The Night Market

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Not that... oh, never mind.”

  Jenny squinted at the point of light.

  “How far?”

  Yael consulted her memory of the map.

  “Two days,” she guessed. “Maybe three.”

  Jenny grunted and returned to feeding twigs into the tiny fire.

  “You know what this means, right?”

  Yael turned away from the light to look at Jenny curiously.

  “No. What?”

  “Some bastard down there has a bathtub,” Jenny said cheerfully. “And I am going to use it. Even if I have to kill them.”

  Yael smiled despite herself.

  “A bath sounds amazing,” Yael said with longing, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the way she itched beneath her clothes. “But you can’t kill anybody for something like that.”

  “I have before,” Jenny said indifferently, sitting back as the fire gradually bloomed. “I’m sure I will again. If a bath isn’t worth killing for, then what is?”

  Yael shook her head, warming her hands beside the small fire.

  “I hope that you are joking,” Yael said sternly.

  “I can see why you would think that. I mean, I make a lot of jokes, don’t I, Princess?”

  Yael hung her head.

  “I can’t tell when you are kidding and when you are serious.”

  Jenny shrugged.

  “Don’t see how that’s my problem.”

  Yael started to unpack the tent from a compression bag. Somehow she had ended up carrying most Jenny’s baggage along with her own, though Yael wasn’t certain exactly how that had happened.

  “You’re in a bad mood tonight,” Yael remarked. “What’s bothering you, Miss Frost?”

  “I’m sober and filthy, trapped in the middle of a goddamn wasteland with an annoying little girl. What’s not to love?”

  “Language.”

  Yael ducked just fast enough to avoid the piece of scrap wood that Jenny flung at her head.

  ***

  A city built just beyond the horizon. Yael steps only on light-colored tiles as she runs from the narrow shadows that the ancient towers cast. Her hands are filled with cut flowers and Yael knows that she must not hold them tightly, or she will risk bruising their waxen petals, but they drift from her hands, found and then lost again.

  “Have you woken?”

  Listless and bored, throwing rocks into the dark water of a pond in a ruined industrial park near the old heart of Roanoke. The water is poisoned with metals and polycarbonates, useless for swimming. Yael watches the reflected lights of the Visitor’s ships as they arc overhead and wishes for company.

  A white hallway. A hospital gown, cool air. Yael catches her face in a mirror, but the eyes are all wrong.

  “Will you wake?”

  ***

  Yael would have slept longer, were it not for a profound need for the bathroom. The night was almost gone and the light of a reluctant dawn petered through the fabric of the tent walls, illuminating Jenny’s empty sleeping bag, crumpled and discarded. The tent door hung partially unzipped, swaying with the cold breeze.

  She lingered briefly in her sleeping bag, reluctant to leave the warmth for the chilly morning air of the Waste. Then she kicked herself free of the sleeping bag with a sigh and hurriedly put on the clothes she had worn yesterday, dusty and still damp with sweat. Yael decided to skip her mask out of simple laziness – after all, she didn’t intend to stay out long.

  The campsite was deserted.

  Their campfire had died down to red coals that hissed and popped, the only sound in the flat grey expanse of the Waste. The night before they had set up camp in what had probably been a courtyard between structures, pitching their tent on a bed of dry crabgrass, surrounded by coarse sand and the bone-white remains of the toppled buildings. Yael glanced around, then hurried behind one of the larger fragments of a nearby wall, modest even in the absence of company.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows of the partially collapsed wall, resiliently denying the reality of what she saw in the creeping sunlight. Yael uttered a very small sound, a tiny yelp that cut off almost before it began.

  A fallen piece of concrete lay diagonally over the top of the stub of the wall, creating a sort of crevice. The ground was disturbed all the way to the mouth of the unnatural cave, probably from the body being dragged across it.

  At least Yael hoped that it had been a body by that point – and not a person.

  Fenrir raised his bloody muzzle briefly from the cavity torn in the corpse’s abdomen, leering at her with his malicious eyes, the edges of his mouth drawn up in a snarl or a ghastly smile. Yael suspected there was little difference. The corpse was turned toward her, and what had once been eyes shone like black marbles in a face so mangled that she couldn’t even guess at gender.

  Yael retreated carefully, afraid to turn her back on the savage, laughing dog.

  Fenrir whined and advanced, red paws staining the grey-brown sand between them.

  Yael took another step back, cursing herself for leaving her tools, everything that could help her, beside her sleeping bag in the tent.

  It was like a dance, slow and deliberate, one step and then a corresponding response, the distance between them maintained despite the changing position. Fenrir snarled continuously deep in the back of his throat, a sound like a rusted machine coughing to life. The dog’s eyes were filled with a primal and direct longing that made her knees shiver. Yael kept her hands out in front of her in a gesture of instinctive self-defense, almost as if she planned to ward the dog away by gesture.

  The fifth step took Yael out from behind the fractured wall and into the gradual dawn and sour wind of the Waste. She had to fight the impulse to run as her eyes adjusted to the light of the open courtyard, Fenrir disappearing into the shadow behind the wall.

  Instead, with an act of tremendous will, she continued to back away, one trembling step after another.

  Yael really did shriek when she bumped into something as she retreated. She struggled and fought against the arms that wrapped around her.

  “Hey, cool it, Princess,” Jenny said, her tone amused. “It’s me.”

  Yael clutched Jenny’s arm without even thinking about it, her shaking fingers digging into the fabric of her red sweatshirt.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jenny asked, confused. “Did something happen?”

  “Nothing,” Yael snapped, not sure why she was lying, or where her sudden embarrassment came from. “Nothing happened.”

  “That’s not very convincing, Princess...”

  Yael shrugged herself free and walked back to the tent, ignoring Jenny’s bemused expression. She tucked herself back into her sleeping bag, pulling the fabric up over her head. She remained that way when she heard Jenny clamber into the tent, kicking off her sneakers at the entrance and then laying down next to her.

  “C’mon,” Jenny said, poking at Yael through the sleeping bag. “Tell. What’s going on?”

  Somehow, in the warm darkness of her sleeping bag, the words came easier.

  “Your dog...” Yael whispered.

  “Fenrir?” Jenny prompted.

  “He is... eating. Behind the wall. Eating someone.”

  There was a pause.

  “And?”

  Jenny sounded genuinely puzzled. Yael tore the sleeping bag from her head and stared at her in astonishment.

  “He is eating someone!” Yael cried out, her voice anguished. “Right over there!”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said, lying down on her back, sounding bored. “He’ll do that.”

  She couldn’t think of what to say in response and Jenny seemed to have lost interest in the conversation, so Yael went back to hiding in her sleeping bag and trying to ignore the increasingly urgent demands of her bladder.

  7. Upon the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of the Hand

  Ten milligrams Diazepam dissolved under the tongue, five milligrams Zolpidem taken orally. Simultaneous prese
nce. His ghost lingering in every room with the smell of old books and aftershave. Three tiny pink Xanax footballs washed down with lukewarm water directly from the tap, bare feet on cold tile. There and not there.

  Yael devoured the potato hot from the fire, burning her lips and tongue in the process. She didn’t care, and was reaching for a second before she even managed to swallow the first.

  “Don’t choke,” Jenny warned. “Slow down. You’ve barely eaten in two days. Shove a bunch of food in your stomach and you are going to be sicker than hell.”

  She couldn’t have chided Jenny for her language even if she had wanted to. Her mouth was full of steaming, inexplicably delicious roasted potato. Yael didn’t know what had caused Jenny’s sudden fit of generosity, but she was too hungry to ask questions. She had gone without food for a day before, as part of one diet or another, but never while walking for miles on end on broken and uneven roads.

  “Hey, Princess. Slow down.”

  Yael hadn’t ever eaten a potato by itself. Her parent’s cook had dutifully prepared them for her since she became a vegetarian, but they were always served as part of a dish, mixed with steamed vegetables or sautéed in olive oil. Somehow these scrawny purple potatoes, with their oddly square shape, were infinitely more delicious than any she had before.

  “I’ve got to admit that you impressed me a bit. I was sure you would break down and eat the stew on the second day. You know, you’re pretty tough for a spoiled rich girl...”

  Objecting would have required either pausing her meal, or talking with her mouth full, and Yael wasn’t willing to do either. She just rolled her eyes and removed another one of the foil-wrapped potatoes from the coal of their camp fire, tossing the potato from hand to hand until the foil cooled.

  “Lucky thing we bumped into that trader. I was starting to think you would starve before we ever managed to get to whatever that city is called...”

  “Hastur, beside the dry lake of Kali, in sight of the ivory towers of doomed Carcosa...”

  “Whatever. You are already skinny enough, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Yael looked over at Jenny gratefully.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course! Look at you! How thin are you supposed to be, anyway?”

  “I’ve been on a diet my entire life. My younger sister is an inch and a half taller, but she weighs ten pounds less. I’m fairly certain that is why my stepmother liked her more. I meant to ask you before, but what happened to the trader? You didn’t kill him, right?”

  “No, I did not. You made me promise.”

  “And that was the right thing to do.”

  “Are you sure? The filthy bastard offered to give me those potatoes, plus a whole bunch of other shit, for ten minutes alone with you.”

  In any other circumstance the revelation would have killed her appetite. As it was, an icy shiver of revulsion ran down her back, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from gnawing on potato stub.

  “Oh.”

  “Told you.”

  “Not killing him was still the right thing. Even if he was a creepy old pervert.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Jenny said, crossing her arms and staring glumly into the fire. “You are such a pain in my ass. I have to put up with your crap right now, but remember that when we get to the city, all bets are off.”

  Yael didn’t even blink.

  “What did you do with the trader, Miss Frost?”

  “I let him go, alright? I paid him and then let him go.”

  “What sort of compensation could you have offered?”

  “I told him that if he didn’t want me to strangle him then he’d better give me all the vegetables he had.”

  Yael tried to get a look at Jenny’s face, but she always found some reason to look away.

  “You are kidding, aren’t you?”

  It must have been the firelight, but Yael thought for a moment that Jenny was blushing.

  “Go to sleep, Princess. Dream us a gold-brick road while you’re at it, will you? This shit is getting old.”

  ***

  “Naked, inevitable.”

  There is a problem with her ID card, the one that lets her back through the checkpoint down the street from her house. She runs it through the machine repeated, but sees nothing besides the red light of the rejection panel and the predatory smiles on the faces of the Public Safety Officers, leaning on their rifles and leering.

  She has followed the tunnel too far, hoping that it would intersect with a wider diameter pipeline that never materialized, and now she is unable to go any further forward, her fingers wrapped around the iron grate that blocks her progress. She wriggled this far on her belly, squeezing through the tight places by holding her breath, and now there is no room to turn around.

  A strange dog won’t stop following her, no matter how fast she walks, no matter how many turns she takes.

  During lunch period, Andrew kissed her behind the library, and now the girls in her class are whispering again. Most of them have boyfriends of their own – an open secret to everyone but the adults. Despite that, Yael can hear them making unkind remarks about her family, her olive skin, her unruly hair. She buries her face in a book so that they will not get the satisfaction of seeing her upset.

  On a deserted street Yael finds a black kitten wandering, missing part of its tail and most of one ear. She stops to pet it, and the cat curls around her ankles, soft and warm.

  “It is a fearful thing, to fall into the hands of a living god.”

  She is driving a car, something she has never done before, and it is going too fast, but she cannot find the brake. Yael can barely see out of the front window, but she knows that she is about to collide with the crowd in front of her, the steering wheel refusing to budge.

  On top of an old building with Elian, next to one of the clusters of scowling gargoyles. She is making him nervous by standing out on a ledge, thirty stories above the deserted street. The wind is so powerful that it feels as if it could lift her from her feet and send her soaring into the muddy skies, a prospect she finds exhilarating.

  Water turns to chalk in her throat. It is impossible to swallow.

  Waking up in her bed with a start, the linen damp with sweat. She doesn’t need to look at the clock to know that it is eight minutes past three, because she wakes up at the same time every night. Her brother has told her this is common, all across the sleeping portion of the globe. He believes it has something to do with the arcane machinery of the Visitors.

  “There is no profit to be had from traffic with the dead.”

  ***

  “Well, that’s different,” Jenny admitted from their vantage at the top of the hill. “I almost forgot what grass looked like.”

  Yael nodded her agreement, also captivated by the scraggly clumps of crab grass that dotted the gentle slope between them and what could only be Hastur.

  The town began slowly; individual cinderblock houses with paint faded by the relentless sun, a road of compacted gravel, trash, and feral cats. The road widened as they went, from a single-track path to a road wide enough for a car, assuming its suspension could handle the pitted and tattered surface.

  It seemed to Yael that it had been a very long time since the last vehicle had made its way down that particular road.

  The houses multiplied, tin and tarpaper roofs and walls made of whatever could be salvaged or stolen; petrified wood from the Waste, scrap metal, fragments of ceramic connected with a web of adhesive gel, crumbling brick and mortar. Some of them had withered gardens, or tiny irrigated plots of corn or a long, unfamiliar grass behind them. Yael did not see any people, but behind sheets of recycled plastic and acrylic glass, yellowed curtains flicked open briefly, and distant music and the scent of fried food drifted by on the desiccated wind.

  “Nervous bunch,” Jenny remarked, appearing pleased by their reaction.

  “You could say that.”

  As the street widened, the buildings grew denser, and the p
opulation made itself known. At first, all they saw were the homeless wretches who huddled in the shadow of broken walls, or under jury-rigged tarps attached to the blackened trees. The layers of filth and rags made it impossible to determine age or gender. They begged silently with outstretched palms, too starved or worn down by the heat to speak.

  Yael was familiar with poverty, at least from the point of view of an outside observer. And this city, or at least this part of it, was unmistakably poor. The houses were of haphazard construction and sat precariously on the sides of the surrounding hills, or stacked on top of each other like cards. Only about half the buildings had electrical service, and the air was thick with the smell of diesel fumes and the racket of dozens of laboring generators. Despite the language barrier, Yael was able to spot the gang members with their neck and hand tattoos, the drug dealers pacing nervously from one side of the block to the other, flanked by guards and hangers-on, and depressingly young prostitutes peeking out from the alleys.

  If the outskirts of the town had been deserted, then the center of town was teeming with life, people spilling out from clay and stucco buildings and into the dusty cobbled square like a disturbed ant colony. On the other side of the square, Yael could see neon lights, asphalted roads, and lowered and elaborately chromed cars creeping through crowded boulevards.

  It wasn’t civilization, exactly. It was more like what came before that, or immediately after.

  There was a temple at the center of the civic buildings to the south of the square, towering above the block that it dominated. Built of enormous blocks of crudely hewn black stone with green inclusions, the great central tower was large enough to shade the majority of the square, and it absolutely crawled with stone monstrosities – octopus-faced giants, terrible fungi, and ghastly unions between men and fish, or men and things less identifiable. The huge and blasphemous edifice sat on the heart of the city like a weight on its soul, dragging everything around it down to someplace far worse, a place where the shadows had teeth.