Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  After that she avoided Arjun for the rest of the day. So did Stevie.

  Brace-Bel saw him reading the Letters and pronounced a terrible curse on all scholars and antiquarians, then withdrew to prepare for the evening’s performance.

  Arjun declined to participate. He fell asleep while the household was still at work.

  Alarms woke him; or rather the memory of alarms—there was a terrible mechanical howl and drone that suddenly cut short with a whine and a crackle in the moment before he woke, and Arjun wondered, as he stumbled to his feet, in the dark, head pounding, if he’d dreamed it—but the house was full of shouting and movement and banging doors, and he knew at once that something dreadful was at the door.

  He fumbled for the lamp on the shelf. He couldn’t light it. No spark, only a dismal fart of inert gas.

  They have found you again.

  He ran out into the corridor. The shouting was coming from upstairs, from the ballroom. He staggered in the dark into a dressing table and broke a vase and bruised his hip.

  He found the ballroom door shut. Behind it he heard Brace-Bel’s voice, Basso’s voice.

  He pushed the door open.

  Inside was shifting darkness, windowless, packed with nervous sweaty bodies costumed in inhuman shapes. Only the crystal on Brace-Bel’s stick gave a cold light; it reflected in Brace-Bel’s eyes, and Basso’s eyes, and Ivy’s, and off Stevie’s jewels, and the boy’s mirror-plates, and off white feathers and brass buttons.

  Basso was pointing a gun at Arjun. He lowered it with a sigh and said, “Only you. False fuckin’ alarm. What were you doing in the garden?”

  “No,” said Brace-Bel, pulling on his trousers. “There’s something else coming.” He raised his stick; the crystal was very bright now, in the dark. “See?”

  “Something set off the alarms,” Ivy said. “And then silenced them. Arjun can’t know how to do that. Even I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Only a few minutes ago,” Brace-Bel said, buttoning up his coat, “each of our musicians suffered the embarrassment of a broken string or a snapped reed. All of our candles guttered. The electric light died. My watch—see?—has gone still. I’ll wager good money that the milk in the pantry is spoiled. Arjun is a sad and somber little man and his presence may kill a joyful mood, but can he break clocks? He cannot. Something comes. At last something comes.”

  “Brace-Bel,” Arjun said. “There’s something I should have told you. I am being pursued. There are two men who pursued me down the Mountain, and have pursued me since. I am very afraid of them. If I run from here I think they will leave you alone. Ivy, will you come now?”

  Basso raised the gun again, and looked from Ivy to Arjun and back again.

  Brace-Bel appeared not to have heard; he was staring with eager anticipation at the darkness of the doorway.

  There was a hollow and distant sound of footsteps; slow, methodical, regular as the ticking of a clock.

  Brace-Bel’s servants shuffled nervously in the dark. “You should all run,” Arjun said. “Go on, go on!”

  “At last,” Brace-Bel said. “At last. Can you feel them coming? This is magic. This is the uncanny. The walls of reality shake. The doors are opening. Together we have called them here. Something comes and the laws of science tremble.” He removed his watch and stamped it flat.

  “You don’t go nowhere,” Basso said. “You don’t go nowhere, Arjun. You come here and tell me what this is.”

  “They are Gods,” Brace-Bel said. “Feel how everything quivers at their coming.”

  The footsteps grew closer.

  “They are not Gods,” Arjun said. “They are the Hollows.” He felt suddenly ashamed and embarrassed, and mumbled, “That’s only a name. I don’t know what they are.”

  Ivy’s eyes were wild and excited, her cheeks flushed; she hovered between Brace-Bel and Arjun and seemed unsure whether to be frightened or thrilled or both.

  “Close that fucking door,” Basso said.

  Arjun and Brace-Bel said, “Doors won’t keep them out.”

  And in fact it seemed clear that no door could have kept the Hollows out, for they appeared in the middle of the ballroom without passing through the doorway, and no one saw them enter. Two. They stepped out silently from the crowd of Brace-Bel’s servants. The young man in mirrors stepped aside, tinkling, to let one of them pass. Mrs. Down, who wore rags, flinched from the other. They stood side by side in the cold light of Brace-Bel’s crystal.

  They wore dark suits. They were of average height, and no particular build. Their faces were not quite clear in the shadows and glitter of the ballroom, but appeared doughy, baggy, scarred, poorly shaven. One was pale, one dark. Their blank eyes were fixed on Arjun, who was about to speak, who was about to ask, what did I do to offend you, who is your master, when Brace-Bel stepped forward.

  “Welcome! Welcome. I have waited for this moment. Since I was stranded here. No doubt it pains you to come forward to these terrible last days of the city but your presence here is …” Brace-Bel lowered himself stiffly to his knees and shuffled forward with his head bowed.

  Basso lowered his gun, uncertain, and Arjun stepped back, toward the doors, looking around for Ivy; she’d gone.

  The intruders looked blankly at Arjun, and blankly down at Brace-Bel. They appeared confused. There was a coldness in the air around them.

  There was a distinct sense of shame; they radiated it. Arjun felt very conscious of his own wrongness and awkwardness. Brace-Bel’s servants blushed and shifted.

  Only Brace-Bel seemed oblivious to shame.

  “I don’t know your names,” Brace-Bel said. “As you can see I am a pious man but I don’t know your names. Once I raged against your kind, but I have learned the error of my ways. I have made a particular study of the Gods of the old city; look around you!” He gestured at his servants.

  The intruders moved their heads with camera-shutter suddenness to regard each of Brace-Bel’s servants in turn.

  Stevie attempted a curtsy, and stumbled.

  When she lifted her head one of the two Hollows was suddenly standing over her, examining her head to toe with scrupulous exacting slowness. She raised her eyes to it and something passed between them; it was impossible to be sure what. Arjun watched as Stevie’s eyes fixed intently on the thing’s unremarkable face. She seemed to be trying to solve a complex nagging puzzle; she seemed to be trying to recall something important. It was easier for Arjun to look at Stevie than at the one of the two that stood over her. She bit her lip as if on the verge of saying: I remember you! She didn’t rise from her crouch but her face seemed poised finely between terror and contempt—as if she was unsure whether that one of the two was a boss to be bowed to and pleased and amused, or a beggar to be driven from her door. The thing awoke contradictory emotions, none pleasant.

  Stevie had played the Spirit of the Lights in the evening’s performance. She wore a thin dress of sequins and shimmer that left her bony and bruised back bare. There were fake jewels in her hair and her ears and hung on her neck and woven into her dress. She wore bracelets and bangles. She’d carried a candle in a stained-glass lantern—it had gone cold and dark as the Hollows approached and she’d left it at her feet. She stepped back and stumbled on it, shattering it, as the thing reached a hand slowly toward her hair. Its thin fingers shook with—displeasure? Outrage? Fingers brushed and knotted and tangled in her lank yellow hair and she tugged loose with a shriek. And then as she staggered away for the safety of the crowd and found that crowd inching away from her, refusing to look at her, creeping into the shadows—then the glass jewels of her dress began to glitter with a nervous uncertain light.

  Arjun stepped forward and called for the intruders to Stop, but their interest was momentarily diverted from him.

  While the one stood watching Stevie shriek—its hands hanging loose at its side, twitching, as though it was not sure what to do with itself—the other held a hank of Mrs. Down’s rags in its fist, and those rags now sta
nk, and seemed to stretch like snakes and writhe. And it seemed there was a third, and perhaps a fourth, stepping into the crowd and fixing on the young man in the mirrors, who was now bleeding from a hundred sharp incisions, and on the pierced girl, who also bled, and whose flesh now crawled and bulged as things grew and delved beneath; something sharp like a hooked steel finger erupted from her cheek spraying blood. All this was visible by the light of Stevie’s jewels, which burned and blazed now and lit the room with glare and stark shadows. The young man in mirrors began to divide against himself; a sharp dark fault line opened down his screaming face. A fifth Hollow and a sixth moved in the crowd. Arjun called for them to Stop again, but they still ignored him. Stevie’s hair caught fire; Arjun reached for her hand and withdrew, his fingers blistered. He remembered now those men in their dark suits; he remembered them emerging from the shadows of doorways and windows as he turned up and up onto the streets that led to the Mountain. They were merciless to things that were not in their place. That was what they had been made for. They found Brace-Bel’s display unacceptable; they would turn it neatly against itself until it was not there anymore. He could not remember how to stop them. He could not remember.

  Basso shoved Arjun aside, raised his arm, fired a shot; one of the Hollows dropped silently to the floor. A moment later Basso’s body jerked and shuddered as a dozen bullets struck it from all sides, and Basso dropped dead.

  Stevie was now impossible to look at. She was a terrible brightness that burned the retinas and filled the room with shadows and after-images: the sun’s flashing light caught in the glass of a high window, and behind that window a thin girl, suspended, screaming. Then there was an explosion, and then darkness, full of motion.

  “I was warned,” Brace-Bel said. He stood at Arjun’s shoulder. His voice was madly calm. “Mr. Shay warned me. He wanted me to assault the Mountain, you may recall. Are these the guardians of the Mountain?”

  “They’re the Hollows,” Arjun said.

  “Are they the guardians of the Mountain?”

  “I expect so. Yes.”

  “Then Shay armed me against them. I wonder—will this work?”

  Brace-Bel raised his stick, then rapped it sharply on the floor. As Arjun’s eyes adjusted to the shadows he could see the men in dark suits—six? Seven? More?—approaching with some curiosity Brace-Bel’s stick, and the glowing crystal on it. They identified it as a thing that should not exist and swarmed in like sharks. Distant undersea shadows rippled across their white faces and the stone’s light glittered in a dozen dark eyes.

  “Come on, then!” Brace-Bel said. “I have no idea, Arjun,” he added, “how this device is intended to operate.”

  Arjun silently withdrew. He stumbled against a young man half naked in furs who crouched sobbing on the floor; Arjun lifted him by his arm and sent him with a shove on his way through the door.

  Brace-Bel lifted the stick higher and let it shine brighter. Dark intent shapes pressed in around it and around him. He shivered; his whole fat body shook. He muttered. The forms around him lengthened as they approached. It was now hard to tell their shapes from their shadows. There was strain and stretching, shiver and scrape. As Arjun closed his eyes there was shattering. When he opened them again the Hollows were gone.

  The electric lights in the ceiling flickered into life and the bloody room was starkly visible again.

  The curtains were singed and the windows shattered; a cold wind blew in.

  Brace-Bel stood quaking. Tears ran down his sallow cheeks. The stick—did it still shine? It was hard to say now—fell from his hand. “Tonight was to end in pleasure,” he said. “Such cruelty! Such … Where is Ivy? Oh Gods, where is Ivy?”

  Seven servants had died, including Basso; Ivy wasn’t among them. She came back into the room once it was silent and looked around and said: “We have to bury these bodies.”

  “They were brave men and women,” Brace-Bel said. “Each was a great love.”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “The police’ll be here soon, or the Know-Nothings, after all that bloody noise and light.”

  There were no shovels in Brace-Bel’s house—no useful implements of any kind, in fact—and the bodies could not be buried. Instead the survivors dragged the dead down to the wine cellar. Brace-Bel was too overcome to assist. Arjun dragged Stevie by her blackened withered arms; he wore gloves and a cloth over his face, and managed not to vomit. Ivy locked the cellar door, and disposed of the key.

  After that the servants dispersed. They collected their meager belongings from their rooms and vanished into the night. They shucked their fabulous costumes and pulled on plain sweaters and skirts. They crept up to Arjun and whispered: what were they?—and he shrugged—and will more of them come?—and he couldn’t answer. They left one by one, as if scared to be together, as if unable to look at each other. Brace-Bel, sobbing, didn’t seem to notice their leaving. Ivy seemed not to care; she’d lost interest in them. By morning only Ivy and Arjun remained to keep Brace-Bel company. They were unable to clean the ballroom floor of blood.

  In the morning there was a cold grey fog, and all the windows were broken and the house was cold, and besides the whole building stank of blood and burning, so Arjun and Ivy brought Brace-Bel outside into the garden to sit in one of the shrines. Brace-Bel wore a thick shiny green bathrobe and hugged himself like a miserable caterpillar. He stared glassily and muttered. He yearned doglike after Ivy with his eyes. “I am quite shattered,” he said. “Quite shattered. Everything comes to ruin.”

  Ivy scavenged in the dewy grass of the garden, and found nothing but torn wires, broken glass, fused plastic, torn webs, inert lumps of metal and bone. “Everything’s broken,” she said. “They broke everything.” She shook her head. She stood with her hands on her hips, as if awed at the methodical and precise destruction.

  She lifted Brace-Bel’s stick from his nerveless and limp hand. She shook it and peered at the crystal. “Does this look flawed to you?”

  Arjun shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Does it look broken? Does it look used up?”

  “Ivy, I don’t know. Does it matter? The Hollow Men are all gone.”

  She looked at him like he was stupid. “There’ll be more. There are always more ofthat sort ofthing. Don’t you know anything?”

  “I’m constantly surprised by how little I know.”

  “Pathetic. I’ll be ready for them if they come again.”

  She gave Brace-Bel his stick back. Then she went back to searching in the grass. “Come away,” Arjun said. She ignored him.

  At midmorning the Know-Nothings drew up at the gate.

  They came mob-handed. Two flat-backed horse-drawn vehicles like little black omnibuses carried six men apiece. A closed wagon shuttered in black canvas followed. The men disembarked and stood at the gate, scowling and swearing, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm. They wore long black coats. There were not enough cigarettes to go round. The horses steamed and shifted. Their leader made a megaphone out of his cupped hands and called out, “Morning, all. All well, Mr. Brace-Bel?” It was Inspector Maury, from the checkpoint, in fine good humor. “Lot of noise last night, Mr. Brace-Bel!”

  “Hide him,” Ivy told Arjun. He nodded, helped Brace-Bel to his feet, and led him back into the house, by a circuitous route that was not visible from the gate. He sat Brace-Bel on a bench in the library, and watched from the window as Ivy went down to meet Maury.

  “Look,” Brace-Bel said, pulling books from the shelves. “All blank. All gone.” Arjun shushed him.

  Ivy was a tiny form in the distance. He saw her open the gate. He saw her shrug and point back at the house. A fire in the kitchen, was what she’d be saying. Nothing to worry about. No Black Masks here, no ghosts, no nothing.

  Arjun had tried to warn her how much Maury, how much the Know-Nothings, hated Brace-Bel, how much they resented his wealth and his impunity; but she’d been so coldly confident of her ability to lie to them, to confuse
and charm them, that he was almost surprised to see them grab her by her arms and drag her, seemingly too stunned to resist, into the back of the black wagon.

  For a moment it occurred to him that she’d wanted to be arrested. She frightened him; he was willing to believe strange things about her.

  Then the Know-Nothings entered the garden—slowly, nervously. When no unnatural curse blasted them, when their feet didn’t burst into flames, no one was turned into a frog or a pig, no one went blind and no one went mad—then they realized that Brace-Bel’s garden, if it had ever had any power or mystery, was stripped of it now, was just grass and weeds and paving-stones, was just a place in the city like any other; and then they picked up their pace. They were laughing with each other as they approached the house and joking about who’d get to have a go on Brace-Bel’s whores and who’d have to settle for the rent boys …

  Arjun dragged Brace-Bel up off the bench, and together they fled out the back of the house by the servants’ quarters and the overflowing bins and rubbish heaps, which had still not been cleared away, and maybe now never would be. Behind them, as they fled for the estate’s rear gate, there was the sound of Know-Nothings shouting, stop, you fuckers, stop, and the crash of their boots, and the hateful barking of their dogs. Before them, across the road, as Arjun fumbled with the rusted padlock on the gate and Brace-Bel slumped bonelessly against the wall, there was the faint sound of someone in the garden of the next estate over practicing a simple tune, badly, on an expensive flute, while a nervous-sounding tutor muttered encouragement, yes, Mrs. Shandy, that’s excellent progress, very good, and as Arjun listened to the stumbling, halting music and in his mind gently mended and completed it, the padlock suddenly leapt in his hands chiming like a bell, and when he fell through the gate, pulling Brace-Bel after him, it was warm, and he was lying on soft grass, and the blue sky overhead sang with swallows and larks, and he had no idea where he was or how he’d got there.