"What is it?" Moss whispered.
The man shook his head and raised his hand to silence Moss. The fingers were as thin as sticks and unusually long. Moss was aware of a terrible heat in his core, and an uncomfortable loosening of his bowels. The air sparkled around him. Damn, not again, he thought. He looked back at the garden.
The creature had moved outside and stood in a rising mist. A heavy coat concealed its form. Its shoulders and arms were covered with bioluminescent lichen and fungi that seemed to grow up and die back, shedding a fine but ceaseless plume of spores. The creature's covered head smoldered. Without warning it walked from the garden, exhibiting the strange elephantine agitation that Moss had witnessed in the railyard.
The man turned away from the door. His eyes were bright and piercing. "His name is Echo." There was sadness in his voice. "He is Elizabeth's servant. Her demon."
"It'll be back," said Moss. He was growing confused, weak. The air around the man's head seemed to swirl.
"Not tonight."
"I latched the door behind me. How did it get in?"
The man's smile was barely perceptible. "There's no lock that can slow Echo."
The room spun. Moss stretched hand toward the wall to steady himself.
"Who are you?" said Moss.
The man took his hand. "We've met before, though I am not surprised you don't remember. I am a friend of Starling's, the one you know as Irridis. My name is Master Crow."
"I know Starling." It had been a long time since Moss had heard Irridis's real name.
"You're bleeding," Master Crow said. He was looking at the floorboards. They were covered in dark smears. Moss's soles were tacky.
"Oh," he whispered. His vision darkened and he fell against the wall. Master Crow's arms caught him, but he was too heavy. He landed hard, losing consciousness. He whispered something inaudible to the floorboards.
He woke to an ache in his shoulders, a consequence of spending the night unconscious on the floor. A blanket had been laid over him. The room was quiet except for a blue jay calling in the garden. Master Crow was gone. Moss was quite alone. The floor smelled of wood shavings. He was thirsty. The wound on his leg had become a distant ache. He sat up and discovered that his calf had been cleaned and stitched. A bitter salve had been spread over the wound. Moss tapped the stiches gingerly. The swelling around the cut had gone down and there were signs the skin had begun to regenerate.
Scrounging, Moss found some old clothing in a wardrobe. He shed Seaforth's clothes like a foul skin, stepping gratefully out of the heap. Fortunately, the carpenter was close to his size. Moss pulled on a pair of work pants, a threadbare T-shirt, and sweater of unfortunate, homemade construction. He satisfied his thirst from a cast iron pitcher pump in the kitchen. Wiping water from his beard, he shoved the kitchen door open. The sun and a gentle breeze mellowed the early morning garden. Other than some broken plant stems, there was no sign of the creature the Master Crow had called Echo. There was no sign of Master Crow either, which was unfortunate as Moss had a thousand questions.
He sat on the step and lit a cigarette. The tobacco burned with a satisfying crackle as he inhaled. He blew the smoke into the sunlight. A grackle hopped into the path with a yellow snail in its beak. It tapped the shell against the flagstone until it broke, and then gulped down the constricting morsel. Moss thought of the slug he had seen the previous night, which triggered a cascade of fragments from his conversation with Oliver.
"Hello," said Moss. The bird eyed him, cocking its head before flying away. A moment later it returned with another snail and repeated its performance. After swallowing the snail, it flicked pieces of shell with its beak. Satisfied that nothing remained, the bird squawked at Moss. He ducked as it flew past him, through the doorway and into the house. Startled, Moss tossed his cigarette into the garden and hobbled after it.
He found the bird in the room with the fireplace. It was scrabbling on the marble mantelpiece, working an envelope from under the clock. Moss shooed the bird away. It flew to the back of an armchair where it bobbed and screeched at him. Moss snatched the envelope free of the clock. His initials were printed on the front. Inside, he found a piece of stiff paper with a note tidily printed in the same blue ink. A gift from a mutual friend. There was no signature, merely an X. He flipped it over, but the other side was blank. The bird screamed. Moss turned, still holding the note in front of him, while the deranged bird filled the air with dust and feathers. Then he saw it. Peeking from behind the chair was the traveling bookcase, with his shoulder bag slung over its corner.
THE ATTIC OF THE CITY
On the day he was to murder Lamb, Moss arrived at the Cloth Hall in the late afternoon. Earlier, he had gone to the Alley of Birds to look for Oliver. As a precaution, he had left the bookcase at the shipwright's house, hidden behind stacked lumber in the workshop. Oliver was not in in the alley, and Moss could not risk asking around. He called the bookshop from a callbox, but there was no answer. In frustration, he finally walked to the shop itself, only to find it locked up and dark. Of course Oliver might be inside, but Moss had no way of entering. By that time the hour was late. Moss had returned to the shipwright's house and retrieved the bookcase. After camouflaging the case, using a roll of canvas and some twine from beneath the carpenter's bench, he walked to a taxi stand, dragging it on squeaking wheels.
By the time the cab deposited Moss at the Cloth Hall, most of the day's activity around the market had dissipated. Farmers and vendors were tidying stalls in preparation for the next day or standing in groups talking. Moss entered the loading doors unnoticed, despite the squeaking wheels, and found his way to a freight elevator. He pulled the safety gate across the opening and pressed a worn button. Beneath his feet the elevator floor heaved, dropped slightly and then ascended at a crawl.
The floors above the main hall appeared deserted. Two levels were littered with broken crates, skids, and other market detritus. The third was a wide-open expanse of hardwood, a dancehall in years past. A raised bandstand occupied the far end of the room, and chairs lined the walls. A heavyset man swept the floor with his back to the elevator. He moved in a lazy, lateral shuffle as though listening to music. In a moment the view was gone. Thinking about Oliver's unexpected absence as the elevator climbed, it occurred to Moss that once he had killed Lamb, he would be in a very different negotiating position to deal with Oliver. The elevator arrived at the attic with a clang.
Moss pulled the gate back on a vestibule lit by flickering sconces. Split boxes, rubber tubes and bags of salt were stacked in a corner. Opposite the elevator, the ruins of a mural surrounded a door twice Moss's height and nearly as wide. It depicted animal life across the millennia. Above it, scrolling calligraphy declared The Museum of Natural History—Collections Repository. Cetaceans were generously represented. Moss wondered if the mural was the work of the late artist that Gale had derided.
A peephole was set into an eye painted on the door. Moss pushed a button dangling on twinned wires, wondering if he would have been wiser to enter by the stairwell. Shifting the bookcase, he knew that it would have been tiring and noisy. He stepped to the side as machinery within the walls screeched, metal on dry metal. The door opened inward. A tin monkey wearing red tails moved arthritically into the doorway and extended its hand.
"Natural welcome museum to visitor the history!" said a high, confident voice full of static. Moss was still parsing the odd syntax when he realized that the monkey had not lowered its hand. "Visitor museum the welcome to history!" The monkey's cracked face was expressionless. The glove had long since worn off, exposing wire fingers with encrusted metal joints. A grinding came from within and the monkey trundled back along a rusty floor track, to a space hidden beyond the entrance. The door moved but Moss stuck his foot into the opening, causing a thump, which was followed by a sound like cascading sand within the wall, as the resistance backed up along the hidden chain of machinery.
The hall was approximately fifty feet high and two
hundred feet long. Moss could see no immediate sign of Irridis's presence. The elephant, which he had last seen in the dark, towered in front of him, swathed in plastic sheeting. Collections of bird nests, eggs, teeth, fossils and every other imaginable relic once belonging to a living creature sat on shelves, minutely labeled in a complex system of organization. Surplus cabinets and large animal displays occupied the center of the main floor creating a labyrinth of dream-like juxtapositions. Seen over the labyrinth, at the far end of the hall, was an empty aviary, a ruin of metal and glass that extended into the pitiless elements above the city. The repository had once held tours for interested members of the public, but it did not look like it had seen a visitor for decades. Moss lifted the canvas on the bookcase and tore a package free, which he had secured earlier with tape. Laying it on the floor, he pushed the bookcase into a deep alcove between two fossil cabinets. Where the hell is Irridis? he thought as his fingers worked.
Moss had left his gun behind in the rush to get Imogene out of Seaforth's apartment. Left without a means to kill Lamb, a new approach had to be devised. One had occurred to him earlier that day, as he inspected the shipwright's collection of tools. Kneeling on the floor in front of the elephant, Moss unwrapped a piece of sailcloth to reveal a cobbler's awl and hole punch. It had a smooth wood handle that fit as neatly into Moss's palm as a missing appendage. Two metal prongs emerged from the handle. The longer was about the length of his index finger; the shorter was a metal claw the length of his baby finger. Both prongs were lethally sharp.
Lamb was a cunning and dangerous man, but he was handicapped by a great desire. Moss had invented a story. He would say that he had found Memoria in the house at Fleurent Drain and after a joyous reunion had managed to convince her to come with him to the Cloth Hall, on the pretense that he lived there—as Imogene actually did. On the way to the Cloth Hall, Memoria had become spooked and leapt out of the cab at an intersection. The story was tissue-thin, but he just had to get close enough to Lamb as he spun it to lunge at the man with the awl. He would drive the tool into Lamb's temple and destroy the artery beneath. Moss was not particularly adroit with tools but he had seen this done in the prison lavatory with devastating effect. Moss had never killed a man before, but he had killed a rabid dog, and knowing what he did of Lamb, he saw no distinction.
Moss tossed the canvas to the side and pocketed the tool in his coat. As he stood, his eyes strayed to the staircase that led to Imogene's mezzanine apartment. There was a light on. At the same moment, Moss again became aware of a burbling sound he had heard the night he had escaped from the attic. He squeezed between a number of taxidermied animals and fossil-laden cabinets. Following the sound he eventually came upon a large open space, occupied by a glass tank as large as a upended railway car. It rested on an iron stage, accessed by wide steps. The ironwork belonged to the previous century, dark and overwrought. The top of the tank was stabilized from the ceiling by chains. Hoses snaked from inside the aquarium and disappeared into the overhead shadows. The tank's pumps and filters were the source of the sound. The water glowed, cool and blue, with bioluminescent light shining from countless marine animals.
Schools of fish and solitary creatures moved behind thick glass. Jellyfish undulated drawing lengths of stinging tentacles through living corals and anemones. At the bottom of the tank, something moved on frond-like limbs, emitting pulses of light as it nosed into the substrate. Moss was absorbing this wonder when Imogene appeared from a slop room to his left.
Her hair was pulled back. She held industrial grade rubber gloves under an elbow. An expired fish was draped in her hand. It was a pale pink, with milky eyes and gills that expanded around her fingers like chrysanthemum petals. She moved stiffly. The line on her neck was livid.
"You're here," said Moss, stupidly. He was stunned.
She looked up abruptly at the sound of his voice. Her expression changed from shock to rage. She walked toward him shaking her head, lips pale with anger. Moss fell back a step, just as the dead fish came flying at him. It sailed past, close enough for him to smell its flesh. There was no time to see where it landed. Imogene tried to slap his face. He ducked and she struck his right ear instead. Her raised foot caught him in the wounded calf.
"Imogene, stop. What are you doing?"
"What the hell are you doing here?
"What's wrong?"
"You left me lying on the fucking road."
"I thought you were dead. They were trying to shoot me."
"Shoot us." Imogene paced, breathing heavily. The exertion had freed her hair and it hung over her face. She pulled it back behind her ears. "Well, obviously I wasn't dead." She snatched the rubber gloves from where they had fallen on the floor.
"I didn't have a choice," said Moss. "If I'd stayed I wouldn't be here now."
"More's the pity, asshole." The rubber gloves hit his face, leaving a trail of fish slime and scale. Wiping it from his face with his coat sleeve, he tried again.
"What are you doing here?"
"I live and work here. Where else was I supposed go?" Imogene glared.
"Oliver let you go?"
"I don't know what you are talking about, Moss."
"Oliver Taxali. He told me that he'd kidnapped you."
A hint of amused confusion crossed Imogene's face. "Did he?"
"I just said he did."
"And you believed him?"
"Again, I thought you were dead. I was so relieved to hear that you weren't that I wasn't thinking. What happened?"
Imogene stared at the fish on the floor. Moss tensed. "I woke up on the ground, with that ugly house manager slapping my face, and telling me to get up. He kept saying that I was going to jail. The two men with the guns ran off after you making a lot of noise. They thought they saw you, but it was just someone checking out the commotion. It was absolute chaos. That man kept yelling at me, calling me all kinds of names." She picked up the fish.
"Imogene, I am sorry—"
"So I punched him in the trachea."
"You what?"
"I managed to get up and get into the cab, despite his dog trying to tear my leg off. By that time more people were arriving. I told the driver to get me out of there, which he was more than happy to do. I had him take me to a club called Leviathan's."
"That's a dangerous place."
"Is it? Well, there is a woman there named Estelle. She does a lot of under-the-table abortions and surgical work in a suite of rooms on the fourth floor, what the Lamprey likes to call patchwork. A lot of weird activity goes on there. Anyway, she knows me—she did my tattoos. She's the one who tattooed your arm and supplied the drug I used on you. She sorted me out, but the downside is that Lamb will certainly hear about it, and so basically I'm fucked."
"That's why I'm here."
Imogene frowned. "What?"
"Lamb is coming in a few hours. I intend to give him some bad news."
"That sounds like a euphemism." Imogene dropped the dead fish and the gloves on a utility cart that was laden with scrub brushes, tubing and other paraphernalia.
"I arranged it."
Imogene's lips tightened as she took a sweater from a chair back and tugged it over her head. "Well, that was rash. I came to you and Irridis for help."
"And we will help you."
She looked past Moss, eyes widening. Moss turned to see what had caught her attention.
The girl that Moss had seen by the canal stood before the towering aquarium, her upturned face washed by the light of the life within. Her raven hair coiled onto the shoulders of a soiled red velvet dress. There was a distant look on her face, lips parted, eyes limpid and unblinking. It was an odd thing to notice under the circumstances, but she did not swallow. She seemed oblivious to their presence, as though they were beings outside of a dreamer's singular focus. Her milk-white hands, with their colorless nails, were pressed to the surface of the aquarium glass where hungry organisms crowded and followed her trailing fingers.
The bottom-d
welling creature that Moss had noticed earlier rose to meet her with rows of blue lights moving along its length. The smaller fish, darting at her hands through the glass, were agitated by its interest. They were shredding their fins in a struggle to be ever closer to her, damaging even more delicate animals in the process, like the spider-limbed shrimp and seahorses. The flashing creature moved inexorably through the chaos, drawing its barbels like a train.
"It's her, Moss. It's Elizabeth," said Imogene, stepping forward. Moss took her arm to draw her back, but she remained as she was. Her face was blanched. Elizabeth's attention shifted. The impassive expression changed to annoyance, but with several odd shifts in between. The word that came to Moss was sorting; a person shuffling through a series of masks until they found one suitable. It was subtle and occurred within a couple of seconds. She stepped back. The platform's railing prevented her from falling. Imogene pulled her arm free but stayed beside Moss. The mass of marine creatures had moved to the middle of the tank, where they hung suspended as a single writhing mass.
Imogene looked at Moss. "What's happening? How the hell did she get here?"
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe she followed me."
The water was clouded with silt, torn fins and scales. A loose form took shape as the animals struggled to gain a position at a core dominated by the flashing creature. Individuals became indistinguishable in the frenetic whole. Moss saw a humanoid form. A gasp from Imogene confirmed that this was not merely his imagination. Seconds passed while the form found equilibrium. An elongated arm, composed of hundreds of panicked fish held by an uncanny force, reached out to touch the inside of the glass where Elizabeth's hand had left a smear. The glass bulged.
Moss, transfixed, had not noticed Imogene leave his side until he saw her come around the tank behind Elizabeth. She had a raised gun, which he recognized as his. She must have stolen it from Seaforth's apartment while he was out.
"Wait," he said, sensing the knife-edge they were balanced upon. While there would be a cost for lingering, sudden action would break the spell, perhaps leading to unmanageable consequences.
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