by Felix Gilman
“Everywhere and nowhere,” he said, in his deepest voice. “I have been to and fro in the city, and up and down in it.” His best oracular voice—he’d seen enough prophets and visionaries to mimic the manner. The boy looked back at him with awe on his face, and a bright smile.
His walk ended at the edge of Holcroft Square, looking at what used to be the local Chapterhouse of the Know-Nothings.
It slumped. The upper floors had been ruined, as if a bomb falling or bouncing slantwise had sliced through the roof on its way down to the Square. Now the building’s shapeless and senseless peaks and valleys echoed the Mountain that loomed behind it.
As far as the Committee could tell—and they were painfully aware that the problem was beyond their comprehension—the Chapterhouse had become the Hollow Men’s headquarters, the focal point at which they massed. The beachhead for the enemy’s invasion was right in Fosdyke’s heart. Distances and borders meant nothing to the Mountain’s servants. Four nights ago the Chapterhouse had merely, like most of the other abandoned buildings in Fosdyke, showed occasional signs of haunting—pale faces at the windows, fluttering shadows on the rooftop, cold fingers grasping through the rails of the fence. The shadows gathered, and by the night before last the Chapterhouse thronged with them. Yesterday morning the Committee evacuated the Bird worshippers from Holcroft Square. Last night the shadows had poured from the ruin of the Chapterhouse like black flame.
They liked it in the Chapterhouse. It was mean and dark and unhappy there.
Arjun stood at the edge of the Square and watched the afternoon bleed away. Shifts ended at the workshops and the fields and the crowds passed him by. His bodyguards grew nervous. Shadows lengthened. Afternoon turned into evening. In the cracked windows of the Chapterhouse Arjun saw a nervous shuffling motion. Inside, the servants began to go about their business. What were they? He racked his memory. It seemed he was close to recalling them—if he closed his eyes he could almost picture them, picture how they’d moved about Shay’s house, up on the Mountain.
Pale fussy fingers flicking the ancient dust from the machines of the Mountain …
A thousand thousand men standing in the shadows beneath a single sputtering bulb, waiting to be called to serve …
A dusty steel tray, a row of strange sharp instruments—was that the laboratory where Shay made his servants?
Arjun’s bodyguard shook his shoulder, and he opened his eyes.
The sun had set behind the rooftops.
Slowly, two by two, the Hollow Men emerged from the Chapterhouse. They came through the doors, through the shattered windows, through the cracks in the walls. They moved slowly, without enthusiasm, like overworked doctors leaving for their rounds. Two, and two, and two more; twenty, a hundred. There seemed to be no reason why they shouldn’t keep coming forever.
Arjun had no idea what to do. “Run,” he said, and ran.
Another night, another hundred little battles. The Hollows rapped on windows, climbed up drainpipes, appeared in the shadows of bedrooms, stepped forward out of the dry ticking of clocks. Husbands woke to see pale men leaning by the bedside, hands fluttering about their wives’ throats. Mothers came running into their children’s rooms shrieking to drive away the pale men who lurked by the window. Sometimes that was enough to drive the Hollows away—not always.
Most people gathered in the cellars, underground, where they burned candles, sang songs, sought safety in numbers. The Hollow Men massed at the doors, scratching to be let in like cats, like refugees. The doors creaked but generally held—the Hollow Men weighed very little.
In a few more days the doors would start to break.
Arjun walked the streets. At some point he lost his bodyguard. He followed and spied on the Hollows as they stalked the citizens; and probably the Hollows stalked him, too, a vicious and paranoid circle that reminded him of too much of his life, altogether too much of it. What could he possibly do to stop them? He had no idea.
At four in the morning he came across a group of half a dozen of them, standing in one of the new fields, delving in the earth with their pale hands, methodically digging up roots and bulbs, and stealing them away in their grey sacks. Arjun had never seen anything so mean and vile and loathsome. Furious, he ran at them shouting; but when they dropped their sacks and turned their awful eyes on him, he fled. The chase lasted until morning, when the Hollow Men vanished, and Arjun, exhausted, fell asleep sitting against a low fence.
He dreamed of music. When he woke he thought for a moment that the Hollows had been a nightmare.
Marta stood over him with her arms folded. She said, “Well?”
Arjun persuaded the Committee to release Inspector Maury Not without argument—they regarded the man as a rabid beast.
He asked them, “Do you have any soldiers left among you? Any generals?” They had to admit that they didn’t. “Maury is a wicked man. But this is war, and the enemy is very wicked, too. I need his counsel.”
“All right,” Marta said. “He’s your responsibility.” Maury had been kept imprisoned in a toolshed. (The toolshed had been emptied, but not carefully enough; Maury had found a chisel in the dirt, a weapon that he later produced for Arjun with a triumphant and bloodthirsty smile.)
Maury sat on the floor of the shed. His nose was bloody, from the struggle to arrest him, but otherwise he hadn’t been hurt. He was sallow and starved-looking—he’d refused all food.
“He kept expecting us to torture him,” Marta said. “Or poison him. I sort of think he was looking forward to it.”
Arjun, Marta, and two guards stood by the toolshed door. Marta regarded Inspector Maury like vermin caught in a trap. Arjun bent down to help the man stand.
“We’re at war,” Arjun said.
Maury snorted.
“Perhaps you were right,” Arjun said. “Perhaps it was madness to try to rebuild, and that resistance has brought down the Mountain’s wrath. It’s too late to stop it now. It’s happened. If you still want revenge on the Mountain, this is where you have to begin the fight.”
Inspector Maury suggested fire and dynamite. He jabbed his finger at the slumping Chapterhouse building, cobweb-grey in the afternoon light. “They’ve stolen it,” he said. “So they want it. So we should take it away from them.”
The Committee members nodded. Marta nodded. “Makes as much sense as anything else. Can we do it before sundown?”
The files. Arjun panicked—Maury had said that the Chapterhouse might contain files on Shay. Who knew what secrets the Know-Nothings might have hidden away?
So while the Committee’s guards placed charges against the base of the building, not daring to go inside, Arjun pushed aside the half-unhinged back door and went into the silent, unlit corridors. Plaster had fallen from the cracked ceiling and the floor had a lunar whiteness. The tables and chairs and bloody leather straps in the interrogation rooms cast shadows like ghosts. Arjun jumped at every muffled sound. It was cold and damp in the ruined building but he sweated in fear. Evening breathed down his neck—the Hollow Men might emerge from any patch of darkness, any crack in the dirty glass, any unpleasant complexity.
The stairs creaked under his feet, and shifted, warped by the shock of the bombs. He went up, as Maury had suggested, and along the landing, and up again, into the storage rooms of the fourth floor. He found dusty rooms full of carefully boxed clothes, watches, jewelry, personal effects, taken no doubt from criminals, seditionists, ghosts, the disappeared, over all the long years of the Know-Nothings’ brutish operations. A mad variety of fashions. Blood-stained, torn. He opened a window and threw the clothes down into the yard—it would be terrible, in these days, to waste serviceable clothes. They fell like men jumping from a burning building. He found a room full of a row of desks, their wood warped by months of rain—the roof had been torn open, and the bloody rays of the sunset spilled through the hole.
No files.
He went down into the yard. “Inspector Maury, there are no files on the fourth fl
oor.”
“I don’t fucking know, do I? I was only here for a week, and I was a bit distracted, wasn’t I? Try downstairs. Try the basements.”
Arjun had been afraid of that. He swore at Maury and went down into the darkness of the basements. Torture rooms, execution rooms. Barred doors. The walls plastered with those repetitive and somehow threatening old posters—BE vigilant and we’re all in this together and all the rest. A stink of fear—not just his own. The Know-Nothings had been gone for months, and the stink persisted.
A locked door. He was ready for that—he smashed it open with an axe. The sounds of violence echoed down the haunted corridors and made him feel complicit.
He stepped over splintered wood and broken metal. The long dark room inside was full of filing cabinets, in rows and columns like dwarfish soldiers. Arjun’s lamp flickered. The cabinets in their ranks seemed to menace him—they cast long shadows.
He opened them at random. Names, dates, places. Code words. Classified operations. Stamps and wax seals in the shape of hammers, eagles, the Mountain. A childish fetishization of secrecy and mystery and fear. Rows and rows of cabinets—what was he supposed to do with all that paper? Time was ticking by. The files rustled as he flipped through them, throwing the shadows of complex things unfurling. Names—the names of ghosts, of murdered men. The cabinets in their inert ranks reminded him of how the Hollows, in the vaults of Shay’s Mountain, stood stiff and silent waiting to be called on …
Arjun turned and there was a dark shape in the doorway, like a man, but misshapen, incomplete, oddly angled. He lifted the axe and readied himself for the thing to rush him …
It said, “What the bloody hell are you playing at?” “Maury?”
“You’ve been down here for half an hour—the light’s going. Do you want to be here when we blow the charges? Hurry up, you idiot.”
They carried out the files in bundles under their arms, panting and afraid. No time to read them or search them. They made half a dozen trips. Loose leaves fell out and fluttered away and were lost— who knew what secrets they contained? The sun set behind the rooftops.
“That’s it,” Marta said. “Time’s up.”
The explosion lit the Square red and gold, then filled it with black dust. The Chapterhouse crumbled away and vanished, as if dissolving into noise and light and steam. A cheer went up.
That night the Hollow Men came anyway. They rose up out of the shadows of charred timbers, out of the dismal stink of dust and burning. If anything, it seemed there were more of them.
In the morning it was time to tally the missing again.
The birds,” Arjun said. “The Thunderers—they had a power in them. It might not rival the Mountain but it might give it pause— where do the Thunderers roost?”
But when he approached the strange birds’ roosts, they saw him coming, and they took to the skies. They didn’t want to hear it. Sullen yellow eyes said: piss off. They still felt confused and violated by the last time—you could see it in the way they hovered, waiting for him to go away. Leave us out of it. They weren’t going to be jerked around again. Who could blame them?
That night the Hollows came again, up from the ruins, down over the borders.
“All the places you’ve been,” Marta said. “All the things you say you’ve seen—didn’t you ever learn anything useful?” Arjun shrugged. “My attention was somewhere else.”
Bright colors,” Arjun said. The Committee had given him an empty office to work in, and he sat with his arms on the desk and his head on his arms. It was three o’clock in the morning, and Marta sat cross-legged on the floor, smoking. Shadows gathered around the star of her cigarette.
“Bright colors?”
“Lights. They’re shadowy things. Bright colors and lights may scare them.”
Two days ago a small army of Lamplighters—a mob, really, or a drunken movable feast—had set up on the hills above Fosdyke. They set off fireworks and made ridiculously tall flags. Why not? It was worth a try.
“All right,” Marta said. “It’ll be good for morale, if nothing else.”
The next morning they repurposed four hundred cans of red and blue paint and three hundred yards of cloth out of the warehouses on 34th Street. Children painted the walls, the grown-ups hung the hastily designed flag of Fosdyke from windows and lampposts. A dome and an angel, in red on blue or blue on red, depending—the instructions got confused.
That night the Hollows came. Neatly, sadly, two by two, they took the flags down, folded them up, and carried them away. And they killed, almost as an afterthought.
Music,” Arjun said. “You said they hate music.” Music occupied his thoughts—it drove out the memory of the sound of the Hollows’ fluttering motions. Music? “A choir,” he said. “A great choir.” A retreat into a comforting familiarity. It wasn’t a plan so much as a kind of highly sophisticated panic. He knew it wouldn’t work, right from the start. He saw it bring hope to the locals’ tired eyes and he felt like a charlatan. They trusted him! He felt like a false prophet with a secret bank account.
“A choir?” Marta said. She raised an eyebrow and Arjun was pathetically grateful for her skepticism. “What do you think we are, here? We’re not what you could call musical.”
But they went ahead with the plan anyway. What other choice did they have?
All shifts in the factories and fields were canceled. Fosdyke assembled in Holcroft Square. Everyone—even the children, even the refugees from foreign districts. They filled the Square and spilled out into the alleys. They formed quietly into orderly lines—they were frightened and desperate and happy to do whatever they were told. Women on the left, men on the right, children at the back. They squinted in the bright morning sun.
Arjun went down the line, testing voices. Hardly anyone was shy. Eager to be part of the resistance, they belted out the fiercest noise they could. “Not so loud.” He smiled, a hundred times. “Not so loud.” Different-colored badges, cut from curtains, pinned to the shirt, identified the different voice ranges. “Stand over there—no, over there.” People stepped on each other’s feet.
Bellow and shriek—those were the two principal varieties of voice, along with grunt, squeak, and quack. Maury turned out to have a powerful baritone.
The music—something simple, something jubilant and demotic. In Arjun’s head, when he created it, the music had had a faint echo of his God; when the vast choir rehearsed, and the Square echoed with their voices, it was distinctly undivine. It sounded like a football chant. It sounded celebratory and defiant.
The afternoon darkened. The rehearsals went on. The Committee for the Emergency had beer brought out, and lit lanterns.
What the music lacked in elegance it made up for in energy. The crowd broke again and again into laughter and foot-stamping— they couldn’t be convinced not to stamp their feet, and eventually Arjun let them have their way. What did it matter? It wouldn’t work anyway.
It didn’t work. As the sun set the Hollow Men stepped out of the ruins and approached the crowd. They winced. They looked upset and embarrassed. They held their hands to their ears, or looked unhappily at their feet. They hated the music and the light, but they came anyway. They clutched each other’s indistinct shoulders for support, they whimpered and complained like neighbors pleading for the music to be turned down. They touched the edge of the crowd, and they killed with fear and shame. The choir broke and ran.
In the morning the choir gathered again. This time they took it seriously. Grimly, with fierce determination, they worked to perfect the music. It didn’t make any difference, when evening came.
The next day the choir was a little smaller, and by the day after that it was a quarter the size, as Fosdyke lost faith and went back to work.
That night the Hollows didn’t come. The next morning the choir’s numbers swelled—and the next night the Hollows came again.
So the days went. Was anything Arjun doing making any difference? He didn’t know. What else could he do
? He had no idea.
Happy news!
On a grey morning when morale was especially low, and absenteeism at the workshops and the guardposts especially high, and the choir listless and mumbling, the Committee for the Emergency made an announcement. For weeks in secret they had been restoring the old pre-War telegraph networks. Now they were in intermittent communication, across the Ruined Zones, with their counterparts in the Rebuilding district of Anchor, far to the south. In Anchor the local Organizing Committee had built, out of a factory chimney, and various steam engines and pumps, a kind of cannon, capable of launching heavy blocks of masonry high into the air at tremendous booming velocities. Two nights ago they’d fired on an airship as it passed over, silent and murderous, and they’d hit it, punctured the immense balloon, causing it to buckle and collapse like a fat man punched in the gut, causing it to tear and flap and burst into lurid green flames in the upper atmosphere, staining the clouds with its oily insect blood. Then it was gone, utterly gone, not even enough of it left to settle as ash on the rejoicing city below. The enemy was not invulnerable! Plans were under way in Fosdyke to replicate the device, as soon as the parts could be acquired—so the Committee for the Emergency announced. The Committee opened Fosdyke’s stores of liquor and beer, and declared a holiday. There was music, unrehearsed and chaotic, and there were bonfires, and dancing, and the Hollows didn’t show themselves that night. Maury, drunk and belligerent, shouted 2/ won’t make any difference, it won’t work, but no one believed him. They laughed at him. Enraged, he pulled out his gun and shot an officer of the Committee dead in the street, and ran off into the night, out of Fosdyke, into the Ruined Zone. Even that didn’t spoil the celebration. The tide was turning!
When Arjun cornered Marta by the edge of the bonfires’ light and asked her if any of the story was true, she shrugged and said, “Does it matter?”
In the morning there were half a dozen drunken Lamplighters to deal with, ranting, making trouble, criticizing Fosdyke’s new color scheme. They’d somehow shown up for the party and wouldn’t leave. They shouted in the street below Arjun’s office, squabbling with the police. Well, Arjun thought, that was fine. New people were good, even mad ones, even annoying ones. Life was better than death. He remembered Brace-Bel, and felt a twinge of sorrow.
