"Thirteen years ago."
"Years after I last saw him," mused Moss.
"He was not unkind, at first, but he tried to exploit my differences. He took me from theatre to theatre, stage to stage, put me in freak shows as the Glass Boy. From the start it didn't go well for him. Audiences accused him of fakery. People have long memories. They remembered that he had once done something very similar with Memoria. Then something happened. He came to the dilapidated building, where he hid me when we were not traveling. He was covered in blood, hysterical with fear. I sat for a week in that building behind locked doors, like an animal, while he came and went by night."
"So you knew about Memoria all along?" asked Moss.
"Only a little. I had heard the stories. I'm sorry, I too should have been more forthright."
Holding the drawing, Irridis moved to the window and looked out. Moss watched his face in the reflection. "One morning, without warning I was put on a train and sent north. That's how I ended up as your pupil at the Chimneys Institute. Two terms, prepaid."
Irridis turned and held up the drawing. "When it came time to put me on the train, he found my drawing and took it, saying that if anyone saw it, I would be in grave danger. He never explained what kind of danger. He was furious. He didn't realize that I stole it back out of his pocket. Before we parted he did something he'd never done before, he struck me, on the side of the head. Then he spat in my face and said that I'd ruined his life."
"Well, that certainly sounds familiar," said Moss.
"It was like he had gone insane with fear before my eyes."
"I believe Imogene," said Moss. "She's right: for better or worse, John Machine has linked us all."
"She has just given me a clue to my past. Maybe I can find the answer to the questions that have bothered me for my entire life."
"Which are?" asked Moss.
"Who am I, and what am I?"
"Then our path is clear," said Moss. "I have to deal with Lamb—"
"And then we go to Nightjar Island. I believe it is there that I'll uncover my past, and we have good reason to suspect that Memoria would return there, given what Imogene has told us."
Whether it was because of the whiskey or her unburdening, Imogene was asleep when Moss entered the room to tell her of their decision. They left her undisturbed and talked until a late hour. Irridis remained in the library long after Moss had gone to bed. He sat accompanied by the ticking of the clock, and the occasional rumble of the streetcar outside. The drawings sat on the desk behind him. He had no need to hold them. The ocelli had already recorded them in every detail, making the information available to him. He was not just able to examine them sequentially in his mind's eye but to experience a full awareness of the information in the moment. Irridis took his augmented cognitive powers for granted. He knew his memory and degree of mindfulness far exceeded those around him, and for all of that, there remained a room he could not access. The time before he was rescued from the icy Irridian Sea was blank, a locked door. Whether through trauma or design, he had no way of knowing. The ocelli, which he believed to be sentient servants, remained mute on the topic.
When the clock chimed 3 a.m. Irridis rose and walked over to the still-open traveling bookcase. It sat as Imogene had left it, and for some time a pinprick of light had attracted his eye. He reached down and pulled a bottle from its recess. It was filled with small shells and bones; the kind of things you would expect a child to collect at the seaside. He held it up and turned it in his hand. Sure enough, something inside glinted. The lid unscrewed with a dry rasp. Irridis emptied the contents onto the desk. Amid the small collection sat a glass oblate ovoid. Its interior was smoky but a faint light could be seen. When he picked it up, it fit in his palm. When he moved his hand away, it remained in the air. It rose to join the five ocelli that were moving towards it like a group of curious fish.
TAXALI'S BOOKSHOP
The next morning Moss decided to pay Oliver Taxali a visit. Irridis had gone out sometime in the night, and Imogene was still asleep. It was the first time he had left the apartment since Irridis's arrival. In a borrowed leather coat and wingtips, Moss maintained a brisk pace, avoiding the faces of the few people he passed. He rubbed his hands together for warmth. It was early and a light frost lay on the nearby rooftops. A streetcar would have been quicker but he wanted to travel unobserved to the extent possible.
The backstreets were paved with bricks worn smooth by centuries of traffic and inset with sewer covers molded with a bas-relief fish. The smell of baking bread filled the air, intermingled with coal smoke. From a railway bridge Moss could see workers in a bakery yard wheeling loaves into delivery wagons. Horses stamped in the cold. The privations of the war had brought back many of the old ways of doing things. A further walk of fifteen minutes brought him to the bookshop, which dominated a traffic circle webbed by tramlines. In the middle of the circle there was a park. From Moss's approach he could see the façade of Taxali's bookshop through a jumble of rusty playground equipment and a bronze monument to a forgotten hero.
Croaker did not deign to lift his eyes as Moss came to the desk. No doubt he was still sulking about the atlas.
"I need to talk to Oliver," said Moss.
"Mr. Taxali is at bath," the man intoned, rolling his eyes. "I hope you're looking after that atlas, Mr. Woods." Moss climbed to the second floor. The walls were lined with signed photographs of authors famous and obscure. He came to a door and rapped a brass knocker mounted at eye level.
"Get lost," shouted a voice from within.
"Oliver, it's Moss."
"I'm having my bath, damn you."
"You're always having a bath. Let me in before I suffocate out here." Moss was growing hot in the close air.
"Leave me be," said Oliver.
"Oliver, open the door before I kick it in."
"Blast you. Very well. You'd better come in then. I can see there will be no peace otherwise. It's unlocked. Don't let the hot out."
Moss entered a large bathroom of cracked tiles, grout like strips of black licorice, and a floor covered in fungal growth. Oliver Taxali wallowed in a cast iron tub on a raised platform. Mingled with the general fug of steam and mildew was the headache-inducing smoke of his cigar. A moth-eaten top hat sat on his head and before him a book of pornographic woodcuts lay open on a bath desk. A housemaid poured scalding water from a kettle into the bottom end of the bath. Then, as though agitating a grotesque soup, she distributed the pocket of warmth with a laundry paddle.
"Well?" he demanded. "Make it quick. I'm not a well man."
This was not Moss's first tub-side meeting, but he vowed it would be his last. As the book dealer lolled, red-skinned in the grey water, Moss averted his eyes from what his imagination had already conjured.
"A woman came to Seaforth's house yesterday afternoon and she said that you had given her the address and my name. My real name."
Oliver scowled, pondering Moss's words. "She already knew your real name."
"That's hardly the point, Oliver."
"She went there, did she?"
"What did you think she would do? Why would you expose me like that? What happened to loyalty?"
"Hmmm. Well, why didn't you just lie? Tell her you'd never heard of Moss." Oliver laughed, showing his stained teeth. The disease that accelerated Oliver's aging had taken a terrible toll in recent months. He looked twice as old as Moss, despite the fact that they had once been inseparable childhood friends.
"But if he'd done that then she'd have come back here." The maid's voice, as soft as the patter of mouse feet, caught them both by surprise.
"What?" Oliver looked at her out of narrowed eyes.
"I just thought she might have come back and caused a fuss," she said.
"Stop editorializing, woman. It's damned distracting. Can't put two and two together around here for all the mumbling and chatter. Make yourself useful and pass me my legs."
"Yes sir, of course. Please forgive my impertine
nce." The maid removed the bath desk, set it on the tiles and then ran to an antechamber, lifting her dress clear of the floor.
"Come with me," said Oliver. With a great deal of splashing and swearing, the man heaved his substantial bulk upward until his buttocks, as red as boiled ham, rested on the edge of the bath. His legs, terminated at the knees with puckered scars, paddled the air as he fought to maintain his perch. Moss once again averted his eyes, pretending a sudden interest in the sagging plasterwork overhead. He counted long seconds before the maid's return, hoping that Oliver could maintain his balance without assistance.
The maid brought the prosthetic legs to the bath side. Instead of approximating a human foot, Oliver's legs were fitted with mechanical bird's feet. Three articulated toes were splayed forward, while a fourth curved backward, providing balance. Each toe was tipped with a silver claw. The shaft of the legs had been worked in an imitation of scales. When the long-suffering maid had finished belting the legs onto Oliver's stumps, he took a few tentative steps and to Moss's relief accepted a bathrobe.
"Give me your arm," he said, reaching out to Moss.
He took Oliver's elbow and led him away from the bath. They entered the room from which the maid had retrieved the legs. It was smaller than the bathroom, and furnished with a rolltop desk, lamp and chair. Oliver sat with a grunt, leaving Moss to stand in front of the desk. He felt that he might pass out from the humidity waiting for Oliver to shuffle through the contents of the drawers.
"Where the hell is it?" Oliver shouted.
The maid appeared at his side and removed the top hat, handing it to him as though it contained something unpleasant.
"In your hat, sir."
Oliver snatched the hat from her fingertips and plunged his hand into the interior. "There is a hidden compartment," he mumbled as he fought with something. "Ah-ha!" He produced a small, leather-bound book. "This is a treatise on magic. A grimoire. Hold it a moment." Oliver thrust it at Moss. His heart quickened. It was no forgery. His educated eye had already determined that much. It was older than any of the occult books already housed in Seaforth's substantial library, but matched those in the traveling bookcase.
"She gave me this. It's the real deal. Nightjar Island. Look at the mark on the cover."
"You think it's real," Moss asked.
"Of course it is, you idiot. Take it," he snapped.
Moss's fingers closed around the book.
"Possession of that book you're holding," said Oliver, "is enough to get you done for." The bookseller licked his thin lips and ran his tongue around the space between his lower teeth and cheek. "I'd have sold my own mother to the devil to have it." He snatched the book out of Moss's hand and wagged it in the air. "Selling you out was nothing. You were small change, chum."
"You sold me out for a book," said Moss. "We are friends, or so I thought." Oliver came around the desk on his avian feet. The maid rushed to his side.
"Mind now, you'll slip," she said. She held him as he returned the book to the interior of the hat.
"There are bigger things afoot than your problems, Lumsden. Speaking of which, any news for Lamb? That lot will be bothering me soon."
"Not yet," said Moss.
Oliver returned the hat to his head with a pat. "Do you know what the secret to catching a fly with your hand is, Moss? You strike not at the fly but where the fly will be next." With that, he turned away, cawing. "Friendship, be damned."
THE BUTCHER'S WINDOW
Stung by Oliver's betrayal, Moss left the bookshop and entered a side street. He stopped in front of a butcher's window and rolled a much-needed cigarette. Even the quiet street seemed overwhelming to his mind, already crowded with thoughts that threatened to boil into a rage. In an effort to block outside stimulus, he raised his collar and faced the window.
On the other side of the glass, three skinned rabbits landed on a bed of fresh snow. The red-eyed bodies, pink-muscled and footless, appeared to squirm, but it was only the result of the snow crystals melting beneath their ebbing warmth. A collection of other animals, in part or whole, was arranged around the rabbits: a pig's head with soft lashes and a split nose, a skinned lamb, a cow's tongue, blue at the tip and covered with polyps of ascending size. There were hanging ducks, lumpy with pores and stiff with subcutaneous fat, hardened like soap. Chickens, songbirds, fish, mollusks, octopi, squid and the aged fetal piglets were arranged on the snow, a harvest of horror laid out like a parody of the treats in the chocolatier's shop across the street. The flaw to the diabolical ordering of this fleshy exhibit was the group of rabbits, until a scarred hand shot into the snow and rearranged them with practiced efficiency.
Moss looked at his reflection. His blue eyes were reddened. He had lost weight and his face was lean. Sweat glazed his high forehead and his hair seemed to have grown overnight. His hands were held over his stomach like two arachnids clasped in death. Smoke from the cupped cigarette seeped around his fingers. Relax, he thought, you look every bit the escaped convict that you are.
Moss looked down at the lamb curled in the ice. Leaving Taxali's he had seen a lithograph on the wall that showed the muscles underlying the human face. For a nauseating moment he imagined his own skinned face lying among the animals, with a halo of snow and a lacework of bloody fluids. He imagined Lamb growing impatient somewhere in the city. How long had it been since the talk in the tunnel? As Moss did the calculation, he shifted his gaze to read the scene behind his head. Shops were jammed together, a pattern of windows and doorways. Behind the peaked rooftops and chimneys there was a dark sky that threatened winter. In the street, the passersby seemed almost of another world, knobs of imperfect flesh animated by some unfathomable spark. He saw each shifting form as a piece of flesh that began a process of decay the moment it came into the world. They were worms, swaddled and perfumed, devourers that chewed the world into a paste and shat out the indigestible remains. Their bodies lay heaped in the cemeteries, fouled the waterways and clogged the sewers. Their names were scratched in blocks of ancient limestone and granite millions of years old, the vainglorious declarations of worms, ticks and burrowers that were born and dead a moment later. He fiddled with the bottle in his pocket. For God's sake relax, he thought.
Moss refocused on the display in the window and the arrangement of livers that looked so reminiscent of a woman's private parts. He turned away and put a hand to his mouth and discovered he had bitten his lip. The coppery taste of blood rose in his sinuses. He flicked the spent cigarette into the street, noticing that he had caught the attention of a large dog. It was the dog from the canal. He had no doubt.
Moss did not know much about dogs. He had grown up with the collection of mongrels in the ship-breaking yards and its adjacent town, but he had avoided the wild dogs of the city. Every dweller in the City of Steps was familiar with the packs of curs that dragged the garbage into the street during the night and often had to be cornered and shot for reasons of public safety. Morel's dog Fits was representative of this kind of animal. The beast that faced him now was not. It was something else, massive, with muscles that moved like liquid beneath a coat that had a racehorse's sheen. Intelligent eyes watched him from the folds of its face. Its ears were pricked like horns. Moss felt awe as his hand reached to the side for the handle of the shop door, preparing to step inside if it became necessary. Then, without warning the dog left its position on the pavement and trotted down the left side of the street.
On impulse, Moss followed at a distance. There was an aesthetic appeal in the dog's fluid gait. It seemed careless of the shoppers that crossed the street to avoid a head-on encounter or those that simply turned to stare. He followed it down the winding street to the end, and then entered a passage. It stopped once and turned to look back. At the end of the passage it vanished from view. Curiosity overcoming sense, Moss broke into a jog, passing through the shadows. He emerged into an abandoned railway roundhouse. All that remained was a large circular yard covered in clumps of grass, goldenrod and late
milkweeds. The yard was defined by a curved wooden building, with empty doors and sagging walls.
A windowless black horse carriage was drawn up in the center of the yard. The dog had settled on its haunches in the shadow of an iron-shod wheel. Moss stopped. What he saw next drove all fear of the dog from his mind. In the place of a team of horses stood a towering figure. Its head was hooded in weather-beaten canvas. Its body was covered in a heavy coat, which appeared to be encrusted with lichen and fungus. A massive yoke hung around the creature's neck, joining it to the carriage with chains. As Moss registered these details, it turned with an elephantine lugubriousness.
Moss staggered backwards. With all his being, he did not want to see the creature's face. In a panic, he turned and ran. He tripped on a piece of buried rail tie but recovered his balance and fled back through the passage. With each step he was certain he would feel the weight of the dog against his back, but moments later he had returned to the quiet backstreets without incident. He walked unnoticed out of the street in the direction of Seaforth's apartment.
AURA
He did not reach the apartment that morning. When traveling on foot, Moss preferred to vary his route to avoid notice. He entered an unfamiliar street, agitated by what he had seen in the roundhouse yard. The conversation with Oliver had shaken him. Although they had grown cagey with each other over the years, at root they had always been loyal. Their relationship had taken a new turn. Moss was at a loss to say why. He knew his emotions were intensified by the symptoms of sinispore withdrawal, which he had unsuccessfully tried to ameliorate with brandy. He was sweating and self-conscious. Every stranger seemed to look up at him at the last moment, as if startled by his presence. It puzzled him, until he realized that they were probably reacting to his own stare. A group of children playing quoits stopped to jeer at him. Under normal circumstances such behavior would have been forgotten a moment later. This time, the children's voices remained with him, like an echoing chorus.
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