by Felix Gilman
“Were you good at it?”
“I was remarkable, Arjun. And when they finally delivered me trussed to the stockyards to be rendered, those simple men who worked there—well, when I told those simple men secrets and prophecies—oh, then they would have done anything for me. Then they would no more render me than they would their own mothers.”
“You lied to them,” Arjun said. “You must be cunning.”
“Ah, but my friend, you misunderstand. I was not a charlatan. I was and am a true prophet. I was surprised, too! I was what they thought I was. It is in the nature of monsters to be … malleable.”
“You have gifts of prophecy?”
“You are skeptical?”
“I am neither skeptical nor trusting.” Arjun shrugged. “I do not remember whether such gifts are normal or not.”
“In certain districts in certain times they have been quite everyday. In Saddler’s Drum, I have heard, every man had the gift; they’d have considered you blind and deaf. Every child is born bawling, they say, having seen in utero the moment of its death; in Saddler’s Drum dice are considered a baffling joke. But here I am a monster.
Here and now, in the last days, there is nothing as wonderful as me.
And soon they decided I was a God.”
“You do not strike me as a God. I can smell you, for one thing.
In my experience, Gods are less substantial.” “And what is your experience, Arjun?” “I don’t know. But I do not believe you to be a God.”
“A reasonable doubt! But then, you have not heard me prophesy.”
“I have not.” “Would you like to?”
Arjun—he was quickly growing used to the name; it had a comfortable familiar fit—considered the creature’s offer. He felt no great sense of urgency. If he was a prisoner in this small dark world, it was best that he spaced out the few amusements it had to offer. And the Beast seemed to feel no particular urgency either. Judging from the sounds, it was lowering its head and coiling itself, as much as it could in the cramped cage, to sleep.
“Beast? If you can see the future, how did you come to be a prisoner? Could you not have avoided it somehow?”
“You want to hear the end of my story? It is increasingly sad.” The creature shifted; its voice came closer again as it lifted its head up, close to the bars. “Well then. As a beast of prophecy I had another burst of fashion, and I was displayed again in the finest salons. But they did not release me; I was precious. And in the end fashion swept me away, Arjun. The one great inevitability. The plague of the city—the old city, when it was still vital and young. A madness of youth. I miss it now, but at the time it was deadly. You would not think fashion would touch me, would you, Arjun? As if I were a hemline, or a popular melody, or a school of painting—when I am in fact a monster, a freak, and arguably a God. Should I not be either beneath or above fashion? Or to one side? But no.”
The creature’s scraping hissing voice was not pleasant to listen to. It was too loud. Arjun wondered whether to ask it to speak more quietly—was that impolite?
“For decades—centuries, quite nearly—I had the ear of Mayors and Princes and Plenipotentiaries and High Priests. Magnates who, I might add, owed their positions largely to my counsel. To my warnings; to my insights into the nature of opportunity. Archbishop Pnoff of the Immaculate Self used to lead me around the cloisters of his abbey on a golden lead, so that all could see my splendor, and know that it was futile to oppose him. Oh, and he fed me … he fed me well.”
“How old are you, Beast?”
“Old. Fashion, Arjun! The Mayor Fosdyke would not get out of bed without asking me what the day would bring. And wisely so. But his son had traveled in distant districts and picked up progressive ideas from men who regarded themselves as scholars. He found me an embarrassment. I am ridiculous, Arjun; that was what he decided, and soon all his constituents agreed. I am ridiculous. And I have certain repellent appetites. And I offered young Fosdyke the Second my gifts of fortune-telling, and I told the fortunes of anyone who would visit me even for an hour or a minute, but they only laughed politely, and then not politely; and the future happened to them anyway, in the same old way, so who is to say they weren’t right? In the end they kindly packed me away in a marble-pillared wide-windowed room here in this very building; upstairs; in the Mayoral Wing of the Fosdyke Museum of History and Natural Wonders. And there I moldered among antiquities from distant lands, from the deep cities beneath the city, from strange cantons hidden in the city’s cracks and folds. For a time I was visited by occasional scholars, who found me interesting. Then they found me ridiculous; they found me shameful; they denied my existence; they stopped coming. A hundred years passed and another hundred. The occasional janitor came to dust my stand. In every generation a curator came into the old wings to catalogue the rubbish there—the vulgar displays of their ignorant forefathers. Twenty years ago children still came, infrequently, on rainy days, exploring the dusty cellars into which I had slithered. Pale bearded Museum-men roped off my corridors but some curious children still came. Too few, too few. Their admiration was sincere but too small to keep me whole. From time to time I forgot what I was, I think; sometimes I thought I was only a thing. A statue. An empty shell. Sometimes I was an animal in a cage. Sometimes perhaps I was not there. In silence I became unreal. I returned to clay, as the pious folk of the old city would say; butIwould say, this is how my maker made me. A provisional creature. An ambiguous creature. Real enough only to serve his purposes. Cruel father! His surgeries are not merely physical. His laboratories are indescribable. Oh, but you asked how I came here. Arjun, even as an animal I was too terrible for the frightened little men of the present Age. New men came and brought me down here into this little prison and locked me away. Utterly away! I expect in the end they will destroy me, but it has been many years. Even as a mute thing they feared me. These are sad exhausted times, Arjun, and I know things that should not be known, I remember things that everyone has forgotten. I was made to know and to tell.”
A hysterical tone had entered the creature’s voice; the high whine of a struggling motor. “Of course I saw it coming. How could I not? But what could I do? Here among the relics and the dust, what could I do but wait for onrushing obsolescence?” It crashed to the floor and went silent, save for its heavy breathing.
“I’m sorry.”
It snarled.
Arjun asked, “What maker?”
It exhaled.
“You said you woke in the sewers. What laboratories, what surgeries?”
“A figure of speech. I was speaking metaphysically. My makers, the Gods. Are you a religious man?”
“Yes.” He didn’t know what else to say. “Who locked you away?”
“The Know-Nothings.” It made a horrible hacking noise, as if trying to spit. “A species of policeman. This is their city now. They put me down here. You will meet them soon, unless you remember the door by which you came here, and do it quickly.”
The Beast couldn’t be drawn further. Arjun let it be.
Arjun. Had that been his name before? He rather thought it had, in which case he had recovered one part of what had been lost to him—though he remembered nothing of his parents, or of his childhood, or of anyone—other than the ridiculous lizard in the cage—ever calling him by that name, or any other. What else did he know? He was a man. He was reasonably sure that he was a musician of some sort.
He knew principally that he was looking for something very important. And as soon as he acknowledged that fact, in the silence and darkness of his own head, a rush of desperation hit him: his head suddenly pounded with the urge to escape that little cell and break out into the streets and resume his search for … what, exactly?
He couldn’t recall.
“Beast?”
“Yes?” It sounded tired, deflated.
“Do you see pasts as well as futures?”
“It’s all much the same stuff. Do you”—it seemed to perk up; it shifted heavi
ly—”Do you want me to read you?”
Arjun stood. “I would like that very much, Beast.”
“Come closer; you must touch me.”
“You did not need me to touch you to tell me my name.”
“Names are easy. Names are whores; they’re anybody’s. I can tell you better things than that. Where you are from and where you must go. What the emptiness inside you is called. Come closer and touch me.” Arjun heard its head bumping up against the bars.
He struck a second match. He was startled again by the creature’s size, its rough lizard skin, the crudity of its form and the yellowness of its eye. It seemed impossible that it was speaking in those civilized tones. He wondered briefly if it was only a puppet— if some dwarf hidden inside the thick hide worked its levers and voice.
Its huge nostrils flared. Its breath stank. It pressed its heavy head against the bars so that the match’s light lit snout and eyes and the rest was in shadow.
Pity and revulsion and fear. It was so lonely, so ugly, so strange. What if it was telling the truth? Arjun did not know where he was, what sort of place he was in; was it possible? With his free hand Arjun reached out, fingers outstretched to touch the scaly snout. And, as his fingers passed between the iron bars, the Beast lunged—bit—taught him an ugly fact about the world.
Arjun was aware of nothing but pain for—how long? Pain and the snapping tearing sound of the thing’s bite, which played over and over in his head, beneath the blazing pain, like a broken phonograph he had heard once playing over and over in an empty tower-block. He howled and ground his teeth. When the pain went cold and numbness set in and he could think again almost clearly he found that he had, in his agony, torn off his shirt and wrapped it tight around his left hand, which was the pain’s throbbing engine. He lay curled on the floor in pain and shock, hot sticky blood soaking the shirt.
The match had burnt out.
Over the sound of his pain Arjun was vaguely aware of the monster talking, in conversational tones. “… seem to see you in a room full of stars, full of star-machines, on a dark hill; don’t talk to him for too long, Arjun. Unless you already have, of course? Ah, yes … this moment tastes old. My apologies.”
A fresh pulse of pain hit him. It ebbed away slowly.
“… helter-skelter down the Mountain; clutching the map in your hands; the map being the first thing to fall away from you, bit by bit. All those who dare the Mountain are destroyed. All but one. How many have I sent to their doom? Enough! Down the Mountain; you were warned, of course, in his sly way he tried to warn you, but the young one’s no match for the old one’s cunning …”
The Mountain! A rush of images in his mind again; Arjun couldn’t make them out, crowded as they were with the fear and the pain. He knew with a sudden sick certainty that whatever it was he was missing was on the Mountain, lost in that airless distant darkness. His wounds both physical and spiritual throbbed with the certainty of it. The Beast was still talking, low and mumbling, a jumble of phrases and names and places; through his pain Arjun caught this time he’s so old, so cold. He caught the Hollow Servants, the Failed Men, and he caught the shadows return. A clattering rush of street names and numbers—Bone Alley, 111th, R Street, Carnyx Street. He heard fat Mr. Brace-Bel and his beautiful blasphemies; the Beast rolled the phrase repeatedly on its tongue. Arjun blacked out for a moment thinking of the creature’s bloody tongue and severing teeth …
“… Arjun! Arjun!”
There was a new urgency in the creature’s voice. “Arjun! Are you listening?”
“What did you do? Why?” His voice was hoarse.
“Arjun! Can you not hear them coming?”
He turned in the darkness to stare in darkness at the chimney grate through which he had apparently come.
“No, no, Arjun! Down the stairs! Through the corridors! Our captors are coming! The Know-Nothings in their hobnailed boots! They will destroy you if they find you, Arjun! Run, Arjun, when they open the door!”
The creature was thrashing in its cage; the bars clanged and rattled like a building collapsing.
Arjun stood, in the darkness, on shaking legs, clutching his wet wounded hand to his chest. His forearm was quite numb. Now he, too, could hear footsteps in the world outside, and echoes of some stupid cheerful banter. Now he heard keys rattling in the lock.
Arjun closed his eyes tight. The sudden flaring light as the door opened still stunned him.
The Beast roared and hissed like a dumb frightened animal. A harsh voice yelled at it to shut the fuck up.
Arjun opened his eyes again and ran stumbling for the door. Three men blocked it; big men in black leather jackets, carrying blazing lanterns and heavy barbed spears. He crashed into them and they fell back in shock. The Beast roared and slammed against the bars. One of the men had the presence of mind to grab Arjun’s arm; Arjun spun round and slammed his forehead into the man’s nose. There was a sparking cymbal-clash shock of percussion. Arjun did not know where he had learned to do that.
Outside the door was a narrow red-brick corridor, and a staircase. Arjun ran; after a moment the men behind him picked up their dropped spears and followed him, shouting at him to stop, you bastard, stop.
At the top of the stairs was a door. Beyond that was a huge echoing room, cathedral ceilinged. High wide windows let in shafts of moonlight. The room was full of looming shapes, under white funeral cloths. In front of him as he ran Arjun saw a marble arm gesturing out from under one of the cloths, holding a wreath. There on his left was the exposed hind end of a horse, sculpted in brass. The men behind him shouted and stamped and echoed in the emptiness.
Arjun could hear the Beast’s roaring, too, echoing all through the empty Museum.
At the far end of the room were huge double doors of brass and dark wood. They were open just a crack. Over the door’s arch was a marble frieze. Horses and men and women and coiling snakes and men with the hindquarters of goats and bulls fought—mated?—on the frieze, all in white marble. Someone had methodically chipped away each and every head. A golden plaque caught Arjun’s eye and a fragment of its text stuck in his mind: raised up from Anterior Pumping Station Seven of the Holcroft Municipal Trust sewer system beneath Fosdyke in the Year … but he read no further; he slipped through the crack in the door and out onto the wide stone steps of the Fosdyke Museum. He half fell, half ran down them.
It was late evening and there was some kind of shabby market in the square outside the Museum. It was clearly winding down; stalls were being dismantled or shuttered, their cheap goods placed on wooden carts or the bent backs of old women. Rank grasses throve in the concrete’s cracks. Sullen-looking teenagers loped idly among the stalls and sized Arjun up for possible violence. Men in grey flannels and grey caps—every one of them in grey, slumping home or standing in little clumps smoking silently—glanced at Arjun as he staggered past and then ignored him, hunching their shoulders, hands in pockets. A pale woman with a single thick black eyebrow who was packing away a stall with three big metal tureens of reeking fish soup stared at him with nervous distaste: he was shirtless and bloody and strange.
After all the Beast’s hysterical talk, he had expected something apocalyptic, awful, the wasteland, the end of days! Not this— though with the monster’s voice still echoing in his ears, even that ordinary market scene had something sinister about it, something furtive, unhappy, hungry, frightened … And then he stumbled and looked up, and saw that behind the pale woman—behind her soup stall, and behind the buildings behind that, an ugly industrial sprawl of tenement windows and fire escapes and water towers—and behind the fat-throated factory chimneys venting smoke and sooty flames—and behind the shallow looming domes of gasometers— and for a vertiginous moment it seemed even behind the dull yellow eye of the moon—behind everything was the vast darkness of the Mountain. Streetlights and firelight crawled its lower slopes, like a bright spill of jewels and treasures, like signs, like bright insistent advertisements for something incomprehensible;
but the peak, the peak was so dark. The Mountain was so close, here. Elsewhere, everywhere, it was a remote troubling shadow on the horizon; here it loomed. How did these people not go mad?
Arjun ducked through the stalls, under their canvases, and into an alley, and another alley, and another. The Beast’s litany of street names rang in his head, floated up at him off street signs, until he wasn’t sure of the difference between the inside and outside of his mind. He ran where his feet took him, until he could no longer hear the men from the Museum stamping after him and shouting after him, and at that point he collapsed against a damp concrete wall and with relief he blacked out again.
Which Door?-Three Sisters-Maps,
Music-Ghosts-The Bosses’ Men
Adog woke him. The mangy thing—naked spine and fly-thin legs, long whining muzzle—was sniffing and licking at the bloody rags on his hand. Arjun kicked it away. It retreated to the end of the alley, where its eyes shone in darkness.
Darkness. It was night, still; he had not slept long.
What light there was in the alley came mostly from that yellow moon—sulphur yellow. So this was a part of the city with smog-pumping industries—that was a thing to know. A little light spilled from the windows of some kind of upper-story meeting hall, where someone shouted angrily and some massed unanimous others stamped their feet.
A large, ugly bird settled with a clang on the fire escape above Arjun’s head. It darted its yellow eyes, shifted its claws on the rails, and emitted a loud noise like breaking wind. There was something shiny in its claws.
“Fak yoff,” it sang. “Faaaaak off. Fakoff.”
It took off into the night on heavy thumping wings.
Arjun recalled vaguely that he was not unfamiliar with fever and madness and hallucination. That was something worth knowing about himself.
