Something like that.
He won’t know for sure until he’s heard it all. Pieced it all together.
He visits some of the places again and again, each time listening to the same frantic words. Each time the story seems a little nearer, perhaps clearer.
Today he’s walking the Northern Quarter. He stops to lean against a wall, flattening his palm and splaying his fingers across the slick red brick. Cocking his head, he closes his eyes and hears the words: Gathered up all my bones, tied them in a silk handkerchief... Gathered up my old bones, tied them in a silk handkerchief... Over and over again.
But he also hears a new noise. A grinding. Like nothing he’s heard before. It started three evenings ago when he was south by the flyover near the tall buildings, glass and steel fingers reaching up to the sky. Beneath the hum of traffic, the grinding scraped up through the soles of his mismatched shoes, making his shins ache as if he’d been running for hours or sitting too long in the cold. He stood there for a while: feeling, listening, trying to understand. Then he headed north again, back towards the centre to search for the source. As he reached Chinatown the grinding stopped again; the city returned to its usual mumbling drone. A brief respite. A few hours later—early hours later—the grinding started up again. Worse than before. The city in pain—
He is jarred from his reverie, his hand pulled away from the red brick, as someone shoulders into him. The city’s whispers are gone. Forgotten. Instead, two men are standing there, telling him to watch where he’s going. Dark jackets, fair hair cropped close to their skulls, a clinical stench from their pale scrubbed skin. They laugh and start to walk away.
Clenching his fists, fingernails digging into his palms, he rocks back on his heels and feels the tug of the city down through his knees and ankles. Grounding him. He couldn’t move now if he tried. Sucking in air through his pursed lips, he exhales and the city breathes with him. His fingers gradually unclasp as he reaches down into the roots, fingering his way through the ground, finding concrete foundations and long-forgotten basements of the buildings all around him. He moves up past timber floors, further and further until he reaches the eaves and then the tiles and the ridges. To a battered stone gargoyle peering down into the street and an old pigeon sat there atop its head.
A moment’s stillness. The gargoyle shakes and the pigeon takes off in a splash of panicked feathers. It falls a few feet, defecates, and starts to clamber back up into the sky on hinging wings.
Down in the street, he smiles. His hands relax. The two men are now swearing, staring down in disbelief at the bird shit streaked across their jackets.
He walks on.
Still smiling.
***
He finds Old Marge sitting at the bottom of a stairwell in the multi-story car park, huddled amongst a pile of old newspapers. She is wearing, as always, a dozen different layers of clothing so that she looks almost spherical. Today she also has a new scarf made of shiny new bubblewrap. She is reading a thin book, the paper brown with age, corners scuffed and curled. No one ever comes down here—the exits are all on the next floor up; the stairs just finish at a whitewashed concrete wall that seldom has much to say.
Standing a couple of steps above her, looking down, he asks, “Have you heard it?”
She scowls. Continues reading her book. When she speaks, she still avoids looking at him. “What? Heard what?”
He reaches out with two fingers to touch the bone-white wall. Give me the apple... Give me the apple... Grinding pain. He takes away his hand again. “I must find it,” he says. “Wherever it is. Whoever—whatever’s doing this.”
She grunts. He hears the scrape of a page being turned. “Dunno what you talking about.”
He looks down at her. “You can find out.”
A long pause. Her eyes flicker back and forth for a while as she reads a few more lines. Then she dog-ears the corner of her page and closes the book. He sees the title Juniper Tree across the cover before she hides the book beneath the strata of her clothing.
She nods. “Reckon so.”
Silence again, so he reaches into a pocket and takes out a handful of coins. He hands over a couple of the silver ones. She inspects each coin in turn, licking the metal and thumbing away some imaginary speck of dirt before tucking the coins away inside her clothing.
She stands, allowing scraps of dirty paper to sleet to the floor. Old Marge is short, not even five feet tall, perhaps not even four. Gathering an armful of newspaper from her nest, she walks past him up to a small landing where the stairs dogleg around. She dumps the rubbish onto the floor and goes back down for more. She does this twice again, and then she starts to arrange the rubbish into a small circle. He sits down on the steps to watch, leaning against the wall and letting the city’s wounded murmurs roll over him: Give me the apple... Give me the apple...
After a few minutes Old Marge pauses, settling back on her haunches to stare at the circle. She nudges and tweaks. She picks up a till receipt, gives it a twist, and drops it back down into the circle. Then he realises he’s just yawned because she’s staring at him with her fierce eyes.
He apologises.
After a few more prods and pokes at the circle, she sits down in the middle, crossing her legs. She closes her eyes, sniffs and coughs. Her jaw works for a moment as if chewing. Swallows.
Silence.
A door slams somewhere above them in the car park. The echo runs around for a while, followed by a gentle breeze that scatters a few of the smaller pieces of paper. Old Marge opens one eye for a moment to take a peek. The breeze gusts again, harder this time, smashing apart her carefully constructed circle. Newspaper pages and paper bags eddy around for a brief few moments before falling back down again. The circle is gone, shattered and broken, scattered across the landing.
Old Marge opens her eyes again. “I know where it is...” She frowns. “They told me but—but I already knew. I must have forgot.”
He waits but she remains silent. Eventually, he asks, So?”
Now she looks sad. “Wasn’t meant to be like this. At the end. I was supposed to—to do something... when I was younger.” For a moment she looks like she might be about to get upset (which is unheard of). Instead she sniffs and swallows again.
Old Marge is older than anyone else who lives here. Older than the city itself. So when I was younger means a long time ago. Hundreds of years.
She stands. “I’ll show you.”
“Just tell me—”
“No.” She brushes away at a few scraps of paper still stippled across her chest. He almost expects them to go into orbit around her perfectly spherical body. “No,” she says again, “I’ll go with you.”
They walk. And as they walk, out of the multi-story and across town, she explains: “There was this tree, juniper, with sharp green leaves and dusty black berries. The tree was here before the city or the people. Before me.”
The crowds of people—the other people who share their city—part before them. She’s doing this, Old Marge, her presence thrusting them aside like a snowplough ramming its way through a drift-clogged lane.
“Used to pick berries off that tree,” she says. “After what happened—well, I guess I just forgot it all.”
They walk in silence through the busy city centre. The sky has darkened to thick violet. They pass bright lights and clean glass. The great wheel. He sees so many faces that he knows his sly words would work on, filling his hands with coins. But he knows Old Marge won’t want to stop. She’s nervous, glancing around the crowd, looking for trouble. She sees the two black uniforms before he does, and straight away she’s coughing and spitting on the sidewalk.
He feels the air shift. Food wrappers roll along the ground to wrap around the ankles of the two officers. They stop to chat with each other, distracted for the moment. He and Old Marge walk past unnoticed.
They continue ploughing aside the people, until they’ve left the lights behind them. Red brick walls rise up on either side of the
street.
“There,” she says, stopping.
They’re standing in front of a large cube of a building, walls busy with a tidy grid of windows five high and a dozen or more along each side. Pale white letters above the highest windows that spell WAREHOUSE. Old Marge points up. He sees the spidery scratch of a tree silhouetted against the darkening skyline.
“Been here the whole time,” she says. “When the warehouse grew it pushed the tree up into the sky.”
They walk three-quarters of the way around the building until they find a lower window free of glass. They find a nearby bin, drag it over and use it to climb up and in through the window.
Inside, the darkness has eaten up all the light. He takes the lead with Old Marge’s hand at the small of his back. He reaches down into the building to ask it to show him the way. The building says, ...said her mother, “what have you done!—but now be quiet, and no one will notice; it cannot be helped now—we will cook him in vinegar.” and he feels the city’s pain again, more keenly now. For a moment he wonders whether it’s trying to warn him somehow, but then it starts to repeat itself again ...said her mother, “what have you done!—” and he realises that this is just another part of the city’s story, one he’s not heard before, and for a moment he sees a glimpse of the whole story. Then the building lets his eyes see what it sees, all lit in dusty non-colours, a wide empty room studded with dozens of columns, and the story is gone again.
He leads them on, stepping aside holes rotted through the floor. They find a staircase and climb up. Four more floors and they push open a rusted metal door, stepping out into the cool night air.
The tree is right there, hanging away from them over the edge.
“It’s been waiting,” Old Marge says.
Normally he would never even think to disagree with her, but how can a tree do anything other than wait? He can still feel her hand rested on his back.
She gives him a gentle push. “Go on,” she says. “I—I can’t.”
Now that they’ve arrived, he still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. He takes a step forward and hesitates. The tree sways and creaks in the breeze. He kneels down to touch the sticky asphalt of the roof. The warehouse mumbles: ...cook him in vinegar... and the pain is even stronger now, almost unbearable. He snatches away his hand. Stands and takes another step forward.
Behind him, Old Marge calls out, “I remember! The roots. Look there!”
Another few steps and he’s standing right before the tree. Roots run away in all directions across the flat roof, splitting again and again until they become feathery, clutching tendrils. Kneeling again, reaching towards the base of the tree, he finds soil there, banked up against the short brick wall at the edge of the roof.
He claws away at the dirt. The city’s pain starts to come in quick ragged gasps. He hesitates for a moment. Perhaps he is hurting it? But as he stops the city starts to scream, so he carries on, scraping and scratching, feeling the muck gather beneath his fingernails. Until he sees more roots.
No, not roots.
Bones.
He grasps one and pulls it free. And the boy is standing where he wasn’t, right next to his shoulder, dressed in clothes from another century. The boy touches a hand to his forehead as if doffing a cap. Old Marge runs forward. He expects her to step right through this mirage of a boy and perhaps keep going, over the edge of the building to scatter herself across the cobbled street so many floors beneath.
Instead, she and the boy embrace. “I’m so sorry!” she says to the boy.
The boy looks puzzled. “Was never your fault, sister. But why’re you so old?”
“It’s been so long,” she says.
Watching them, he stands up and starts to pick the soil from beneath his fingernails. The city is quiet again, murmuring to itself. The boy’s story has been scattered amongst all the streets and shops and warehouses. Walking the city, he had been listening to the boy.
Old Marge and the boy turn, as if to leave.
He calls out to them: “What about the city?”
They stop and turn back again. The boy is frowning.
“You can’t—you were the city,” he says to the boy. “All these years, what will it do without you?”
The boy shakes his head. “No, I was never the city.” He smiles.
They leave him standing there.
Only later, as he’s walking the streets alone again, does he understand. Walking and listening to the murmur of all the stories, just as he’s done all these years. He is the only one listening.
His city.
The Dubious Apotheosis of Baskin Gough
Patrick S. McGinnity
Of course, Gough realized in a flash of unfiltered intuition. Of course. It finally made some sort of sense. At last.
He locked the study door and braced it with a tilted chair. A heavier piece like the bureau or desk might have been better, but there wasn’t time, and the noise of dragging something so heavy would surely arouse someone to check on him.
He stripped hurriedly then, piling his clothes atop his shoes. The air was close, though the temperature had fallen as the memory of the watery afternoon sun faded. With a surgeon’s care he arranged the instruments he would need beside the bath. At the brink, though, he hesitated.
Cold and oily, the water in the tub showed no reflection, even when he bent low over the tub, close enough to smell the piscine stink. He did, however, fancy he caught a rippling shimmer, as of a school of minnows just below the surface.
The fluid swallowed one leg, then the other. There was a layer of something soft near the bottom, some thick sediment, and he shuddered as he sank into it. Despite his discomfort, he forced himself to lay back against the rim of the tub, as if this were nothing more than a hot bath at the end of a long day. He understood, after all, this was the only way. His breathing quickened.
The scalpel came to hand almost of its own volition, and it did its work with fine efficiency. His flayed forearms throbbed with gleaming red pain; cold brine set the long shallow incisions afire.
Gough moaned through gritted teeth, forcing his head back against the tub and willing his body to remain submerged, though the pain stole his breath, and the prickling that had begun within the silt layer was maddening. It was like being submerged in champagne, except of course for the fiery pulses of pain. With difficulty, he lay still as the tingling climbed from those parts most deeply submerged, up his belly, his arms, his chest. After a time, lying still was no longer a struggle—even had he wanted to, he suspected, he could no longer have climbed from the bath. A hoarse groan, his throat raw as if he had been screaming. Perhaps he had.
There!
Noise from the open window. A plaintive mewl, like that a tomcat will make when he scents a queen just out of reach. Gough struggled to turn, to raise his head, panting from the effort, but he could no more compel his body to obey than a tree could pull up its roots and stalk off. He settled instead for locking the periphery of his gaze on the square of starlight that was the window. His head ached with the effort. This is the only way, he told himself, though the voice in his mind carried a note of uncertainty. The Artist! She had returned for him. It had to be.
***
[Signed correspondence from Ms. Danica Morden to Mrs. Camille Donovan]
This morning, Camille, over yet another breakfast of canned pears and salt pork, Chas asked if I thought it possible that we’d all died in the flood; that all of this was some infernal punishment, a penance for our sundry sins. While I’ve no better explanation for what’s happening, I cannot believe that hell, the afterlife, or any of it could be so trite. Chas is a fool and has heard too much of Roderick’s seminarian dogma.
And yet what other explanations are there? A stone house (a mansion, really) bobbing along like some cork on the flood that ripped it from its place weeks ago? Even the cellar is intact, yet from the constant rocking it is clear we are afloat, and from the soundings taken from the porches, this infernal
river or current has no bottom. Ostraander’s airship is moored to the upper porch, and even from that high vantage, he claims there is no land in sight. If only the airship were big enough to hold all of us, we could leave this doomed house behind. Let Baskin Gough go down with his ship if he likes, but get the rest of us back to sanity.
It isn’t only our situation that is uncanny, though. I’ve sketched every room in this blasted house countless times, and every time I look again the perspective is somehow warped and transformed until there is nothing of Dun Leah House at all in the drawings. Might hell be a floating house that can’t be rendered on paper? Silly, I know.
Incidentally, I’ve been forced to abandon The Salon of Madame Tessier. Gough has already paid my commission—not that I’ve any use for the money here—but I find myself entirely unequal to the task of completing the piece. All of the figures are masked into place with their corresponding shadows, and I have detailed studies of all of the guests. Completing the painting ought not to pose such hardship.
It’s not because of those we’ve lost—I’m sure of it. If they were there for the initial sittings, I have them in my mind and my sketchbooks; indeed, my sketches of Reliene are exquisite, if I do say so myself.
Since her disappearance, Camille, I’ve come to understand her better. Though it shames me to admit it, I find I miss the idea of Reliene more than the woman herself. The impulsiveness and irreverent spirit that so attracted me at school wore on me when we were living together. Perhaps after the row our relationship caused at home, I threw too much of myself into my new identity as the deviant daughter, never seeing that it was, in fact, that very identity I prized, far more than I could ever love Reliene. She was exciting, yes, but mostly she was the catalyst for my “becoming”—it just took losing her to allow me to actually see her as distinct from my new-fledged self. How fitting, then, that she alone made her way onto the canvas of The Salon before I stopped working.
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