Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  The school was an enormous Italianate Victorian, the structure much too big for the two dozen or so students who went there, an anachronism whose façade seemed to suggest a smug awareness of its own incongruity. The upper floors had been sealed off with strict warnings to all students not to trespass, which of course Liam had, and though he had found nothing but an endless series of faltering rooms stacked full of ancient books, he hadn’t felt quite the same since. “The dust found its way inside me,” he’d written on his sketchpad after returning home that day, but he had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He didn’t even remember writing it, or drawing the picture of the janitor with the arms growing out of his mouth. In one of the old man’s hands, he had drawn an alarm clock.

  Liam looked away from the school. At the far end of the neighborhood, barely visible through the blizzard, stood the church. Even from here it looked like a face with hollow, admonishing eyes and a gaping mouth, the head atop the body he was now traversing like a tick. As much as he feared the school, the church absolutely terrified him, for surely if this part of the city had a black heart, a source of all its hated life, it was there within the unnaturally thick walls of the crumbling church. His parents had raised him to pray, to revere the gods that dwelled inside that place, and, as he was a good child and afraid of parents and gods alike, he had obeyed, might have continued to do so if not for his mother.

  It was a day he would never forget. The Day of Leaves. He had been sitting in his room, daydreaming, the pencil in his hand moving of its own accord, sketching. His mother had burst into the room and slammed the door behind her, startling him. Her nose was bleeding and her eyes were wide. She looked like a wild thing, feral. It was the first time he had seen her look this way, but it wouldn’t be the last. On that day, his body had tensed as she rushed toward him, but rather than strike or admonish the boy, she had grabbed him by the shoulders and brought her face close to his. Her breath had smelled sour, toxic, alien.

  “You must listen to me, Liam,” she’d said in a tone he wasn’t sure he had ever heard before. Pleading, almost whining. “You must listen to your mother now, do you understand?”

  Confused and frightened, he’d somehow managed a nod.

  “Good, good. That’s a good boy.” She sat down next to him, her skin reeking of smoke and ash. Her hair was tangled, the edges singed. She kept pulling at it as she spoke. “I don’t want you going to church anymore. I don’t want you going anywhere your father goes, okay?”

  “Okay,” he’d said, because there was nothing else he could say.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.” Given his feelings on the subject, it was not a difficult promise to make. He appeared to be the only child not enthused by the prospect of further visits to a monstrous building that made his head hurt. He could have gone forever never smelling that sulfur smell again, or sitting on those mildewed pews, or looking upon the strange upside-down effigy with the goat’s head someone had hung above the altar. He would be happy to never again hear the organ that only played tunes better suited to old ice cream trucks even when nobody was playing it. No, he would be perfectly happy to never set foot inside such a place again. Up until that moment, the only thing that had kept him from obeying his instincts in that regard had been his parents’ intervention.

  “You don’t know what it is. What they’re doing to us. What they’ve already done to your father. You must stay away from there and you must stay away from him. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be safer in your room where nothing has to change.”

  “Okay.”

  She had shaken him one more time to be sure the words had reached him and then, satisfied, she did something she would never do again: she kissed him lightly on his brow. It burned where her lips had touched his skin. Then she was gone.

  He thought that day might have been the last one in which his mother was capable of showing him any love. Though there had been far better days in the beginning before they reopened the church and tore the light from the sky and the color from the world, he still considered the Day of Leaves a good one because she had still cared. She had even kissed him!

  But soon the poison got to her too, changed her, and while she continued to resist—sometimes so much he could feel it radiating in warm waves from her skin—she was no longer the same woman now. It was only a matter of time before she started going to church again, and then she’d make him go too. And gods only knew how they would be made to pay for straying.

  The school lurched away from him, an explosion of vines separating supposed innocence from the world of the adults. Here, propped up atop cracked concrete sidewalks, was McMahon’s, the town hall, The Elder’s House, the police station, and finally Ned’s Grocery Store. Stone facades leaked viscous fluid from the cracks; fungus hemmed the bottoms. The roofs had sunken in the middle as if under the weight of something enormous and unseen. The breeze tore wisps of smoke from the slanted chimneys. On the opposite side of the road, a six-foot high stone fence topped by wrought iron railings blocked the view of the marsh but not the turbulent motion of the phosphorescent air above it. Green and yellow lights pulsated within the miasma. Tall withered trees that had grown up through the muck only to die looked like the masts of shipwrecks. And perhaps some of them were. The history of all but the marsh was known. Nobody in the neighborhood was permitted to know more, or worse, to venture beyond the fence, and nobody had ever tried. At least, that was the official story. Liam had heard whispers about foolish souls who had braved the marsh, their inevitable demise accompanied by the sound of something immense and soggy shifting itself to accommodate the induction of more life to be processed into nutrients. Others said that a contributing factor to the death and decay of this part of the city had been the derailment of a train ferrying toxic materials, which Liam supposed might explain the presence of a marsh within the confines of a city, the strange fog, and the things rumored to live in its depths.

  All Liam knew is that it smelled like wet dog and saltwater.

  Against the wall stood a row of scarecrows, or rather the remains of them. On the Day of Leaves, these creatures had their burlap chests stuffed with dead vegetation before they were set alight. Now all that remained were the charred crosses and twisted shreds of material that called to mind the burnt bacon and eggs on his mother’s stove. The scarecrow’s hoods, though blackened by the flames, retained their shape. The sheep skulls that had been placed inside those hoods would be there for always. Only the straw bodies would be replaced.

  And at the north end of the neighborhood, a twelve-foot wall of dead, twisted trees and vines at its back like some kind of cape, sat the church, watching him with stained-glass eyes. The longer he stared, the more it seemed to tip its steepled hat at him, as if in acknowledgment. Lights flickered within as the last lingering penitents made their way through the aisles.

  Without transition, it grew dark in an instant, long shadows yawning toward him from the open maw of the church.

  Liam quickly averted his gaze and battled his way through the drifts to the pub.

  * * *

  There were half a dozen men inside, all of them clustered around the bar, all of them hunched over pints of whatever heady brown slop passed as ale. They fell silent as he entered, as if whatever they’d been discussing before his arrival was something not meant for his ears. He recognized them all as his neighbors, but if they recognized him, it didn’t show. All he saw were wary deep-set eyes over pale faces and stained beards. A fire crackled in a large open hearth in the corner, but the heat was occluded by a trio of men who were watching their shadows dance upon the wall.

  McMahon’s head rose like a gray egg above the cluster of men at the bar. His face was a mass of lines, his eyes like black pebbles in a stream. Tattoos of mermaids crawled up both arms as he braced them on the mahogany bar and scowled at Liam. “This is no place for you.”

  Feeling as if the attention of the whole room
was on him, though only McMahon was looking directly at him, Liam swallowed and cast a hurried glance around at the men, hoping he might locate his father among them and therefore avoid having to engage McMahon in conversation. But his father wasn’t here.

  “I’m looking for—”

  “I know who you’re looking for. He’ll be home when he’s ready, and you can tell your mother that too. Haven’t you learned your lesson by now?”

  Again, Liam looked around. Clearly his father was here, somewhere, but he had already scanned the faces, or, when not made available for his study, the coats, and had come up empty. Where, then, was he? He put this question to McMahon, whose ruddy face seemed to darken with every second measured by the raven-faced clock above the bar.

  “I told you to go home,” he snapped. “And you’d better do it before you cause us any more trouble.”

  Liam stood immobile, helpless. If he returned home without his father, his mother would beat him to within an inch of his life. If he stayed, there was every chance McMahon would do the same. So he said the only thing he could think of to buy him some time.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Go outside in the snow,” said McMahon.

  Then, rather unexpectedly, a voice piped up from beneath the smoky glow of the amber lamps. Liam thought he recognized it as that of Mr. Wyman, his maritime studies teacher, but couldn’t be sure because Wyman’s voice had a tendency to change depending on the weather.

  “Let him look. None of this is our business anyway.”

  Though visibly displeased, McMahon threw up his hands and went back to scrubbing mildew from the beer taps. “As you like,” he grumbled. “But it won’t be on me. You can explain it to them when it all goes to hell.”

  Wyman—if that was indeed who had spoken from beneath the shelter of his tattered tweed jacket—breathed laughter that sounded like the snow huffing beneath the door. “We’re all headed there anyway, McMahon. Doesn’t matter in what order it takes us.”

  On the wall directly opposite where Liam stood was a cupboard with a missing door, inside which he could see an old dartboard. There were no numbers on the board, only symbols made of wire, symbols he recognized from his schoolbooks and the placard set into the stone block by the church door. The darts were made of boiled leather wrapped around shards of sharpened rat bones. Next to the board was a half rotted oak door that looked as if it had been designed for dwarves, but Liam knew it only appeared that way because time had forced it, like the rest of the building, to sink so that one had to step down into the adjacent room.

  Eager to be free of the atmosphere his presence seemed to have generated among the gathering, Liam hurried to the door, grabbed the metal ring and shoved. Too large for its frame, the door resisted, the wood scraping against the stone lintel, the resultant sound monstrously loud in the confines of the small bar. Even the shadows seemed to shrink away from it. And then he was inside and forcing the door shut behind him.

  He found himself in a narrow room with no windows and a ceiling so low he could touch it without fully extending his arm. Chaotic explosions of fungus gave the impression that the walls and ceiling were cushioned, or had been painted black, red, and gray. Broken chairs and tables had been stacked to the ceiling and back to the far wall so that there was little room to move. Liam had to skirt around them to reach the door in the far wall. When he did, he stopped, one hand on the ring, his heart in his throat.

  Going beyond this point meant reliving his previous nightmare. The door led outside to an open-air bathroom covered only by a faltering tin roof, beneath which a single ceramic trough served as the place for men to relieve themselves. There were no facilities for women, because women never came here. There were no stalls. It was little more than a back alley with access blocked from the street by an avalanche of empty gas canisters and pulverized furniture.

  Liam considered opening the door just a crack and calling his father’s name, but he knew the howl of the wind and snow would likely make it inaudible. He lingered on the threshold, heart ramming against his ribs, until yet another voice entered the fray, this one more comforting than any other: You can undo it. It will hurt at first like it always does, but you can take the pain. Later, when you’re all alone, you can revise it and make it yours. He had come to think of this soothing voice as echoes of his adult self, sent back through the mildewing pathways in his brain from some incomprehensible future, or a dream of one. And thus far, it had always steered him right.

  Bracing himself, he yanked open the door and immediately recoiled at the stench of piss the icy breeze blasted into his face. Grimacing, he wiped his nose on his glove and stepped out into the alley.

  The single naked bulb suspended from the tin roof threw little light. The cobblestones out here were greasy and uneven and missing in places. With the warmth of the bar shut behind him, Liam wrapped his coat tighter around himself and squinted into the poor light. The trough where men did their business was empty of all but stains, discarded cigarette butts, and a half-inch of dark brown water, which bubbled and gurgled as if alive. Liam avoided looking too long at it as he made his way past the “toilet” and out into the area of yard unprotected by the sagging roof.

  The snow buffeted his face like gravel as he surveyed the dark expanse before him. He stood still for a moment beside the calamity of gas cans and furniture blocking the exit until he detected a sound to his right, from the area next to the old tin shed where the darkness was thickest.

  Last time he’d come here on such a mission, he had not needed to venture so far into the yard. On that occasion, he’d found his father sitting in the trough, pants around his ankles, face raised to the tin roof in ecstasy as the violin woman worked on him.

  Yes, no women came to McMahon’s Bar, but these visitors had been women in shape only. Nothing else about them suggested femininity. Nothing about them was remotely human. And of course there wouldn’t be. The church had sent them.

  Liam dreaded coming upon such a scene again. It had taken him the better part of six months to recover from the last time, and only then because he had drawn sanity back into his head through his pictures. He knew he could do the same thing again now, no matter what he found, but he didn’t want to have to experience it again first.

  Unbidden, a small pulse of anger warmed the base of his throat and he frowned. Why had his mother made him come here again, knowing what he was likely to find? The answer, when it found him, was startling in its simplicity: they wanted him to see, wanted him to be driven mad, maybe in the hope that this time, it would take and they’d finally be rid of him.

  Incensed now, the anger spreading downward, setting fires throughout his chest and down into the pit of his stomach, he forgot his fear and made his way over to that suffocating swatch of darkness beside the old tin shed in which McMahon kept the spare barrels of beer, the moonshine, and the mason jars full of animals he had never had the heart to let go.

  The sounds were louder here. Sounds he recognized despite being too young to know them. He stood there for some indeterminate amount of time until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could see the shapes, the nakedness, hear the passion as his father had his way with another one of them.

  The violin lady was suspended above his father via her broken, twisted arms, her long-fingered hands clamped to the roof of the shed on one side, the wall on the other. She had no legs to speak of. Instead, her ragged torso ended in violin strings that started somewhere in her throat. Made taut by the concrete block suspended at the other end of the strings where the rest of her body should have been, the wind played a haunting tune she controlled by moving her mouth and working her throat. His father knelt before her, her bare breasts clamped in his dirty hands, his mouth working feverishly over her erect nipples. When she moaned, it was music; when he gasped, it was an ugly, hungry, desperate sound. His manhood was erect, stabbing pitifully at the empty air beneath the concrete block as she weaved from side to side.

 
The woman became aware of Liam first. She did not panic— they never did—instead she released one hand and then the other and dropped down into the darkness of the rubble until she was out of sight, the faint twanging of the violin strings the only indication that she was still there, hidden, as she alerted his father to their visitor.

  The old man still had his hands before his face where the violin woman’s breasts had been only a moment before. Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, he dropped them and looked dazedly at the boy standing before him. The confusion quickly turned to rage as he rose like a wraith, tugging up his pants as he readied a hand to strike the boy.

  “I fucking told you, I told her not to bother me,” he said, a string of drool dangling from his lower lip. Even in the gloom, Liam could see the red glare in his eyes. He was drunk on more than just the beer.

  Liam braced himself for the blow, his head turned slightly to the side, eyes shut tight.

  It didn’t come.

  When next he opened his eyes, his father was staring uncertainly at him, something like fear on his long haggard face, both of them shivering from the cold.

  “I’m allowed to do whatever I want here,” his father said. “That’s how it is now.”

  Discordant music as the violin woman skittered away down through a rent in the rubble. The old man looked over his shoulder with something like sadness before turning his attention back to his son. “I’m not coming home. I don’t belong there anymore. But you know that already.”

  The snow whipped itself into a frenzy around them.

  “I’ll stay here and die with the rest of them. That’s what was going to happen anyway. We all knew it. We just didn’t expect it so soon. The gods can have us. I’m sure they won’t turn us away. But whatever happens, this place can’t last forever. Not like this. The city is dead.”

  Despite the anger, Liam shared his father’s sadness. It didn’t have to be this way. Revise, advised the voice he kept secret inside him, but he knew even if he did it would do nothing to erase the horror that lived on this side of things. All was darkness here, because it belonged here, and if it didn’t stay contained in places such as these, it would corrupt everything.