by Mike Allen
And I wondered about the Avatars. Was Sasha right, did she fill some cosmic gap? Were there others? Did I know them, had I seen them walking down the street or taking a double hot chocolate, no whip, from my hand?
* * *
When he appeared, when the magnet that governed our movements jolted in galvanic response to his presence, Mike and I both knew it instantly. It was something in the way Sasha’s breath caught, something in the way her shoulders shifted, the way she set down her cup and lifted her head.
He was clean-jawed as some young Galahad, and there was an aquiline elegance to the planes of his nose, to the curls that clustered on his scalp in Greco-Roman order.
His stare went to Sasha and for once she didn’t smile or beckon. She just sat there staring wordlessly at him, her eyes as wide as windows. He came over to her table in three graceful strides and stooped to say something.
“Yes,” she said, giving him her hand. “That’s me.” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm, a gesture as startlingly intimate as though he’d taken off his shirt.
Was he an Avatar as well? Was his job to console selfless women? To pick up people in coffee shops? To piss off unrequited lovers? What role did he fill?
Mike and I stood side by side, watching, ignoring the customer trying to get a refill on her mocha. We stared while Sasha gathered up her things and the young man helped her into her jacket, tucking his arm around her hand.
For a moment she looked back, and it would have been the time to say something then, but Mike’s heel ground into my foot. I yelped and she half-laughed, and waved at Mike, and left.
“Give the poor girl a little happiness,” Mike said. “Breathing room.”
“Will she be back tomorrow?”
He shrugged, finally looking to the counter and the empty mocha cup sitting there. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she won’t be an Avatar any more.”
The customer gathered her drink after he refilled it and looked around, meeting my eyes. She took a step towards me.
I felt an ethereal weight, as though someone were watching me from just past her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet someone here at two fifteen . . .”
The bell over the door jingled as another customer entered: plaid jacket, crew-cut, elderly, his gaze scanning the shop.
I squared my shoulders.
“First off,” I said, leaning forward to touch her sleeve. “Everything I told you in my e-mail was a lie.”
BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE
by Leah Bobet
Bell, Book, and Candle met for the five thousand and fifty first time on a rainy November night.
Bell hung her cloche on Cafe Mariposa’s gnarled hatstand and left her gloves on. She worked in a fancy dress shop on the other end of town and was wary of needles and pins. Book had got them a table. He hunched over it, tweed and brown, his hair thinning monklike at his spiraling centre part. A rough-shouldered gambling man slipped him a twenty, and he smiled sharks-teeth and made a notation in his brown leather notebook.
“Book,” she said in greeting, and ordered a cardamom coffee; her voice plucked violin counterpoint to a glam-fusion-rockabilly band. She hummed a few bars with them, but her singing voice came down rough, stuck on the gears between the march of the wooden soldiers and Jack getting ready for the chorus.
Bell blushed. Book patted her hand. He smelled like binding glue and the sweat of fine horses.
Candle was late.
He arrived on the arm of a Duchess, and bright sea-green ribbons twined through his trouser laces. He hung his hat on the tree that grew through the floor of the Cafe Mariposa, and it sparkled with forest-dark velvet, gold trim, a feather that bowed down in passing to waiters and witches and kings.
“Darlings,” he said, bright-flushed and drunken, and perched on his seat like a fairy. His shirt was trimmed with lace. Bell wanted to touch it with her naked hand.
Book pursed his lips. “You’re late.”
Candle laughed and heads turned. Candle waved and a drink was brought. He tossed it back, and the Cafe Mariposa watched the duck and swell of his long golden throat. “So tell me,” he said, his voice striding through shattered conversations and dancing on the shoulders of the stereo music. “What word?”
“No word,” Book grunted. Bell’s shoulders sagged. No word.
“Of course there’s no word.” He waved his hand expansively. It glittered with jewels; they refracted light over the tables around. Hands reached out for a million reflected rubies and closed fingers around air. “There’s never word.”
“Wick,” she said, and took his right hand. He pulled it away. “We’ve just got to be patient.”
He shot her a dark look—even his darkest look was dazzling. Hearts trembled, thighs warmed under the edges of his scorn. She put her hands between her knees to keep them prim and straight. “If we were to be called for, they’d have called for us already.”
He was likely right. It had been centuries. But Bell always felt like that when he was in the room. “We just have to be patient,” she repeated, and because she was the voice he subsided and drank his liquor, a fizzing bright-coloured thing that was not as bright as he.
“One day I won’t come when you call me,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek with a nip that drew blood.
He left on the arm of a Baron, and the lustre of the moss between the world-tree’s bark faded when the door slammed shut behind him.
“Want him?” Book asked, and Bell blushed high and hot, sunburned with desire.
“Everyone does,” she said, and put on her hat to go.
* * *
The snow fell. The fairy lights were strung and restrung over shopfronts and around trees: the electricity strangled dryads and kept the brownies away. Bell, Book, and Candle gathered at the Cafe Mariposa, where the speakers threw Bing Crosby at crumbling stucco murals of Puerto Rico and false butterflies glimmered in the ceiling foliage.
The leaves had fallen off the hatstand tree. They crunched underfoot on the flagstones as the waiters danced between wrought-iron tables, bearing sugar-plum tea on silver trays. It smelled like winter and cinnamon inside.
Bell ordered hot cider spiced with rum; it warmed her hands through the black kidskin gloves. Book waited in muffler and fedora, his thick suit pilling at the lapels, his breath redolent with sixteen-year-old highland whiskey. “There’s word,” he said, and scratched another notation onto a curling crimson page.
Bell almost spilled her drink. “For when?”
“Tonight.” Book’s hands shook. The gamblers stayed well away, threading through the corners of the room and fingering bills in their pockets. Book’s hands frayed and fretted at his old quill pen’s feathers.
Bell rubbed at the absence on her shoulder blades until they were sore. And asked for more rum in her cider.
Candle swept in like the Puerto Rico summer, wrapped in a red velvet gown that flared and dragged behind him heedless of the dirty churned snow. Holly and mistletoe girdled his waist; the admirers he pressed close gasped as it pricked their bellies and then stared after him, dabbing the blood away. He took off his curled honey-coloured wig and doffed it to Bell elaborately, and there was a chorus of laughter and sighs.
“There’s word,” Bell told him. Flat and unmusical.
Candle clenched a fist. The chandeliers in the Cafe Mariposa trembled, hissing with electricity, and every bulb blew in a shower of sparks.
Bell, Book, and Candle walked single file down Dry Street South in the snow, picking their way around puddles: Bell’s patent-leather boots and Candle’s stiletto heels clacked one-two against the concrete. Book consulted notes taken in his own arcane hand, scribblings and arrows and dashes and dots, and they stopped at the Grand Cathedral at the centre of the city. It twisted with sculpture and screaming mouths and rubble: it was long-ago ruined. Bell tightened her hat.
The doors of the broken cathedral were open. The ironbound wood hung slick with rot
: a night insect crawled out of one hole and into another. Bell kept her hands clasped behind her back and squinted into cobwebbed darkness.
“Book,” she whispered. “What do you see?”
Book took her elbow, eased her carefully aside. “An altar with the gems dug out,” he said. “Tapers rusted into their chandeliers. Rats in the nave. Bats in the belfry. The ringer’s rope, frayed, and the vestments in dust.” He paused. “Light.”
They followed the light.
It glowed soft down halls with niches of marble, stripped of their statues and gilt. It glowed brighter along the curving stairs to the crypts, the sea-kissed crypts where coffins floated and the dead screamed to be saved from drowning whenever it rained all night. Bell lifted her skirts and followed Book down into a chapel cleared and dusted, ringed with men in coats of brushed, severe black wool. They wore inquisitorial masks. Bell’s skirts hissed and tangled from her trembling.
“We’ve come,” Bell said, and the room echoed with ringing like a cathedral mass. “We didn’t think you’d call again.”
“We are still here.” A voice, bitter as strong coffee. “We’ll always be here.”
“We . . . we serve,” Bell said, hesitant. It had been so long since they’d been asked for. She’d forgotten all the words.
Candle took her hand and squeezed it so it hurt.
“Who is brought before us?” asked the man with the voice like coffee, and the gathered rumbled a reply, a name magnified into nothing by the stones of the falling crypt. Men moved up to surround them, cloaked and hooded, marked with cross and censer and axe.
“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious body and blood of the Lord,” he began, and Bell’s back straightened with the anxiety of ritual, the reflexes of performance. Someone whimpered beyond the light, mashed flat by cloth and rope. Words blurred in her ears. Voice built in her throat, hot and poisonous.
“Ring the bell,” the high magistrate said, and the cork on her mouth loosed and Bell screamed.
“Close the book,” the high magistrate said, and fairy glamour passed over Book’s eyes and smoothed them away.
“Snuff the candle,” the high magistrate said, and struggling to contain him, the soldiers of the Inquisition slit Candle’s throat.
He crumbled to his knees shedding fringe and feather, and his head hit the flagstones and burst. A smell of beeswax and ripe summer wafted from it, and then the body was cold.
The man in the box screamed and did not stop screaming, and Bell wanted to scream for herself, but her throat was empty now and her tongue would not obey. She fell to her knees and dug kidskin into the rough-grouted stones of the Grand Cathedral.
“So be it,” the priests intoned, and the mass dispersed at five past midnight.
* * *
Bell led Book home, weeping all the way, to his loft above the racetrack. The garret was stuffed with shedding paperback novels; their pages filtered the light of the rain-streaked slanting windows. She brewed him weak tea in a battered tin kettle and sat him down at table. The tablecloth was stained with ink.
He fumbled for it tentatively, mewling in the back of his age-spotted throat. Bell took off her gloves and put her hands on his, guided them to the chipped china mug bought decades ago from some tourist shop down the coast. Glaze chipped off as she wrapped his hands around it, left a long scratch, fingertip to thumbpad. Blood welled and she sucked the wound, still weeping in noiseless gulps.
When dawn came the skin where Book’s eyes had been melted away, and he opened new dark eyes, quick as ferrets. “You’ve been crying,” he said, and she nodded. Her voice burned in her throat again, warmed it like a heartbeat.
“We can’t do this again,” she croaked in a voice that had been made to sing not scream, and Book nodded.
Bell went back to the dress shop. Her manager scolded her for the scratch on her hand. She wore demure black lace gloves to work until it healed, a seamed line that curved her hand into a fist when she slept. Book went back to the mold-dampened secondhand shop where he spent his days presiding behind the counter, fingering paper and the curve of illuminated letters. He stared at the coin his customers gave for yellowed textbooks too long, the faces of sheepish men who asked him the odds for whole minutes. People avoided his eyes: too young and nervous.
Nobody saw Candle.
The snow melted. Green and careful shoots wended through the soil into the air, budded, burst. The tree in the centre of the Cafe Mariposa bloomed with pink Japanese blossoms, white apple blooms, drunken lavender lilacs, crocus, and mint. New pegs grew from the trunk to hold hats and capes and light spring wraps, and each was tipped with roses.
Bell and Book met in the Cafe Mariposa when the weather broke for certain. The tree stroked her hair with lilypetal fingers when she took off her cloche to hang it up. Book was shaggy and ragged and wore no hat or coat. There was an inkstain on his earlobe.
“I’ve been calling him night and day,” Bell said. There were pouchy shadows beneath her eyes.
“I’ve been writing him every morning,” Book said, and took her hand.
“What if he didn’t come back?”
The wind coming through the patio heard and fell flat on the tiled floor.
“We’ve a job,” Book said doubtfully. “It’s why we’re here. It’s why they haven’t called us back up yet.”
Unless there’s nobody left to call us back, Bell thought for the five thousandth time, and didn’t speak it. Some things were too terrible to speak.
One day I won’t come when you call me, the wind mimicked, and Bell shivered at the touch of winter. “We can’t do this again,” she said, and led him out of the Cafe Mariposa.
The dress shop where fine ladies bought ermine-trimmed capes lay north, along cobbled avenues lit with converted gas streetlamps, where tinsel fluttered in the wind every month of the year. The junk shop where students prowled through Book’s tailings lay east, through drab apartments and noodle shops where the painfully young quoted philosophy to each other all night. Bell and Book went west, west where the gutters clanked with needles and the lonely walked the streets, hungry for love or drink or junk.
They stopped where a workman stood eyeing the whores, across the street from their long-limbed display, stuffing hands in his pockets and taking them out again.
“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said like a flute. “He lights up the world wherever he goes.”
“I know a Candle,” the workman sighed, “but she’s a woman, a beautiful woman with a gown that’s crimson and green.”
“He—she, whichever,” Bell snapped. “Where has he gone?”
“I wish I knew,” he said sad-eyed, “but ask the whores; I met her walking with them, and her eyes were nothing like the sun . . .”
They crossed the street. Book shuffled and kicked garbage with his cracked wingtip shoes. A crumpled wrapper hit a drunk slouched between buildings, and he railed at them in a voice like hours upon the rack.
“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said nervously, plucking at her skirts. The whores were bright and painted just like him, but it was false and made her ache deep down in her gut. “He is varicoloured as a peacock and arrogant and sweet and men and women both would do anything to hold him.”
“We know a Candle,” they murmured seductively, and Book shifted and hopped foot to foot. “But he is not varicoloured but dun grey, and not arrogant but cowed, and went into the Dark House to die.”
Bell swallowed tears and clenched hands in her skirts. “Where?” she asked, and they pointed.
The road curved south. The road curved through the projects, the falling-down Old Quarter, the factories and cemeteries and emptied into the yard of the Great Cathedral, screaming-stone spires melting and cracking in the damp spring air. There was a guard at the churchyard door, armed with guns, leather, a chain, a frown. Book gave him a damp, crumpled roll of small bills and they passed inside.
The doors of the confessionals
were cut into counters, and a row of black-suited madams stood within with keys and cashboxes, sour lemon eyes.
“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said, low and tired. “He burns too fast, and he stings the back of your throat when he’s almost gone, and you lie awake wanting him at night even so.”
“I know a Candle,” the madam said, “but he is with the Marquis, and you’ll have to wait your turn.”
She gave them a number on a plastic card. They waited.
“I . . . I forgot how bad it was,” Bell whispered in Book’s inkstained ear as the flagellants came and went, trailing love-sweat and tears across the stones of the Great Cathedral.
“We all did,” he whispered back. The crypt lurked below them. It gnawed cold at their toes. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Not your fault. It’s our job. They wouldn’t have given it if it was . . .”
He could not finish.
A loinclothed novice called their number, and they followed him up the slippery stairs of the hollowed cathedral towers. The stained-glass windows had been smashed long ago, back when the inquisitors were put to the sword, and nobody had replaced them. A few fingers of spring rain gusted through the jagged remnants.
Bell and Book found Candle curled up on a bed, bleeding onto black satin sheets that wouldn’t show the stain. He shuddered when the door opened. The wounds were already closing.
“You’re alive—” Bell blurted.
“I’m alive,” he whispered, arms wrapped around dimpled knees. “I’m alive. I’m alive.”
Bell stripped off her white springtime gloves and touched his cheek with her bare hand, nails dark red and trimmed boy-short as to not catch and pull fine silks. “You’re alive,” she gasped and pressed him close.
He was Candle. He was not made to die.
“I love you,” she whispered, “I love you, I always have.”
“I don’t love you,” he said dully, and hid his eyes behind her sleeve.
