Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  And yet, these buildings provided his livelihood. And when he encountered them, they made his heart beat faster, and brought out in him something like a fierce possessiveness to stake a claim on them before someone else did. He was a hunter who mourned for his prey, but was very good at tracking it down.

  It wasn’t the Plastech Foundries, with its many sealed-up windows like myriad blinded eyes, he was here to have a look at today, however (its future was tied up in complex litigation; he had already checked)...but another structure, in the same general neighborhood, and he had begun drifting in that direction now.

  He had discovered the building while renting an hour on a commercial satellite through his home computer to scour Punktown’s secondary industrial sector, mostly given over to office and warehouse space these days. He had laid various templates of the city over his satellite view of the area, trying to ascertain the structure’s ownership. One map would seem to indicate that it was within the boundary lines of an old Choom textile mill, but another appeared to show that it was an outer building of an early Earth-owned steelworks complex. One template claimed it was not there at all. This had led Titus to call up earlier satellite photos of the district. There was the building, in every view, dating back decades, and just as enigmatic in each one. Was that its vehicle-filled parking lot in one view, or was that another parking lot for the steelworks? His computer could pin no name, no label to the building, which despite its good size seemed to have reposed in a kind of serene anonymity through many years of growth and decline.

  Finally he had pored over the very first survey shots of the Choom city which Punktown had swallowed up, shots taken during the earliest colonization efforts. And the building seemed to be there, but maybe not. It looked familiar, but different. As Titus went back over the various pictures, it seemed to him the building had changed subtly or even drastically in appearance over the years. Different owners, refitting it for their own needs, or a succession of different buildings built on the same spot?

  In the earliest shot, the mill or factory had a good half dozen great brick chimneys, and maybe it was thick smoke from these that gave the structure a darkened blurry look, smudged, as if it had been caught in a photograph while moving very quickly.

  But now there it was, before him, and even though he had only seen it from on high on his computer, and it had been altered over the decades, he recognized it instantly. It raised itself above outlying sheds and generator buildings of the steelworks, its flank scaled in a mosaic of red brick that looked damp in the misted air. It had few windows, on this face at least, some sealed up but others just nakedly black. He noted none were broken, however; they must be transparent ceramic, because Titus couldn’t imagine the neighbors would let them go unshattered. It still possessed several chimneys, if less grand than the castle towers of its past, and a rust-streaked metal dome or cupola atop one section that might once have stored gas or some liquid, or only been cosmetic. Might it still store something; might the place still be vital, in operation? Why had he assumed upon his discovery of the building that it was abandoned? Well, certainly, most of the factories in this sector had been abandoned over the past twenty years. But as he neared it, he didn’t find anything that would counter his first impression. It resembled nothing so much as a ghost ship—however well preserved—that had spontaneously and unaccountably resurfaced from the bottom of the sea. A sunken ship with its name long erased.

  Wandering around it at a respectful orbit, he searched for a way inside, if this were possible today. One side door of metal was firmly shut. A pair of dented and paint-chipped loading dock doors were locked as well. On these, he noted, there was a symbol stenciled in white, either a company logo or a character in a language he wasn’t familiar with. On the opposite side of the building he found another door, and he put his hand on its latch with no real optimism. It clicked casually. It was unlocked.

  He hesitated. In the dirty glass, he saw his own face reflected back at him. The handsome features of a black man of forty-one, with his still-smooth skin the lustrous deep brown of a chestnut. Behind the lenses of his glasses, the whites of his eyes were a mellow ivory like old piano keys. He thought he had a sad face. It watched him expectantly, as if another man stood on the other side of that door waiting for him to open it and let him out.

  He didn’t know if he would be trespassing, but he could claim sincerely to ignorance if caught. He was here to explore, wasn’t he? He had let himself into many a deserted edifice before. He pulled the door open, and it didn’t even squeal.

  But again, he hesitated on the threshold. It was gloomy beyond, though gray light came in through those windows that were uncovered. He produced his flashlight from his trouser pocket...and he was mindful of the licensed handgun he carried in a shoulder holster hidden by his overcoat. Punktown was a rough city even in its less derelict regions. Abandoned buildings were an attractive shelter for much of the city’s considerable homeless population, especially when winter was nearing.

  Back at J. J. Redhook, he had asked the counter man who served him what he knew of the building.

  “Used to be a ceramics plant, I thought I heard somebody say once. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s out of service now. One of our kids who harvest the weed went in there one afternoon with his buddies, he told me, and they ran into this mutant that was living in there. A mutant or some offworlder—who knows? They said the thing looked like a devil crossed with a nightmare, and it chased them the hell out of there.”

  “I heard about that place,” another counter man had spoken up. “They made chemicals there, I think...for, uh, photography. And there’s an old guy who lives in there, just one old man. He must’ve put on a mask or used a holograph projector or something to run those punks out of there. If it was that moron Brandon and his boys, I’d have run them out myself.”

  So as he stood in the open doorway, Titus didn’t know whether to be on the lookout for an elderly homeless man, or some dangerous mutant or alien. Maybe, he thought, trying to joke with himself, it was some elderly alien mutant. More than likely—and as logic would dictate—the building was host to numerous lost souls. Well, he’d encountered them before; had even had to play rough before. He thumbed on his beam and stepped inside.

  It was an open lobby or courtyard of sorts which tunneled upwards through the center of the structure. The high ceiling of it, though nearly lost in murk, was the interior of that dome he had seen outside. The lobby’s walls were also of brick, and arched interior windows looked down from them. Metal footbridges with meshed safety railings ran across the vertical tunnel, connecting one side to the other on four levels, but no stairs or elevator were in view. Titus crossed the bottom floor to a door of metal. His dark reflection in its narrow window again looked like someone on the other side peeking through at him, until he shone his light on the glass and banished his own ghost.

  As he had hoped there was a stairwell beyond it, and he began to ascend. It would have been pitch black in this enclosed space if not for his torch, and he was grateful when he came to the first landing that it opened out into the lobby again, with its dim patches of sunlight. He stepped out onto the first of the metal footbridges, stopped half way across to finish his coffee. Rather than carry the empty cup with him, he politely set it down on the edge of the walkway, then continued across. Another door opened to him. He entered a long hallway of brick with an arched ceiling, and an elevator door close at hand. Though it might still have a long-lasting emergency power cell, he didn’t take the chance of using it and strolled further down the tunnel-like corridor, letting his beam and his whim guide him.

  One of the hall’s doors he peered in through let him into a large room filled with great dark hulks of complex machinery. Even stepping close to one of these imposing entities—cautiously, as if he feared it would suddenly spring into gnashing, clanging life— he wouldn’t venture an interpretation as to their original function. A pass of his beam along brick walls revealed a fe
w charts, schematics or diagrams of some sort, though he saw no evidence of written language that might indicate the origins of the building’s last owners.

  As he proceeded along the second level, and then the third, Titus was struck by the relative cleanness of the plant. There had been no fires that had gutted it, no chemical spills that had necessitated its evacuation (though physical calamity seldom was the reason for a factory’s demise, economic calamity being more wrathful than acts of God). But more than that, there were no signs of habitation by the homeless and disenfranchised. None of the usual graffiti coating the walls, scattered beer and wine bottles, paraphernalia of drug use. No stink of urine, no garbage, indeed no rodents or bugs that would be drawn to the refuse of such invasion. A place this big should be swarming with various tribes of the homeless, competing nations of the homeless in a kind of microcosm.

  What was keeping them away? Granted, the place had an eerie, unsettling stillness. But the people who dwelt in Punktown were not distinguished for their meekness. It was tooth and claw in Punktown, whether one wore soiled rags or a five-piece suit. What about this place could so disturb a gang who might desire a spacious hang out, or a band of angry mutants, that they would leave it pristine, uninhabited? Had there in fact been some dangerous spill that Titus was blissfully and perhaps lethally unaware of? Or was the building just so skillfully anonymous that these people were simply unaware of its existence?

  He had now reached the fourth level, paused on the footbridge that spanned the lobby to gaze down into it, from this height a brick abyss. He could tell by the soft pattering against those windows that looked outside and the further graying of the light that a rain had started to fall.

  Wait. He leaned against the railing, craned his neck out into space to study the walkways below this uppermost one. He had left his empty coffee cup on the first footbridge. It was no longer there.

  So he wasn’t alone. Again he became conscious of the heaviness of his gun nestled to his ribs. What was it, then? Some withered little troll of a man? Some demon with a face of fiery rage?

  He continued across the bridge, continued with his exploration, determined to briefly take in this last floor before he departed to make an initial report. His pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. They were recording everything he saw and heard, so that he would have a record of his investigation to present with his report.

  He entered at last into another spacious, if rather low-ceilinged room filled with Cyclopean machinery. Bundles of cables snaked up walls, across the ceiling like living roots or vines run wild, trailing off into gloom. Everything was sepulchrally still. And yet, there was in fact a faint ticking sound that Titus, holding his breath upon discerning it, thought might be the rain against a window. But he saw no window. An insect, scrabbling across the floor? As he turned his head, seeking its source, his gaze fell on one of the machines. He made his way to it, pointing his light. When he reached it, he shut the light off. Because there was a subtle light coming from a tight little cranny of the machine, a pale glow deep inside it. Stealthily, he pressed his eye to the opening.

  A single glass vacuum tube of some type, emitting a firefly’s soft green luminescence. And also, one tiny piston working up and down, creating the cricket-like ticking sound he had heard. That was all. It was like finding one last ember glowing in a burned building...the last dying beats of a dinosaur’s heart.

  Something else caught his attention as he straightened up. His beam was reflected back at him from the rear wall. As he wound through the machinery to reach it, he determined it was made of glass colored a dark yellow, like a wall of amber.

  It seemed very thick and it was dusty; he rubbed it with his coat’s sleeve, then pressed both his light and glasses to its surface, wishing he had brought his bulkier recording glasses that permitted him to see in the absence of light. Was that another room on the opposite side of the murky glass wall?

  Abruptly, he shut his flashlight off, and jolted back fom the wall. Just as the beam had begun to pass across the legs of a narrow cot like a prisoner might sleep in, pushed against the back of the small room beyond, a dim light had begun to grow inside the chamber. It continued to grow, casting a yellow illumination from the glass across Titus and the surrounding machinery. He took several more steps backward.

  And now, a figure that must have been in the cell all along came forward from the bed to the glass. It was silhouetted by the diffused light behind it. He could tell only that it was a woman, naked, too dark to see the face of but her outline attractive. The figure pressed the palms of its outstretched arms to the glass. Again, Titus jolted back. It seemed to be putting its face, now, to the wall...to be peering out at him...

  Inexplicably, he turned and fled. His coat snagged on a machine and he tore the fabric in wrenching free of its bite.

  His footfalls clanged across one metal footbridge. Another. The stairwells were too dark; he nearly lost his footing in one and plunged to his death...

  Outside at last, he lifted his face to the mounting rain, which seemed to fall from the glistening brick skin of the building looming above him.

  * * *

  In his living room, Titus found a woman reclining on her side on the sofa, her legs drawn up, dressed in a cozy over-large sweatshirt, black sweat pants that clung to shapely legs, socks warming her feet. A mug of coffee rested on the floor within her reach, her head turned toward the vidtank. She didn’t appear to have heard him come in, or was too absorbed in the program she was watching to acknowledge his presence. And yet, the VT was not on; the screen she stared at was blank. It was not his VT Titus had forgotten to turn off when he left, but his holograph projector. He touched a keypad and the attractive black woman vanished...just as she had nearly two years ago now. Even her cup of coffee disappeared.

  He poked his head into one of the two bedrooms, but no, it was empty; there was no apparition of his son in there. That boy was now back on Earth. Titus had left his son’s posters on the walls, and the small bed still reposed in the corner.

  Tossing his torn and sodden coat over the back of a chair, he sat at his desk and inserted the tiny pellet from his recording glasses into his computer system. His screen saver showed an old-fashioned wrecker’s ball swinging into an anthropomorphic, cartoon-faced cathedral that winced and yelped and was diminished with each goofy-sounding blow. Now, his recording came on, and he fast-forwarded through much of it.

  He paused several times while viewing the part in which he had peeked into the machine with its soft inner phosphoresence. Maybe it was the poor light, which he tried to make corrections for in the image, but the miniature piston did not show up clearly. It was a dark smudge or blur, as if it had been moving much too quickly for the eye to follow, though this had not been the case as he recalled it.

  At last he viewed the portion of the recording where he had approached—and gazed into—the glass wall.

  He wanted to pause on the dark face of that imprisoned phantasm. Zoom in on it. Lighten the image. He dreaded what might be revealed to him there; what eyes had gazed upon him.

  But he never saw it. Where he had before been able to see into the glass, the recording remembered a different view. The wall was still aglow, as if its very material gave off light. But there appeared to be no room beyond it. All he saw, like cracks running throughout its surface, was a silhouetted latticework of dark veins. The thickest branches of these could even, when he zoomed in, be seen to subtly pulsate.

  He thought of a praying mantis that pretends it is a flower. But that was perhaps too violent an image. Maybe, then, a moth whose wings imitate the color and texture of bark.

  But he thought also of dead things. And what they might leave behind.

  The next morning, he was not quick in preparing for work. His supervisor called him, but was amicable enough about it. Seeing that Titus was still in his pajamas and robe, he told him to take the day off if he wasn’t feeling well.

  “Oh—what was up with that place yo
u were going to go have a peek at?” his supervisor asked him, before signing off. “Did you ever make it over there, yesterday?”

  “It’s nothing,” Titus said quietly, gazing into the screen, wondering what it was he was protecting or preserving. “There is no building there.”

  THE RUSTED GATES OF HEAVEN

  Ahead of them as they made their way into the wooded grounds ran the Bellakees’ twin pets Hapi and Gbekre, hamadryas baboons whose fluffy capes—and indeed, entire bodies—had been dyed a brilliant blue, and their eyes a metallic silver. Interesting hieroglyphics had been shaved into their fur and branded on their long dog-like faces.

  Mendeni was familiar with Hapi, a baboon-headed god of ancient Egypt, but Mr. Bellakee had to explain that Gbekre was a baboon-headed god of the Baule tribe of old Earth’s Ivory Coast, whose job it was to judge the dead. Effigies in his likeness, Bellakee had gone on—knowing that as an archeologist Mendeni would be interested—had often been found to be stained in the blood of sacrifices.

  Mendeni thought the baboons would have been impressive enough without their embellishments, but he wasn’t about to give voice to his opinion when the Earth-born couple were being so gracious.

  The great monkeys galloped off, crashing through and disappearing into the thick underbrush of the dense forest. The Bellakees had no fear that they would lose their pets, as their entire sprawling estate was surrounded by a high invisible wall of energy. Following a worn path with his hosts, Mendeni was nostalgically moved to recall picnics in the woods with his parents and brothers in his youth. It was hard for him to believe, even though he was a young man, that those forested areas had ever been as extensive as they were. Of course, everything from a playground to a summer’s day seemed so much larger and longer to a child, but he knew it had more to do with the accelerated growth of the colony city of Paxton over the last two decades. But Paxton, or Punktown as it had come to be called, had existed before his birth, so that even though he was himself a Choom, native to this world Oasis, he had never dwelled in anything but a city of the Earth people. The Choom town that had preceded it was merely the grain of sand that the black pearl of Punktown had formed around.