and you are not.”
“Where is this museum?”
“In Fosdyke, on Holcroft Square. The Museum has stood here for far longer than this Age of the city. Like me it has survived out of its time. We are far from any river or lake and near the lower slopes of the Mountain.”
At the word Mountain a fistful of images flashed in his mind, grey-toned flickers like the phantoms of the cinema. Two vague men in hats and shined shoes approaching implacably. A clock tower, the white face darkened by a complex and spiderish excess of hands. Eyes, half-light, pale faces, men stacked like cordwood in a cellar under a spitting bulb. A garden of grey roses. A silent square of ugly statues. Clouds inert in the sky, as if painted; the birds also still, perfect intricate little china models. (Wires? No.) A tram swaying into a rain-soaked station, shaking as if frightened to stop for him. Gears turning. Time as a trap. A dark basement, a thousand Hollow Men standing in the shadows under a dead bulb. A tarnished silver tray bearing sharp and twisted implements. An old, old man looking down from a high win
dow and snarling thief and twitching grey curtains spitefully closed.
“I have never left the city,” the creature said. “And perhaps I never will. But I have heard that there are places where madness is associated with the moon—that pointless white rock. There is a word: lunatic. Here in Ararat madmen dream of the Mountain. Are you mad?”
“No. I don’t know. How would I know? Where—when are we?”
“These are the last days of the city,” the creature said. “This is where things stagnate. This is where things come to fail and end. Man, are you a failure?”
“Very possibly. At what?”
The lizard shifted on its huge haunches and made a mechanical barking noise that might have been laughter. “I am not satisfied with calling you simply Man. It may offend. Will you permit me to name you?”
Apparently taking his silence for assent, the Beast began.
“There is a story they used to tell in these parts, long ago, before all such stories were forgotten. It was popular among the worshippers of a certain God, a certain harmless but ineffectual spirit referred to only as the Ineffable. It manifested rarely even back when I was young and Gods were many. Its cult was one of those that claimed exclusivity; that held out its God as the city’s sole creator. As such cults go it was inoffensive; it attracted mostly the elderly and they spent their days writing peevish letters to the editors of local newspapers. There were many worse in this city.
“They said—the Knowers of the Ineffable—that this city once was open fields and hills, babbling brooks and limpid blue pools and shady copses and the like. Yes? A vale as vast as all of Ararat, flowers to every horizon. They say the Ineffable came down from the Mountain to rest among the flowers, to sit cross-legged and ponder the Mysteries. And that He brought with Him His manservant to watch over Him as He sat in contemplation.”
The Beast pronounced Him with a bitter hacking H.
“But they say that while the Ineffable sat in silence, head in the clouds, the manservant grew bored, grew resentful, lonely; that he wandered off. Always he came back, regretting his dereliction of duty; and always he would quickly grow restless again and strike out in some new direction, over gently rolling hills, farther and farther out, until one day he found a beautiful pool in a valley and sat down by it to talk to his reflection. He was lonely, you see.”
The Beast gave an exaggerated steam-engine sigh.
“And from the deep blue waters a face arose, within the servant’s own, then taking its place: the yellow-eyed face of a serpent—its long body coiling away beneath in the depths. And it spoke. It asked him, why are you here? Who have you run away from, Man?
I dunno, he said. I got bored. Nothing to do.
Will you go back to Him? the serpent asked.
I dunno.
You don’t have to, the serpent told him. And it told him, there are trees over the hill; break off the branches. There are flat stones by the riverbanks. Build four walls; build a home. There you can hide from your master and you need never go back.
“And so,” the Beast continued, “he did.”
The Beast paused for so long it seemed it might have died. Then it said, in a clattering rush: “Well, even the Ineffable can only ponder the mysteries of the cosmos for so long. He woke and was hungry and needed to bathe and found no food waiting for Him and no water or towels. Beetles had crawled on His skin; birds had pecked at His beard. And He came looking for his manservant. He looked in on him, through the holes in the hut’s crude thatching. He saw him lying on a bed of reeds, asleep. Did He wake him? He did not. Did He punish him? Maybe. He gave him what he wanted. Outside the hut’s reed-woven door, He laid a dirt track. While the manservant slept, He raised up huts and shacks all along that track. At the end of the track He set a crossroads and three stone roads; at the end of each of those roads, another crossroads and another. He built houses and offices and warehouses and prisons and theaters and tenements and palaces all along those roads. He built a maze around His sleeping manservant, in that one night. Hide from me, will you? Imagine Him laughing as He works. In the morning the manservant woke to find himself caged and lost at the heart of something new and mad: the city. Ararat. And he walked out into the crowds.
“There was a dispute among the Knowers of the Ineffable. The story at this point diverged. Some said the manservant rose to be a prince of the city; others that he wandered like a lost ghost in the mob and his pocket was picked and his throat slit and his body left in an alley. Or perhaps he got a job. Got married, had children? Or grew old and died of one of the many diseases less well-made creatures like yourself die of. At this point in the story—I have thought a lot about stories—the servant ceases to be interesting. Now the story belongs to the city. The servant, lost on those crowded endless streets, is lost to memory. Lost to himself. Anyway, if I remember rightly, his name was Arjun. Some say the serpent named him Arjun; others that it was always his name. May I name you Arjun?”
“If you like. It sounds familiar. Maybe it was my name before.”
“Maybe, Arjun. I am very wise.”
Beast?”
“Yes?”
“There is only one door in this room. In order to reach it, I must come very close to the bars of your cage, in the dark. Are you dangerous?”
“That door is locked, Arjun; don’t bother.”
“Ah.”
“I am both a prisoner and a treasure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for your pity.”
“Then we may be here together for some time, Beast.”
“That may be, Arjun—unless you have remembered how you came in here.”
“I have not. I think it had to do with music.”
“Sometimes I hum to myself to pass the time and I may have been doing that when you appeared. Do you like music? There is little of it in these days. Perhaps I was singing some of the old music.”
“I think it had something to do with music. That means nothing to you, Beast?”
“Nothing that would be of use to you.”
“It means nothing to me.”
“Then we are stuck.” The Beast rumbled. “You raised my hopes! I wanted to show myself to the world again.”
It seemed impolite—so Arjun was a polite man, then!—not to ask: “Will you tell me what you are, Beast?” “Why not? It will pass the hours.”
The Beast’s story began in darkness, in forgetting. In muck and filthy water. In the sewers. It had been a simpler creature once. It had been a sewer-thing.
In certain parts of the city, the Beast explained, the sewer-tunnels were very deep and wide. It described great arches of moss-wet stone, dark foul water. Drains and grates and sluices like waterfalls. Galleries of mildew and algae. Humans lived down there—they lived everywhere, they burrowed into every place, hacked out homes in every crack in every wall in the infinite city— and so did stranger things, such as the Beast, for one. It coiled its long body through the dark water. It fed on rats and the occasional unlucky rat-catcher. It listened to the drip and echo of the tunnels. It never had a thought in its head until the spiked noose snapped shut around its neck, sharp spears stabbed its sides, it was hauled unceremoniously from the water, its legs were lashed to its belly with rope, and it was heaved and dragged by dray horses into the light.
“My first thought,” the Beast said, “was that I hated the light. Nothing since has changed my mind.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“For a while I was kept in a cage, on a high wooden platform draped with bunting in vulgar colors, by the front gates of the mansion of the local potentate, a man who styled himself Minister. People came and threw rocks. Or just gawped. This went on for some years. The looks on their faces! They’d always known there were monsters beneath the city, but they’d never dreamed they’d see one dragged up into the light. My poor scales went dull in the sun; my eyes went milky in the glare. I was a sorry sight. And yet people came from all over the city; from districts a
nd cantons many, many days away by coach. A cacophony of accents muttering about me. I learned their languages quickly. I have a remarkable brain, I discovered.”
“You have no memory of what you were before?”
“I was nothing; I knew nothing. I was an animal. Then I was dragged into the light; now I am a thing in a cage. But there is much more between then and now. You are impatient. I’ll be quick. In the hottest summer of the century, when the air was black with flies and thick green weeds choked the rivers, the Minister finally died. I was of no interest by then; I was no surprise. They sold me to a circus and I traveled in distant precincts. I was moved from cage to cage sometimes, at spearpoint. The circus changed hands, passed from father to son to grandson to the grandson’s hermaphrodite acrobat lover and poisoner, who went mad and was succeeded by a team of sober investors from a bank. They found me … discomforting. They kept me in the darkness of the tent and allowed the children who saw me to think I was merely a clever machine. They did not like to think about me. When they died, some faceless cog at the bank decided to sell me along with the rest of the circus animals to a stockyard to be rendered into glue.”
“Clearly you escaped.”
“Clearly! I had learned a trick or two at the circus. When my mere person was no longer enough to fascinate my public, I learned tricks. I learned from an elderly rheum-eyed charlatan to tell fortunes, to read minds. I could not read palms; who would trust me enough to come so close? But I read names and eyes.”
