by Felix Gilman
The intoxicating synesthetic xaw was taken from a virulent purple weed that grew only on certain rusty surfaces. The Dad claimed to have discovered it in his explorations of the city’s waste-grounds. It bore all the marks of having been engineered, he’d said after long study, though for what purpose he wasn’t sure—most likely something religious. The name xaw came from an old book Ruth had read, where xaw was the drug the young wizard used to call on the powers that defeated the King of Shadows … It was probably the wrong name for whatever the weed really was. Certainly smoking it gave Ruth no magical powers. It heightened memory and the senses, it calmed the nerves. Now Ruth and Marta cultivated it in the backyard, on chicken wire and the insides of old machines, and as far as they knew were the only people who remembered it at all.
Everything in the room was a ghost of a different and better time. None of it was more than a temporary escape. The room was a stalled project, a plan of a jailbreak that had gone nowhere.
They needed Ivy back. Ivy was the clever one. Without Ivy they were stuck.
No customers came. Evening fell. The market was open.
Wrapped in a grey shawl—not so much to protect against the cold as to mask her face—Ruth visited the market.
The market’s legal status was unclear—that was the way things usually were, the Know-Nothings preferring to leave people unsure what they would or would not tolerate, or for how long, or under what conditions. The market wasn’t exactly hidden, but it moved from night to night, and you had to know someone who knew someone if you wanted to find it. Tonight it was in an empty barn on the end of Anchor Street. It sold non-Company goods, and stolen Company goods, and sometimes illegal goods. Some of the young men behind the seedy stalls selling incongruously bright and new tools were, Ruth knew, Black Masks. Others were just thieves. Most of them knew her, and smiled, nodded, had enough sense not to say her name out loud, because you never knew who might be listening …
“Miss Lowl”
She sighed. “Good evening, Mr. Zeigler.”
Out of breath, running to catch up with her; drainpipe-tall and thin, grey-haired; cheerful, smiling, bowing, kissing her hand with awkward avuncular courtliness. Mr. Charles Zeigler, resident of No. 87 Carnyx Street, Flat 2C, unmarried, a sort of friend of her father’s from the old days—or at least, they’d shared similar interests. He was now a part-time, lowest-grade accountant for a subsidiary of Holcroft Municipal; he wore his frizzy hair long and wild and kept in a basement down-street a junked and jury-rigged printing press with which he put out Sightings, a cheap newsletter on the uncanny and anomalous, that would surely one day get him in serious trouble unless he learned more caution than he seemed capable of.
“Find anything interesting tonight, Miss Low?”
An old picture book. An odd mirror of antique design. Groceries, while she was there—vegetables, wine, a scrawny rabbit. “Not much,” she said. “Yourself?”
Zeigler was a tenant. A bachelor rent-scraper in a little room. Flat 2C had once belonged to Ruth’s father, like a number of the houses on Carnyx Street, and now it belonged to the Low sisters. Those debts and obligations were about all the Dad had left behind, when he left. Zeigler was probably behind on the rent—he usually was. Ruth couldn’t remember. She’d have to ask Marta.
“Not much. Not much! But I hear you have a guest.”
She slowly withdrew her hand from the man’s grasp. “Shh, Mr. Zeigler. Please.” She felt a sudden panic; she thought of how tiny and vulnerable Arjun had appeared through the windows, receding … “Mr. Zeigler, some things are private. Some things aren’t safe to talk about. He’s only a lodger, he’s only a friend. You won’t give anyone the wrong idea, will you?”
“Oi course not.” Zeigler looked sincerely hurt. “Of course not, my dear.” He took her hand again, patted it. Then he whispered, “I hear he went walking away south this afternoon. Just between you and me, may we prepare for the return of your much-missed sister?”
He let go of her hand. His fingers twitched at the jacket pocket that contained his notepad. His bushy eyebrows twitched. Ruth sighed. “Good night, Mr. Zeigler.”
As she came onto Carnyx Street from the unnamed alley behind the Morgans’ house someone grabbed her arm, and she nearly dropped her groceries; but it was only old Mrs. Morgan, confused, in a panic, asking after Marta.
“What is it? Maybe I can help?”
“I was looking for Marta, dear … it’s Mrs. Thayer, she’s in tears, poor thing, says that poor boy’s gone again. You know how he gets.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Morgan. I’ll talk to him.”
Thayer always went to the same place when he went outside; up to the roof of the Foundry, among the water towers, where he sat grey and fat as a pigeon and threatened to jump. Ruth had to drop her groceries to clamber up the fire escape to reach him. It was Marta’s turn really, but there was no sense wasting time waiting for her. You never knew; maybe today would be the day that Thayer finally did jump. She found him heaving and groaning on the edge of the roof. It was better not to say sorry, however badly you felt it, because it only upset him; better just to sit with him. She touched his arm. Despite the cold he was damp with sweat. From time to time he bellowed, “I’ll do it!” A small sympathetic crowd gathered in the street below. By the time Thayer was ready to come down— shoulders slumped and sighing, same as always—Ruth was hungry and thirsty and desperate for bed.
But Marta was waiting at home, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in her hand and a concerned look on her face.
“I know,” Ruth said.
“We need to talk.”
“Do we have to?”
“You know you shouldn’t. Why do you always do it? Is it because of him?”
Ruth sighed, sat down. “Go on, then.”
“It never ends happily with ghosts. Why do you put yourself through it?”
Marta was right; it had never ended happily.
They came and went—the ghosts who tumbled down the Mountain, lost and confused, half in the world and half out of it, heroic and pathetic and beautiful … Last winter there’d been the pilot. Sandy-haired, handsome, smelling of smoke and engines. He’d gone up on the Mountain on some wonderful winged machine, something like—to judge from the wreckage—a balsa-wood bicycle with wings of silk, and a heavy iron steam engine. He’d had no name that he could remember, so Ruth called him Altair, because that was stitched on his parachute—Altair Aerodynamics Manufacturing. He’d broken his legs in the fall down the Mountain and into the world. He didn’t remember where he was from, or why he’d gone up on the Mountain. He thought he was a kind of explorer; he remembered flying his machine into dark clouds over the Mountain, and the flash and ozone of lightning, and nothing else. Zeigler found him half dead in the empty lot south of Capra Street, and the Lows and Zeigler brought him raving back through the streets and installed him in the bed in the attic. He’d been angry and confused at first, then … Ruth shouldn’t have fallen for him, but she did. In the spring, when he was walking again, albeit on crutches, and not far from the house, he vanished. Did he find the way back to his city, his own time? Did something take him? She’d never know.
Before that there was the astronomer, who came wandering lost down the street on a summer night, frantically asking anyone who’d stop for him: why are the stars so different here? A little ugly man, kind and clever. The stars, he’d explained, were different on the other side of the Mountain. He stayed all summer. He’d forgotten his own name, he’d forgotten the city he came from, but he was full to bursting with stories, myths, and science about the stars, the sky, the clouds. He’d used the stars to mark his path up the Mountain; having been thrown back down in a different place, he was lost. He said he was lucky to have landed lost among such kind friends. When he vanished one night Ruth told herself he’d found his way back to his own stars, and she cried for a day.
Before that there were others. The thief, the soldier, the pilgrim, the sculptress
…
“Every time,” Marta said. “Every ghost that blows through. You always let yourself get hurt. They never stay. That’s not how the city works.”
They didn’t have to stay, Ruth thought. That wasn’t the point. And anyway—”This one’s different.” The words were out of her mouth before she thought about them, and when Marta snorted and said, “how?” she couldn’t answer.
That night she dreamed, among other things, about Arjun—who carried some mystery silently with him, walking with her through a labyrinth under the city, the walls etched in gold and onyx, where every gate was guarded by a thin slithering dragon that asked riddles, the answers to which were all about alien times and places in the city, mostly about Gods. And somehow she knew all the answers, and Arjun followed through the gates after her, and for some reason both of them wore red robes, shimmering and rustling. And as they progressed through the maze the walls pressed in closer and closer so that they were walking arm in arm and almost leaning on each other, breathing together—and that dream shifted as dreams do into a dream about the Beast beneath the Museum. She walked in the dusty velvet-roped corridors, among the hulks of ancient stuffed monsters, glass eyes and stretched skin and bristling lifeless fur, dull scales, molting wings stretched out on iron frames, yellow cracked tusks, broken fangs, and heavy legs on the grey hide of which generations of naughty children had scratched their names. She remembered. It had been shortly after her mother had died, when the Dad still brought the girls with him everywhere he went, and shortly before the Know-Nothings locked the Museum away. While the Dad and Ivy were upstairs among the machines, Ruth, who didn’t share their fascination with machines, slipped away, downstairs, past the ropes, and found herself lost among the ancient animals. Sloth, minotaur. All long dead. Auk, mammoth, chimera. The plaques were so covered with dust she had to ruin the sleeve of her dress wiping the things legible. Amphisbaena, dragon. Then, like dust shifting and falling, there had been a soft voice. It had called her Middle Child.
She would have given any adult a kick in the shins for that, but from that long-dead thing looming still and shadowy over her it seemed acceptable.
Middle Child, you remind me of someone.
She had climbed up onto its platform and settled cross-legged beneath its shadow, curious to hear what it would say next. For a long time it was silent, and then it spoke prophecy:
You will never marry.
… which was a great relief, at the time, and exactly the best way to make friends with her, and make up for the Middle Child business.
You must always keep a close watch on your sister.
… which she’d always tried to do.
You must stay close to your father.
… which at the time had seemed to go without saying.
There was something else on the edge of her memory, some terribly important warning; but then she was torn out of sleep by the shriek of two of Marta’s horrible stray cats fighting in the room below.
Twenty minutes later she found herself outside the Museum. In the cold of the night she was no longer sure the Beast had been real; nor was she able to tell herself it was only a dream. It nagged at her. As if she didn’t have enough strange memories to haunt her! But this one, at least, could be resolved quite easily if only she could get into the Museum, if she could somehow …
She shivered, wrapped her hands in her scarf, approached slowly, coughing to announce her presence, so that the night guards wouldn’t take her for a threat.
There were two of them, standing by the great double doors, at the top of the marble steps. They were backlit by smoky torches and so heavily dressed in layers of wool and leather and fur hats that they loomed like bears.
“Hello, Henry,” she said. “Hello, Siddon. Cold night.”
She knew them both. They weren’t bad lads. Henry—the elder, the less bright of the two—had mooned after Ivy for a summer three years ago. Siddon, the younger, had broken his leg and lost most of the skin on his left arm when he slipped and fell among the grinders in the Glassworks, and if not for Marta’s herbs the infection would have been a lot worse—so it was no surprise when he gave Ruth a friendly smile and waved her up the steps, and said, “Cold fucking night, Miss Low. Boring, too. Come stand by the torches a moment.”
She did. Siddon affected to bow to her, welcoming her to the Museum; he gave her a sly suggestive smile.
Henry furrowed his brow. “You’re out late, Miss Low.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Bad dreams, you know?”
Henry nodded solemnly.
In a conspiratorial whisper, Siddon said, “He thinks the Mountain sends bad dreams, you know, Miss Low.”
Henry scowled. “I only said sometimes it seems …”
Siddon laughed. “Long nights, Miss Low. We all say all sorts of strange things. Do you mind if I call you Ruth? I shouldn’t when I’m on duty, so to speak, but no one’s here who minds …”
“Of course you can, Siddon.”
There was a long silence: Siddon, quite obviously trying to think of something charming to say, only a few minutes away from gathering his nerve to ask Henry to mind the Museum while maybe he and Ruth went for a walk; Henry narrowing his dull eyes as if something about the scene bothered and upset him; and Ruth realizing that there was no possible way of broaching the subject of the Museum’s contents and the mysteries it might contain with these two, that there was no hope of tricking them, that if she asked to be allowed in, they would simply say no, and maybe if she was lucky, for old time’s sake, they would forget she’d asked, but that was the best she could expect …
“I don’t come out this way, much,” she said. “Do they have you out here every night?”
Siddon tapped the side of his nose. “Important stuff in here. Secrets. Count yourself lucky you never have to see this stuff.” He looked ready to say more; then Henry coughed, and Siddon’s face closed into a stiff blank smile.
They made small talk about Marta, and Siddon’s sister, and Siddon’s sister’s baby; and Ruth shifted restlessly from foot to foot. She felt almost able to sense the presence of the impossible creature beneath the Museum, its weight, its warmth, its strange smell; she felt almost able to hear its whispering dusty voice beneath Siddon’s laughter and Henry’s grumbling. Birds gathered in the eaves above, in the cracks of the Museum’s marble facade, settling like memories. Siddon made a daring joke at the expense of Holcroft Municipal’s bosses, apparently to show he wasn’t just your ordinary loyal Know-Nothing …
“I should be getting going,” Ruth said. “If you’re here some other night I should bring you something to drink, maybe.”
“Someone’s always here, Ruth. A little thank-you’s always appreciated.”
The next day she was in an unaccountably good mood. It was a good day for business; the bell rang and customers crept in, opened their wallets, walked out with forbidden books stuffed in their coat pockets. She had a sense that things were moving again, unfreezing, stirring from the dust: Ivy would return, Arjun would bring her back, the mistakes of the past would be wiped away …
The picture book she’d picked up at last night’s market turned out to be charming. It dealt with a young wizard—who dressed very oddly, in what she could only think of as a dress and a kind of sparkly tea towel wrapped around his head—who set out to rescue a princess from the headquarters of a wicked Combine, who had the remarkable power to open quite ordinary doors and manholes and pass through them into far-off parts of the city, or draw through them monsters, genies, storms, flying horses, golems, dancing-girls. The bright pages were brittle with age, and she turned them slowly, carefully, admiring the details, the colors, the vibrant exotic vines that curled around every structure in that long-forgotten city.
It struck Ruth as a good omen. It made her laugh. But she hid it every time the doorbell rang, because it was most certainly forbidden, and if the wrong person saw it …
The book made her think of Ivy. Doors. Before she l
eft, Ivy had been obsessed with doors. With gates, gratings, bridges, and tunnels—with distances and measurements and the spaces between things. They’d had a game when they were girls, and Ivy had taken it too seriously—doors. Same as the Dad, before what happened to him. Ivy would have laughed at the little picture book, called it a childish fantasy, whereas her investigations were scientific, were not about escape, but understanding, and control. Ruth vividly remembered the screaming row the sisters had had, shortly before Ivy—frantic and depressed as her experiments and explorations one by one failed, her mathematics refused to work out, and she was trapped and unable to break free from the city—was desperate enough and unwise enough to go off with that unpleasant Brace-Bel creature. Ruth remembered—all three of them standing in that same cluttered shop front, picking up and throwing fragile books and records, sneering and crying and snarling, arguing over whether Ivy needed her sisters, whether they were holding her back, or whether Ivy was, as Marta said, a bitch, heartless, worse than their father … The room still seemed to echo with it. Ruth refused (it was a sunny day; warmth slanted in through the thick windows) to be upset at the memory. Ivy would be free soon, home again, happy to see her sisters; they could apologize and begin again, together, through dreams, cunning, patience, science, to unlock the puzzle of the city and pass beyond it into better and brighter times. Up the Mountain, into the clouds, down into the warmth of memories; it didn’t matter.
In the evening—as Arjun, miles to the south and east, climbed over Brace-Bel’s low fence—Ruth went walking, hands in her pockets, down the street, meaning to check on Thayer and his poor mother, and noticing how the clouds behind the roofs and the chimney-pots were like blood and grey feathers. Like when Marta’s cats got hold of a pigeon. She was never sure whether to take clouds as significant or not. The Dad had briefly had a period of fascination with clouds, which he theorized were a kind of abstract and roiling map of the city below, color-flattened, like one of his “photographs,” and which might, if you studied them in the right way, offer directions, expose secret paths not visible in the solid world below—but Ivy had said all that was nonsense, evidence of early senility; clouds were only clouds. Ruth had no idea who was right.
