by Felix Gilman
“A Mr. Brace-Bel.”
The man at the table smirked. The men around him nodded grimly; they seemed oddly nervous.
The man at the table said, “You’re one of his.”
“I am not one of his anything, sir. I have a message. I take work where I can find it and I was well paid to carry this message.” Arjun opened his wallet. “See, sir, there’s money to spare on this job.” He left it hanging suggestively open.
The man at the table rolled his eyes. “Put that away.”
Arjun flushed. “Of course.”
“Let’s hear the message.”
“I can’t, sir. I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“That fucking pervert. Brace-Bel. We’re very interested in him.” The men around the table nodded again, closing in. “What’s he up to, then?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“He doesn’t belong here. He’s not natural.” The man tilted his chair back. “You say Know-Nothings. People mean it like a curse, but it’s not. Do you know what the League means? It’s not about this job, son. It’s not about guarding rich men’s houses, or factories, or breaking strikes, or kicking in heads. Do you think we like that? Of course not; it’s just a job. Everyone has to make compromises. The real work we do—it’s about things men aren’t supposed to know. Things we’re supposed to forget. The bad old days when the city was haunted. The evil things they do up on the Mountain. All those ghosts like you who come down and say there’s a War coming, and it’s going to be bad. We Know Nothing Of It. See?”
Entirely confused, Arjun said, “Certainly, sir.”
“Maury, son. Call me Inspector. I know what you are.”
“I’m a messenger, Inspector.”
“Somehow that ghost Brace-Bel comes wandering into town. Normally when ghosts come down off the Mountain, or they slip in through the cracks in the city, we pick ‘em up off the street and we dispose ‘em. Like stray cats. Lost things. And the bosses, the council-men, they tell us, good job. Ghosts upset people; you’re bad for business. But this one’s different. This one’s got money, and he’s made powerful friends. How’d he do that, eh? Fucked if I know. He’s a clever one. He’s got tricks and devices, uncanny stuff. He’s doing all kinds of black magic up there. But we’re not allowed to touch him. We’re not even allowed to get close to him. What are we going to do about that?”
“I don’t know, Inspector.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to let you see him. Last thing we need is you ghosts forming conspiracies against us.”
“I am from Fosdyke, Inspector, born and raised …”
“Don’t waste my time.”
“… very well.”
“What should we do with you?”
“I have no love for Brace-Bel. Let me pass, let me see him, and I’ll come back to you; I’ll tell you what I saw.”
“Aren’t you a slippery one? You wait here. Colfax!” One of the men nodded at the sound of his name. “Go let the Lodge know what we’ve got here.”
Colfax set off at a lumbering jog.
Maury continued staring Arjun up and down.
Arjun shrugged. His legs were nervous and aching so he sat down in the street.
A brief flurry of rain came and went.
A little later a convoy of three horse-drawn delivery carts came, loaded with barrels of beer and vegetables. The drivers studiously avoided eye contact with Arjun while Maury checked their papers. Then they went on up the Hill, the horses straining at the steep incline and the barrels shaking and sloshing with every slow step.
Maury’s manner was not unfriendly, now that he’d decided to his full satisfaction who and what Arjun was. He even offered Arjun a cigarette, and shrugged and smiled when it was refused: “Don’t they do this where you’re from, ghost?”
“I don’t really recall.”
“Huh. Of course you don’t.”
They chatted. Though it seemed Maury intended murder, there wasn’t much apparent malice in it; but then, in Maury’s eyes, if Arjun understood the drift of the man’s conversation, Arjun was not so much a person as a thing; or not even a thing, but an illusion or reflection of a thing; an infection of unreality in the solid world.
Colfax came back and whispered in Maury’s ear. Maury nodded. No action was taken.
Arjun said, “There are better places in the city than this, Inspector. There are places where no one need work, where everyone lives a life of leisure and ease. Machines serve them. There are places where men have mastered flight.” Was that true? Arjun wasn’t sure; he hoped only to pique Maury’s interest. “There are places where music plays from every streetlamp and paving stone. There are places where Gods descend among the crowds. If it’s sex or money that interests you there are places where …”
There was an ugly rash on the side of Maury’s bulbous nose. All Maury’s attention went to scratching it.
Maury didn’t listen, but he was quite happy to talk. “Who are the Know-Nothings?” Arjun asked. “I mean the Civic League. I admit it. This is not my city. Who are you?” Maury lit up another cigarette and answered, at length, cheerily, with a long and incomprehensible history and geography of Chapters and Lodges and Orders; a story of beatings and backroom deals; a slow erratic rise from gang to secret society to mob to hired thugs to party to unofficial to semiofficial police force. Maury claimed to be a person of some importance in the movement, more importance than Arjun thought likely, given his current posting. Perhaps it hardly mattered what lies Maury told to someone who was not real. And as Maury talked and kept talking, never looking at Arjun, drumming his fingers on the table—the day-to-day work of Lodge 32A, which was Maury’s Lodge, the declining quality of new recruits, et cetera— Arjun thought: no, there is hostility in it. Maury talked as if he thought that by affirming the minutiae and the tedium of his city, his real city, he could drive the alien and impossible out of it; he could render Arjun silent and invisible.
Arjun had to repeat his question twice before Maury heard it: “Do you serve the Mountain?”
“What?”
“Or fight it? Who runs this city?”
“None of your business.”
“If war comes, what side are the Know-Nothings on?”
“Who’s been talking to you about war?”
“No one important.”
“Then keep your mouth shut.”
Maury chatted to Colfax about some colleague’s failing marriage; they agreed that it was no big surprise.
“In the Fosdyke Museum you keep a Beast,” Arjun said. “An uncanny creature, from another Age of the city. It should have died long ago. What is it? Why do you keep it?”
Maury stopped smiling. “What beasti”
“A lizard, a gigantic lizard. I don’t know what it is. It talks. Why do you keep it?”
“We kill things like that, ghost. We don’t keep ‘em.”
“I saw it. It spoke to me.”
Maury looked long and hard at him.
“Well, we’ll see about this.”
“What do you mean?”
“None of your business.”
Arjun panicked. “Don’t harm it. Please, I need to speak to it again.”
“Mind your business.” As Arjun started to stand, Maury’s men closed in around him; he sat back down. Maury took out a pen— shook it violently to make the ink move—and scribbled something down on the papers at his table.
“Going to be a cold night, eh? Shift changes in an hour. Then you can come along back to the Chapterhouse with us.”
Just as the sun set behind the Hill there was an explosion.
“Fuck!”
A series of aftershocks echoed down the Hill as Maury jumped up from his chair. Black smoke jotted an exclamation over the top of the hill.
Maury’s men gathered around him, shielding their eyes and staring up the road.
“The Odradek estate?”
“Harrington, more like.”
“There was a riot at Odradek�
�s textile works.”
“Fuck. Black Mask have been putting bricks in the windows of Harrington’s offices for months. Fuck.”
“We caught Maskers trying to blow up Odradek’s wife’s motorcar last fucking week.”
“Shit.”
“I knew there was something in those barrels …”
“Oh no, it did not fucking come past us, shut your fucking mouth, Colfax …”
“Shut up, all of you,” Maury yelled. “Colfax, Burke, with me. Let’s see what’s left. Ah, shit, Harrington had his kids there … Lewis, Waley, stay here. No one passes. You. “ He rounded on Arjun, “Did your lot fucking do this?”
“I can hardly be a ghost and a revolutionary, Inspector. Where would I find the time?”
“Aren’t you fucking clever?”
There was another, quieter explosion—or perhaps the sound of walls crumbling—and a cloud of dust.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck …” Maury started running, stiff-legged and wheezing. Colfax and Burke followed. Maury called over his shoulder, “Lewis, get rid of that shit.”
Lewis handed his half-smoked cigarette to Waley—the job wouldn’t take long, that gesture said—and drew his gun.
“Let me go,” Arjun said. “I’ll disappear. I don’t belong here; this was a mistake.”
“Shut up. Turn around.”
“I can show you wonders.”
“Turn around.”
“Not on the street,” Waley said. “There’s children live here, they shouldn’t have to see it. Down the alley.”
“Let me go and it’ll be like I was never here.”
“Turn around.”
Arjun turned around. He fumbled in his pockets. He had no weapon; not so much as a penknife.
His fingers brushed the glossy paper of the matchbook from the WaneLight Hotel. A small miracle; a matchbook from a hotel that existed only in another world.
He withdrew the matchbook, readied a match to strike, and turned back again.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“It’s a matchbook, Mr. Lewis.”
“Last cigarette?” Lewis asked. “Don’t see why not.”
“If it seems unfamiliar in design,” Arjun said, “it is because it comes from another city. A better and more beautiful city. Do you want to hear about the luxuries of the WaneLight Hotel? Every prince and potentate in that Age of the city stays in the WaneLight Hotel.”
“Shut it, ghost.”
“Then do you want to hear what these matches can do?”
Lewis lowered his gun, an uncertain look on his face.
“If I strike this match, what will happen to you?”
“Nothing.”
“The WaneLight Hotel protects its guests, Mr. Lewis. This is a ghost trick, Mr. Lewis, this is an uncanny device. If I strike this match you burn.”
Lewis lifted the gun again and Arjun raised the matchbook, tensed his elbow as if to strike.
“Ghost tricks, Mr. Lewis. You’re right to fear us.”
For all Arjun knew it was true. What was the Hotel? Where was it? He had no idea. He remembered only enough to know that it was uncanny, and unpleasant. Maybe its artifacts were deadly, maybe its name was a curse. Who knew?
Lewis neither raised the gun nor put it away. Waley screwed up his face and advised Lewis that Arjun’s story was bollocks, but made no move to draw his own weapon. Arjun’s tensed arm began to ache.
There was a noise of crashing and running feet from the crest of the Hill. Over Lewis’s clenched shoulders Arjun watched four men come running down the road. They yelled as they ran and waved their arms, in which they held pistols and knives. What appeared at first to be evening shadows on their faces turned out to be black masks, oil-black rags covering their mouths and noses, leaving only wild eyes and dirty hair visible.
They’d sent barrels rolling downhill before them; that was the crashing clanking sound. The barrels spun and sparked. Metal rims struck cobbles with a deep church-bell peal and the barrels bounced and leapt downhill. Some of them were in flames.
Lewis and Waley turned, swore, and fired wildly at the approaching spectacle, and the black-masked men behind it.
As Lewis swore, fumbled in his pockets, cracked open his weapon, and began to reload, Arjun jumped on his back and grappled for his arm. Lewis dropped the gun.
The barrels went bouncing again, and Lewis was kneeling on the ground, reaching back for Arjun’s eyes, as Arjun held his elbow tight around Lewis’s neck …
The barrels struck a crack in the cobbles and bounced again— one of them burst, spilling flaming timber and hot ringing metal down the street—and Waley was pointing his gun at Arjun and shouting …
Then the barrels came thundering down on them, and they all tumbled out of the way as best they could.
When Arjun looked up from the gutter he’d thrown himself into, the black-masked men were there.
One of them kicked Lewis back down into the gutter.
Another shot Lewis, and then Waley, in the back of their heads, spattering gore on the cobbles. He bent to pick up Lewis’s and Waley’s guns, and wiped them clean on the back of Lewis’s coat.
A third approached Arjun, and Arjun tensed himself again for flight, but the man put his gun away and pulled off his mask. Underneath was a handsome young face, sweat-soaked and soot-streaked, beaming a smile full of crooked teeth. The man extended a hand to Arjun and said, “Thanks.”
The hand was missing an index finger. He seemed to be offering it not to shake, but to be seen. Arjun raised his own maimed hand in response and the man’s smile widened.
“You’re welcome,” Arjun said.
“Are you coming, then?”
“I have business on the Hill.”
“Business is done, mate.”
“Not mine.”
“Good luck, then. Your funeral. Look out for more of these filth.”
The handsome young man pulled his mask back on and ran off after his fellows, who were already vanishing into the evening fog that filled the low places of the city.
For now, the crest of the Hill was bare of enemies. Arjun went up it at a run.
Black smoke rose over the Hill. There was a noise of men shouting, bells ringing. There was a clatter of buckets and ladders, ropes and axes, perhaps hoses. It was all far away on the other side of the Hill, and Arjun kept his distance. He wandered among tree-lined high-walled streets, in and out of pools of gaslight and shadow. Dogs barked and howled their outrage at the invasion of their peace, but even they eventually settled again. The trees and the fences muffled the noise and soon Arjun was out of earshot of it all.
He counted off numbers and addresses. The estates on Barking Hill sprawled. Through the iron gateposts he saw rolling lawns, orchards, a painstaking and manicured facsimile of nature; and another, and another, until it came to seem quite monotonous. Another lawn, another stand of oaks, and behind them, those white marble mansions, lights in the windows, faceless and repetitive in their mathematical perfection.
In the silence Arjun’s thoughts turned inward, and he wondered at his own calm. He’d been within moments of death; he’d seen two men murdered at his feet; he remained unclear as to who exactly the Know-Nothings and the Black Masks were, and what the point of the violence might have been. Any of the people behind those fences, in those beautiful mansions, would have been reduced to shaking and sobbing by the day he’d had; how could he be so unconcerned? Something in his past had numbed him to horror; something valuable and human in him, he thought, had been lost. Maybe he was a ghost.
Brace-Bel’s gate had no number, but a plaque bore his name. By the grace of Thayer’s elderly mother and the black-masked terrorists Arjun was there, alive and intact.
Ruth would have eaten dinner, and the house would be dark; would she be able to sleep tonight?
The fence around Brace-Bel’s garden was high, but the trees that grew outside it and stretched over it were so comically easy to climb that the fence couldn’t seriously be
meant to keep people out. At most it was a warning; it might almost have been an invitation.
Xaw-Market-Ancient Monsters-
Wizardry-Ghosts of the Coming War
Ruth
Through the Window of the shop at No. 37, Ruth watched Arjun walk away down the Street. In the thick whorled glass of the windows his body blurred, twisted, was soon a black angular refraction indistinguishable from the trees or the lampposts. The curve of the Street took him out of sight entirely. Seized by a sudden excitement Ruth ran upstairs to the window of the third-floor bathroom, which looked over No. 39’s roof, and allowed a view of a tiny vulnerable figure that might have been Arjun passing south off the Street across the little patch of waste-ground behind No. 92, and under a yellow sky bruised by grey clouds.
The bathroom was, she noticed, appallingly dusty. “Not been up here in ages.” Her voice echoed. The Dad had been an overambitious builder; the house was too large, too full of empty spaces, too full of drafts and dust.
Ruth considered cleaning—she was too restless.
Instead she wound up one of the music-machines to play a shimmering soulful number by the Pullman & Jones Band, and smoked one and then another of the pungent xaw cigarettes. The music built from minor to major, to a crescendo of trumpets. Her senses sharpened by the xaw, it seemed the air filled with sudden brightness. She adjusted the needle and played it again. The afternoon sky darkened.
The room was full of ghosts.
For instance the music-machine, which operated according to forgotten principles, and could no longer be manufactured, had been rescued by Ivy and their father from a rubbish-tip.
Ruth had rescued the music herself; the record had been part of a lot to be destroyed by the Know-Nothings, but she had been friends with one of the guards at school and had been able to persuade him to let her salvage as much as she could fit under her coat. No one remembered who the Pullman & Jones Band was. The record’s sepia-toned sleeve showed a group of smiling young people, mostly black, men in pinstripe suits and women in dark dresses, in a lush park, in front of an unrecognizable city of domed and glittering buildings. She was achingly proud of having saved them from the fire.
