by Felix Gilman
It was four days after he stood under Ruth’s window, wondering if he should go up to her, or leave her alone, trying to remember just how she’d put it when she’d said she needed time, time to think. Should he? Shouldn’t he? What would he say? He felt like he barely existed anymore. The afternoon shift ended and passersby slapped his back and said: Good man! Our savior, Mr. Clever, this is! He’ll figure it out! He smiled, to be polite.
It was three days after he volunteered in the fields, and went to bed with his back aching and slept dreamlessly, wonderfully, too exhausted to think of how he was trapped.
It was two days after the Storm blew in, off the Mountain— they could all see it come down off the Mountain, roiling and churning, rushing like a flood. Lightning whipped it on. It carried soot, dust, black mud, wet leaves, driving industrial rain. Ruth threw the attic windows open and stared into the hurtling darkness. Her father, spitting in the city’s face. This was his answer, then! Why couldn’t he just leave them alone? But he couldn’t do it, she realized; the wound was too deep, the guilt too painful. What would he do to himself when he was all alone again? The Storm whipped away the flags, tore down the bright rags, scoured away the paint, splattered Fosdyke a monotonous grey-black. That night the Hollows came again, and did their work unimpeded.
The messages came in the form of posters. They were well disguised, woven subtly into the fabric of the city, and Arjun might never have noticed them if Ruth hadn’t pointed them out. How long had they been there? He couldn’t be sure.
“They’re fresh,” she said. “Look. Isn’t that odd?” They were walking together down Carnyx Street. It was a grey afternoon. The shock of the Storm and the return of the Hollows had struck at the roots of Fosdyke’s resilience, and now the workshops were abandoned, the fields untended. The Committee issued orders, and the orders were ignored, or never heard. People hid in their homes, drank and fucked in the bars, lit out across the ruins for shelter in Fleet Wark, or Anchor. Ruth and Arjun, who knew something they couldn’t share with anyone else—something that explained everything, but made no difference, would only make things worse—walked together down empty streets, in silence. The days were numbered. It was odd, then, that there were freshly plastered posters, still wet, glistening, on the brick and concrete walls of Carnyx Street.
They looked like the old posters the Know-Nothings used to put up. A picture of the Mountain, black and vast; the green-inked slogan below urging vigilance. But instead of vigilance the slogan was murky, unformed, an analphabetic nonsense.
Ruth brushed her fingers across it; they came away sticky. “I remember this.”
Oh?”
“I don’t know.”
The next morning the posters were wrapped askew around all the lampposts on Carnyx Street: this time they resembled the old Know-Nothing posters with the young girl, and the old man, and the slogan about how we’re all in this together—but the faces were blurred, vague unfinished sketches, and the letters illegible. Arjun found Ruth standing by the lamppost, deep in thought.
“Ivy?” he said.
“Ivy. “
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. It reminds me of something, from when we were all little.”
He touched the poster. It had dried; the green ink was already fading to yellow. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“It’s not for you.”
The next day, all along the concrete wall at the back of Carnyx Street, by the fields: the Know-Nothings’ old recruitment posters. The slogan was more like numbers than letters, and the faces of the young men in their boots and black coats were blurred.
I saw them again,” Ruth said. “Down by the canal.”
She’d been keeping notes. She’d been keeping a map of the posters’ appearances. She had tried to scrape samples from the walls, but they came away in damp grey strips of rag. She started trying to sketch them.
People were starting to notice her obsession.
“The face,” she said, brushing her fingers along the glossy surfaces. “On that girl. I feel like I know that face. I feel like I know the words.”
It’s not words,” Ruth said. “On the posters—it’s not language at all. It’s a kind of code.”
“Are you good with codes?” Arjun asked. “I know a great many languages but I have always been slow with codes.”
“No. Ivy was the one who was good at that sort of thing. But I remember this.”
“Ivy?”
“It’s her face, you know. If you look just right you can see that it’s her face.”
“It’s been too long,” Arjun said. “I forget her face. All I remember is that she looked like you.”
“No. She was the beautiful one.”
“Was she?”
“When we were children we had codes, and languages. She used to make them up. And … he, you know … he used to pretend he couldn’t understand them, though I suppose he could have if he wanted to. He wasn’t all bad back then. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested. Or maybe Ivy really was cleverer than him. Shit. I don’t understand. But I remember. Ivy’s trying to talk to me. She’s reaching out to me. She needs me, Arjun.”
It was as if Ivy’s patience started to run out—a letter came through the door of the Low house, addressed to Ruth, though no postal service had existed since before the War. Numbers and letters; private language, in a childish hand. The graffiti on the fence spoke to her, and the way the ivy curled on the railings. Another letter. The signals multiplied.
“We used to have a game,” Ruth said. “I think I remember it. When the Dad was away, we used to pretend there were doors, a maze, a secret city just for us, full of miracles. What did we call the city? What were the rules? Oh, the weeds in the lot behind the house were a forest. Those old iron sheds were like towers. Palaces. The rusting gears in the old junkyard were treasure maps. The cobwebs, the candles. The grown-ups didn’t know. The boys from the factories didn’t know they were part of the game. We used to mark our territory with chalk and flowers and stones and broken glass. We took it in turns to be Queen. We had a game, when we were girls, and Ivy always took it too seriously. We had names for things—I wish I could remember them.”
Arjun hovered close by. He didn’t understand, and there was no point trying to understand. Whatever she was seeing it was private, personal, incommunicable. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He couldn’t sleep. It was very close now.
Marta had him summoned to her office. The headquarters of the Committee were in disarray, half empty, purposeless, and off-kilter like a sinking ship.
“Stay with her,” Marta said.
“I am.”
“I don’t know—I don’t want to know. Do you understand me?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve put a lot of bloody work into not knowing.” She was drunk.
“I understand.”
“We can’t last. It’s all going to fall apart. We can’t make it work down here, not when …”
“Marta …”
“Shut up. Listen. When you go up there, I suppose you’ll do whatever you have to do. Your whatever it is—God or whatever. Do what you need to do—just think about us, will you? Try not to forget us down here. If you can do anything. Stop all this. I don’t know.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t let her get hurt.”
“I’ll try.”
“Bloody right you will. Go on, then. Get back to her.”
And one day it seemed it was suddenly obvious to her. The shape of it came into focus and Ruth smiled beautifully. Her table was littered with scraps of paper, notes, scribbles, diagrams, maps marked with the various messages she considered significant.
“It’s a map,” she said. “And I understand‘it.”
Arjun came to stand behind her. “I don’t understand any of it.”
“I do.” She kissed him, and took his hand. She snatched up her scribbled maps and ran downstairs. He follow
ed. They didn’t bother to lock the door. Arjun’s heart was beating madly.
Downstairs in the street she was standing by the mouth of the alley, studying her map. She bit her lip nervously. She beckoned to him, then stepped decisively into the shadows. He followed.
They took a winding path to the Mountain, through back alleys, up and down fire escapes, along dusty never-used emergency corridors, across rooftops, through unlit empty cellars.
The route Arjun had taken before had led across vast open plains, station concourses, ornate blasted plazas—terrifying and immense exhibitions of ruin and emptiness. The route Ivy sketched for them now was a subtle and furtive one—tradesman’s entrances; half-open untended windows; unused sheds.
They crept along in the weeds by the sides of train tracks. “She says don’t get on the train,” Ruth said, and Arjun saw no reason to argue; the half-faces he saw in the windows as the trains rushed past, hollow, elongated, were not welcoming.
All morning the Mountain was at their backs, and, door by door, they seemed to be moving south across the city, and away from it. Ruth consulted her notes nervously.
“Are you sure …” Arjun kept asking, and she shrugged no.
They were being followed; they both felt it.
“Do you see that … ?”
“I thought I did. It’s gone now.”
Whatever it was, it didn’t approach them, and eventually they agreed they were imagining it; that all that was behind them was their own shadows, the slowly closing doors …
When they thought they were lost, there were more marks on the walls; more posters; the name ivy finger-written shakily in the dust on a broken window; complex spiraling children’s games sketched in ivy-green chalk over the next manhole; a sprawl of ivy all along the wall of an alley, or curling around the black iron of a fire escape.
In the afternoon, they began to approach the Mountain again. It carne closer and closer. It grew from a distant grey-blue blur into a vast darkness.
They stepped from one alley into another, briefly crossing a high gargoyled rooftop, from which they could no longer see the Mountain, in whichever direction they looked; and they knew they were inside it.
Nothing attacked them. Nothing black and dreadful hurtled down from the sky or boiled up from the gutters. If they were followed, perhaps it was only shadows or curious animals. No traps. No darkness of forgetting enveloped them. Ivy had found a secret, safe path onto the Mountain.
And Arjun did not understand how it was done—in fact he tried not to think about it, because when he tried to understand his head hurt and he felt sick and scared. But as the day wore on he began to sense the shape of Ivy’s mathematics; the vast geometrical perfection she had … made? Charted? Discovered? It made his own wanderings across the city look amateurish, sentimental, haphazard, half-hearted. There was a cold and beautiful music to it. He felt that he understood her; he felt that he would never be capable of understanding her.
“We never understood her,” Ruth said.
At the end of the alley was another alley, which opened onto a broad, dark street. The streetlamps all down it at irregular intervals cast a ghostly haze, circled by moths. The ends of the street—if it ended anywhere—were lost in shadow. Opposite the alley’s mouth was a long concrete fence. There was a gate. It was locked.
“We can climb this,” Ruth said. “Give me a hand here.”
“No,” Arjun said. “I should go first.”
She shrugged. “Be my guest. Welcome to the family home. Wipe your feet.”
“Ruth, are you afraid of your sister? Your father?”
“I don’t know. Yes. No. I just want to see them.”
“We may have to kill him. I will kill him, if he won’t give me what I want.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe even then. He cannot be allowed to keep the Mountain.”
She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Something played on her lips that was maybe the start of tears, maybe a smile—at his expense?
“And Ivy?” she said.
“Ivy, too. Ruth. Ruth. She may have brought you here to help her, but we are not here to help her. Do we agree on that?”
She nodded. She said nothing. The white lamplight made her pale, ethereal. A good person, Arjun thought, an innocent, despite everything. She would never forgive him for being a part of all this. That was her father’s fault, too. Small comfort!
“I’ll go first,” he repeated.
They helped each other over the fence.
They were in a rank unweeded garden—the grounds of a neglected mansion. There was a stand of unhealthy-looking trees to their left. The grass was wet and there was a slightly marshy odor.
There was a thump and rustling behind them, as if someone had followed them over the fence, but when they turned they saw nothing and no one.
At the far end of the garden—down winding paths, and past a number of hulking dark sheds—stood Shay’s house. The form of the Mountain. A mansion of immense, imposing size. Wasteful size—only a handful of windows at the center of the dark mass were lit.
And, as Arjun and Ruth approached, it struck them that the mansion was tremendously ugly; and what was ugly about it was that it was so repetitive. It was less like a sprawling and luxurious mansion than like a single, mean, five-story flatblock repeated again and again, stacked and reflected and refracted, but not elaborated or developed. It had no interesting features other than size. It was a failure of imagination, instantiated in brick and iron.
“This isn’t real,” Ruth said. “It’s a mask. This is how he wants it to look. It could be anything. The Beast said this was a machine the Builders made, an engine, a factory, a … I don’t know what. He made it this way. This is how he wants to live.”
“This is his soul, Ruth.”
“He wasn’t always like this.”
“Are you sure?”
From the concrete sheds to the right of the path there was the hum and grind of slumbering machinery.
A huge curved corrugated-iron shed stood by the left of the path. There was a rusty half-open door. Sounds of murmuring, whimpering, hissing emerged. There was a sound of something like tuneless singing.
“Don’t,” Ruth said, as Arjun pulled at the door, making stuck hinges screech. “Don’t. We should stay on the path and go to the house.”
“Is that what Ivy says?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t trust Ivy. I want to look around.”
He pulled. Something snapped and the door opened.
The interior of the shed was huge and dark and smelled of rust and blood and muck. A single dim electric bulb dangled and swayed like a suicide from the high ceiling.
Whatever had sounded like singing, or murmuring, it was silent now; perhaps it had only been the creak of the metal, the groan of the pipes, the low hum of electricity.
There were shapes in the shadows—crates, cages, tables, the no-longer organic bulk of dead things.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Ruth said.
Arjun slowly approached one of the cages. “We can’t make him any angrier.” Something the size of a man slumped in the cage, wrapped in what might have been a cloak, might have been shapeless useless wings.
“He has laboratories,” Arjun said.
Did the shape in the cage move? It was hard to say. The bulb swayed slightly; the shadows twitched and jumped.
“He was always interested in birds,” Ruth said. Arjun turned to see that she stood by a row of shelves, like library stacks, on which stood rusted birdcages, dirty glass cases, wooden perches either empty or holding stuffed parrots and hawks and ravens and other, unnameable birds. “All dead,” she said. “They’re all dead.”
“No one’s been in here for a long time,” Arjun said. “The light—you’ve never seen those lights, have you, electric lights? They burn out. It should have burned out long ago; that door was rusted shut, and the dust … But nothing works here as it should.”
“He was always interested in
birds. He used to tell us—no, he used to tell Ivy, we were just there in the room sometimes when he said it—he used to talk about how free birds were, how lonely, how the city was all open for them. Once I said, why do you put them in cages, then? And he just laughed. I thought he was laughing kindly.”
A number of the birds were dismembered in part, flayed and sliced open, nerves and muscles and bones exposed.
“He used to know a lot about how their eyes worked. They were too slow, or too fast, or something; how they saw pictures of things.”
“Nothing here rots,” Arjun said. “Why doesn’t it rot?”
“Birds. Oh, it really is him, isn’t it? Oh no.”
“He does worse things,” Arjun said, “to more precious things than birds.”
The sound of shuffling; a slow drip-drip.
There was a row of cages containing dead dogs, dead apes and monkeys, leathery little lizards. Some bore the scars of elaborate surgeries; others didn’t, yet.
“Perhaps at first he collected them,” Arjun said. “Creatures like this. Do you think these spoke, when they were alive? Or obeyed his commands? Or the birds—did they navigate for him? I imagine him trading for them—there are places where such surgeries are cheap and commonplace, and places where they must seem like the most wonderful and terrible magic. When I met him, when he went by the name ofLemuel, I remember there were birds …”
“Look.” On a low table, covered in dust, there was a row of sharp instruments. Ruth brushed her fingers through the dust, and shuddered.
“He must have learned it somewhere. He must have learned all kinds of things. I walked in his paths for years and I never learned very much of anything.”
“He’s much cleverer than you.”
“My attention was focused elsewhere. Now I feel I’ve wasted my time. I am afraid to face him.”
