Arcane II

by Nathan Shumate (Editor)

  “I’m sorry, Anna,” said Virginia, trying to get around her sister, but Susannah was determined to hold her there longer, and she grabbed her by the arms and drove her back a few steps.

  The wind took them a little farther than Susannah had intended, but she held her ground. “You don’t get to leave.”

  “Let go of me.” Virginia tried to tug herself free, but Susannah was stronger. “Let me go!”

  Susannah’s grip nearly slid away at Virginia’s struggling, and they stumbled together near the edge of the roof, Virginia pulling and pulling away and Susannah grabbing and shoving, until Virginia tried to duck around her, and Susannah gave a frenzied cry and pushed her, and then—

  Virginia wasn’t on the roof anymore.

  Susannah didn’t even see her fall. When she peered over the edge of the roof, the tiny body was already sprawled on the pavement. The note she typed up on Virginia’s computer was frantic and incoherent, but it sounded well enough like the ranting of a suicide case, so she hit print and then stumbled down the darkened hallway, past the shells of empty cubicles, out to the back parking lot, and waited for the call.

  ***

  As she was wondering how long it would take for frostbite to settle into her numb digits, the phone began to buzz.

  Susannah stared wonderingly at the still-dark screen, thinking that perhaps in the delirium of hypothermia and sleep deprivation she was hallucinating the sound, but the phone vibrated steadily in her hand. Every time it had rung that day, the Caller ID had borne an impossible name which had sent her into fits of terror, but now Susannah, limbs aching in the cold, desperately grasped the phone and flipped it open.

  “Hello?”

  “Anna,” said the familiar voice. “Where are you going?”

  She had to press the phone to her ear with two hands, they shook so badly. Her breath came ragged, almost but not quite a sob. “Home.”

  “Is the city your home?” Virginia’s voice crackled in her ear.

  “What?” Susannah asked breathlessly. “I’m going home. Virginia—I didn’t mean to. You know I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

  “Stop telling yourself that. You don’t believe it.”

  “Please,” said Susannah, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a rotting body in the passenger’s seat, dried blood caking the cracking skin, hair matted with spilled bits of gray matter, face a puzzle of stitched-together flesh—but when she turned her head to the right, there was nothing there.

  “This is nine,” said Virginia, her voice more and more distant in the raspy static. “You’ve entered the city. Vexilla Regis prodeunt inferni.”

  Susannah dropped the phone and threw open the car door, blustery wind slapping her in the face and pulling violently at her hair and coat. She stumbled through the snow past several rows of cars which were now only mounds of white. In the distance she could just make out the city lights, staggering upwards in slanted lines as if the skyscrapers had become old headstones jutting crookedly from the frozen earth. The lights plunged up into the writhing clouds as the snow swirled in thick pellets.

  The echo of her sister’s strange, unearthly voice guided her on. She had to find a way out. She had to get home.

  Ahead, on the shoulder of the road, was a hunched figure. Susannah came closer, recognizing the tattered brown coat of the homeless man and desperately glad that there was at least some other living creature around, even if it was him.

  “Hey—” she called, her voice tugged away in the wind.

  As she neared, she saw him gnawing on something like an animal, and it took several minutes of staring to realize that it was a human leg in his hands, blood and bits of torn-off flesh hanging from his greedy mouth.

  He looked up as if sensing her approach, black eyes boring into hers. Susannah stumbled away and took off down the expressway, weaving around the hulking, white-clad cars.

  There was a sign up ahead, the big blue kind that gave the name of the exit. Susannah tilted against the wind, eyes streaming, mouth sour, until she was right under it, and looked up at the blurry letters.

  WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DIS.

  She shook her head, terror pounding into her skull. Too bad, too late.

  Her mother’s face floated into her mind, along with her biting, unforgiving words. Jesus glared accusingly from where He hung crucified all over the walls, body emaciated, hands nailed down, crown of thorns cutting into His bleeding head.

  “Virginia!” Susannah shouted. “Help me!”

  But Virginia would not help her. Susannah had killed her, and all that was left was her mother’s judgment. And this time, the punishment would be worse than six hours of kneeling.

  She spun around, trying to see through the blinding snow. The lake was on her right, frozen solid, and the world groaned again like a giant stepping onto a wooden stair that could not bear its weight.

  Breath now quickly shuddering in and out of her icy body, Susannah squinted at Lake Michigan, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. She sank to her knees, staring up and up into the unfathomably massive shape protruding from the ice.

  In the dark she could make out no details of the dark figure save the shadow of six huge wings beating at the wind. When the creature tried to shift, the ice groaned with the weight. A horrible snarling, chewing sound emanated from the distance, like a dog eating a rabbit.

  “I killed my sister,” she murmured, and she sensed the beast pause and sniff her out.

  Slowly the beast turned three heads to her, and in the darkness she could just make out each of its faces: Virginia’s shattered face on the left, Susannah’s own on the right, and in the middle her mother’s accusing stare, acknowledging her confession with cold and unforgiving eyes.

  The frozen lake loomed before her, and Susannah found herself sliding out onto the ice on her hands and knees, the wind pushing her forward. Below the surface, she saw bodies frozen in contortions of agony, arms outstretched as if beseeching her aid, legs twisted, eyes wide and staring up from their icy tomb.

  Stuck in their stasis, they were forced to forever remain in the moment of their treachery. But Susannah knew there was a special place reserved for her—the creature was hungry.

  She was home.

  Orpheus and Eurydice

  Miranda Ciccone

  I lost Elle to the monsters. I know they took her because I didn’t see her for weeks. Maybe longer. I damned well searched for her everywhere I could think to look. The apartment, the streets, the cafés and libraries and all the shops and the empty museum and the docks and the beach and the foaming edge of the ocean.

  No one had seen her. I asked everyone, showed her picture to old men, young women, mothers with babies, kids walking dogs. I asked the men selling hotdogs out of carts and the ice cream vendors, I waved her photo at cops and hookers and businessmen hurrying home. I showed her to bus drivers and meter maids and knots of kids hanging around corners smoking.

  No one had seen her.

  I turned my apartment upside-down. I turned my life upside-down. Bills and letters and manuals went everywhere. I tore apart the television, the phone, the kitchen cabinets. Searching for a hint, an impression, some sort of memory. Something to tell me why. A pattern. Meaning. I took a knife to our bed, shredded it to pieces, filleted the pillows and savaged the sheets.

  Days. It took days, and then I sat surrounded by gutted machines and the intestinal tangle of wires and mattress filler and the confetti of our life, and stared at my hands as the blisters oozed. I was bloody, and I stank.

  I lost Elle to the monsters.

  I spilled back out into the street under a burning autumn sky. People ignored me as I called, and ran, and called. Fleeing down tunnels of backs and shoulders and pristine heads, hair shining halo-bright in the falling dusk, the artificial radiance of streetlights. My voice bouncing hoarsely down corridors of smearing light.

  Elle Elle Elle. Gone, gone, gone.

  “Maybe she left,” a man on the
corner said, and I stopped so quickly I stumbled, and stared. He quirked a grin at me. I’d never seen him before.

  “She left you,” he repeated, nodding and bobbing and self-satisfied. I gaped at him.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Look at yourself,” he snapped, “You’re disgusting.” He flapped a hand, taking in my days-old beard growth, greasy clothes, pus and blood and burn marks. I hadn’t eaten for days. I had forgotten to eat.

  “Or maybe,” the stranger whispered, sidling up close enough that I could feel his breath on my ear, “maybe she was never really with you at all.”

  I screamed, right there in the street, surrounded by strangers. Screamed until my voice cracked, and I ran. Not home, because that wasn’t home anymore. Away. Toward the sea.

  I fell to my knees by the water and it spilled away from me, toward the sun. I dug my ruined hands into the phantom warmth of the sand. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried. Cried and drooled and spit and begged.

  “Give her back. Give her back.”

  But the sea never gives anyone back.

  ***

  I woke up lying on the beach, shivering. Someone was squatting over me on his haunches, hands dangling. Moonlight shone on round spectacles, but the face was young, male.

  He sucked air through his teeth.

  “Listen,” he said, “You’ve got to get up.”

  “I can’t,” I breathed, voice skittering away from me.

  “Well you can’t stay here, either. There are people coming.”

  “People—” I propped myself up on an elbow. The stars were overhead, hard and distant. “No. What are you talking about?”

  He pushed his glasses up his nose. “There are people coming from the sea. This is where the dead come back. They follow me here and they go back to the city. Look.”

  He stood up and stretched out his arm and pointed. I stared, and then followed his gaze.

  Behind me a city sprawled along the beach. Something shadowy and enormous. Something I’d never seen.

  “The city of dreams,” the man said. “The dead come from the sea.”

  I got up, staggered away from him. I still couldn’t see his eyes but I could see the gaping hole in his forehead, oozing blood down half his face. He smiled at me, a little sadly.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m dead too.”

  I backed up. Kept backing up. But then what he’d said registered finally.

  “Elle,” I said. “Will she come back? From the sea?”

  He looked at me.

  “The monsters took her, into the city. You know that, Oscar. You know.”

  I nodded. I did know.

  He stepped closer. His feet made no sound on the sand. His hair was glossy black and his face no older than mine.

  “Run into the city,” he whispered. “Find her. Find her.”

  A splashing noise came from the edge of the water. A shining head emerged, then another, and another. Slowly, the bodies of the slain walked out of the sea.

  I turned, and ran.

  ***

  The people were gone. The businessmen, the mothers with babies, the cops and hookers and vendors and kids on the corners with their cigarettes, all gone. The streets were full of the smell of burning leaves, and wind, and ashes. I fled down dark roads past black windows and hanging talismans of bone and twine that clanked in the breeze. Strange signs flashed in the corner of my vision, chalk and paint and darker fluids, on brick and concrete and stone.

  I ran until I stumbled and then my legs gave out in a plaza of some kind. I hit my knees beside a dry fountain and passed my hands over my face. Sweat and snot and God knows what else.

  The dead man was sitting on the edge of the fountain.

  “Listen,” he said, “My name is Ángel. I’ll help you if I can, but I’m dead so there’s only so much I can do for you.”

  “Why?” I gasped, throat dry, “Why... help me?”

  “Because I hate to see the living come here,” he told me gravely. “The city is where the lost go, and the forgotten. It’s fine to be forgotten when you’re dead, but not like this. Not the living.”

  “I never forgot Elle.”

  Ángel shook his head. He said only, “The monsters live here. This is where they come from.”

  He stood up, held out a hand.

  “Get up,” he said.

  ***

  He told me about the monsters. Stick-Man, Ghost Bird, the Face in the Moon. Bones and gods and shaking laughing things, inhuman squirming writhing things, hungry mouths and flaking skin and dry, dry, dry. Demons of the wilderness, older than the city, older than the people in it. Old.

  “You forget them, and forget them, and forget them but they never ever forget about you. They wait.” Ángel tapped my head, above the temple. “They swallow the living. The ones who lose their way.”

  “How many people live in this city?”

  “Millions.” The dead man paused. “More. Hundreds of millions. Generations. They get trapped and can’t find the way out.”

  “Why do the dead live here?”

  He shook his head. “The dead don’t live anywhere. It’s just that they keep following me back.” He flashed a grin and for a moment his mouth was full of blood.

  Then it wasn’t.

  “We’re being tracked,” he said, after a few minutes of wordless walking. “Stick-Man’s dogs.”

  I hadn’t seen it but I’d heard something. Something huge, cataclysmic, shifting along in the shadows behind the buildings. Bigger than the stars, but hidden. My mouth went dry.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  He gave me a shove. “You run.”

  I ran from the dark, into the dark. Panting breaths pursued me. I heard the thrum of padded feet on stone, the clatter of nails. My footsteps struck heavy and blind. My chest burned. My eyes, my legs. Burning.

  I needed a way out, an escape, but I found only blind alleys, dead ends, streets turning in on themselves again and again. A maze. I stumbled into brick walls and clipped sharp corners, fell and clawed my way upright. Gasped and spat saliva and maybe blood.

  Something struck me from behind and I pitched forward, scrabbling and stumbling.

  Scream, a voice hissed in my ear. She screamed. Cry for her. Lost. Lost.

  “No!” I choked out, and got my scraped hands under me, and my feet, and took off again. The shadow followed, loping behind. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it, blotting out the stars. Smell the stink of it, old blood and rot.

  Blonde head lolling, eyes empty, teeth reddened and face swollen with decay...

  No. No. Not lost.

  I saw Ángel in the distance, by a razor wire fence, waving both arms frantically. I strained my aching legs and reached the fence just ahead of the dog, which wailed and howled when Ángel shoved me through the broken gate and slammed it home.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and didn’t turn to look.

  Elle’s hair is like a wave.

  “It’s okay,” Ángel murmured, after long moments passed and I struggled to breathe. “It’s gone now.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “She isn’t dead,” I said, but my voice shook.

  “All I know is she isn’t in the sea,” Ángel answered. “So she must be here, somewhere.”

  I looked at him. He had probably been about twenty when he died.

  “What happened?” I asked, gesturing at his face. He shrugged.

  “Something I wasn’t prepared to handle.”

  screaming

  “Oh,” I said.

  I looked around.

  “This place belongs to Ghost Bird. She and Stick-Man are bitter rivals—his dog won’t dare come here.” The dead man took my arm. “Come on.”

  ***

  I saw the living for the first time in Ghost Bird’s quarter. Old foot soldiers, standing around on a wide road under a sky the color of rust. Hollowed-out eyes followed our passage, rusted butcher blades dangling from slack fingers.

 
They drifted behind us as we walked through that blasted ruin of a city. Bare trees, mutilated buildings, holes in walls blackened with decay. The echoes of a war.

  Ghost Bird laughed when she saw us. She stood waiting on a street, in front of a falling-down house. Tall and thin and bony, her hair swept back from a hatchet face. Around her hung the shape of some huge creature, browned skull and hollow beak and the sweep of feathers. Wings. A malevolent eye. She grinned at us. At me.

  “You brought this on yourself,” she said to me. Ángel made a noise of displeasure.

  “He’s looking for someone,” he snapped. “Someone he lost.”

  She raised a thin eyebrow and her long hands twitched, nails flashing. I knew if he had been alive she would have gutted him right there.

  Instead she clucked her tongue, reached out thin fingers and grabbed my chin. Turned my face from side to side. Sniffed the air.

  “Stinks,” she said, releasing me. “I can smell it on you, your grief. A girl, yes?”

  I opened my mouth to deny it, but what came out was a yearning, agonized “Yes.”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “Always yes.”

  “Someone took her,” Ángel supplied, “She’s not with the dead crossing over. She’s not in the sea. So she must be here.”

  “Not with me and mine,” Ghost Bird said thoughtfully. She cocked her head at me. “No. This is Stick-Man’s doing. Some scheme from the corpse pit. Worms and stars and damp, bloody earth. Yes.”

  “No,” I breathed. Clapped a hand over my mouth, nauseous. My skin crawled.

  Ghost Bird’s face softened. She reached out and peeled my hand from my face. Her nails cut my skin and blood ran in the grooves of my palm.

  “Shall I fetch her back from Stick-Man for you?” she asked, with horrible gentleness. I heard a noise like a crow’s cackle. “Go into his pits and slay all his dogs and bring her back, shining and golden with her hair like a crashing wave? For you, who are so beautiful?”