Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “They already have.”

  “All right, Virginia,” Mrs. Gamely said. “You’ve failed a bit. But you’re still alive. You may not find a way to save your child. But you have to try. You owe it to her, and you owe it in general.”

  The snow came down ferociously now, hissing softly the way it does when it falls in earnest, and the mother and daughter embraced.

  The City Alight

  AT FIRST not even the fire department or the police knew that anything was wrong. Visitors to the observation decks of mile-high towers could see pillars of fire in the limitless distance. However, like all visitors to high places, they assumed that everything on the ground was under control.

  But the pillars of fire that rose over the city of the poor went unnoticed by officials who were apoplectically fixed on the remarkable activities of Jackson Mead. Fires were not unheard of in the city of the poor, either. Summer and winter, it smoldered on, consuming itself in self-made arson. This time, though, the flames were higher and in many more places than usual. While the rest of New York hid from the cold and stayed indoors in comfortable houses where children played and winter-weary dogs slept by the hearth, an army hit the streets in the city of the poor.

  Two days after Christmas, young men and women were dancing at the Plaza, the lifters were roaring over the harbor, the bridges to Brooklyn and Queens were alight with evening traffic, and the factories had resumed their rhythmic work. Lawyers who never slept took in bushels of facts and regulations, and spat out arguments twenty-four hours a day. Deep underground, repairmen were at war with pipes and cables to keep the city above them illuminated and warm. They moved with the tireless determination of tankmen in an armored battle, straining to turn huge ten-foot wrenches, facing explosions and fire, digging like mad, rushing squads and battalions through the dark tunnels, their miner’s lights bobbing over dirty and timeless faces. Police fought through mortal encounters in separate incidents all over the city, foreign-exchange traders held six phones in each hand, scholars in the same room at the library were, nonetheless, in a thousand different places as each bent over his book in one of the thousand clear pools of steady lamplight. And they danced at the Plaza—women in white or salmon-pink dresses, and men in black and white and cummerbunds. Balding violinists with pencil mustaches and amazingly dissolute faces filled the marble-columned court with music. Hanging thickly from the columns and the ceiling were streamers and bunting in pink and gold that gave the dancers a summer glow. The backs of the chairs were draped with beaver, mink, and other furs which, as if they could remember the cold, were cool to the touch. Outside, carriages were trotted by, and warring winds from the north shook the icicle-covered trees like crystal bells. The finery and fine movement, the health and dancing, the joy itself, were soon to come undone.

  Somewhere in the city of the poor, where the roads and streets had eroded away and what was left was a tea-colored meadow strewn with pits and shacks, were an old man and his wife who had made their living over the years by keeping a little store. Their wooden shelves were almost bare, but now and then they managed to stock a few bags of rice and sugar, some soft-drink bottles full of kerosene, some secondhand housewares, and a few shrunken and mutilated vegetables. The one room was lit by a lamp which burned beef tallow and waste oil. When it got very cold that winter, the old man and old woman put on all the clothes they had and took refuge in the back of the store, behind a home-sewn burlap curtain. Sometimes the old man went out to find scraps of wood, which he then burned in a coffee can. They were too cold to tremble, their lips were blue, and they stayed still so as not to offend the chill, hoping that it would let them live. Though the cold spell didn’t break, and would not break until long after they had died, they didn’t die of the cold. They died of heat.

  At about the time when the dancing at the Plaza had reached its apogee and the bare-shouldered women were waltzing in sensual unison, the old man and old woman heard the beginnings of something that sounded half like surf and half like fire.

  They heard the wind, and people running in long strides the way animals race from forest fires, in huge heart-pounding leaps. And then came the stragglers. Someone pounded on the door of the shop. The old man swallowed, too frightened to move. His wife looked at him, and cried. The tears ran down her face regularly, one at a time. Before they could come to rest on her dress, the front door was pushed down and it slapped the floor explosively. In the blink of an eye, fifty people were inside. Everything on the shelves disappeared immediately. Then the shelves themselves were ripped down. Anything that stood about was kicked and thrown. Crates and boxes hit the ceiling and ricocheted off the walls, lighted torches brushed against the wood, and as the hovel was beginning to burn and the crowd was already on its way out, someone ripped down the burlap curtain. Half a dozen men seemed to take offense that the storekeepers had dared to remain still on the other side, and they torched them.

  Their clothes burned away, and then they themselves burned like tallow. As everything went up in flame, the drab interior became a furnace of white and silver. Under the buckling roof beams, a bubble of gold fire arched up like the roof of a cavern. From a distance, this appeared to be a small twirling pillar rising through the roof, dancing for a few seconds above a bed of sparks.

  Across the darkened landscape that told of its poverty in showing no light, little pillars flickered and grew, sometimes combining, until small firestorms whirled like waterspouts, feeling out each contour of the land, sweeping to and fro, seeking wood, dead trees, and oil-soaked earth on the banks of stagnant creeks and foul canals.

  JACKSON MEAD sat in total silence in an unlit room that looked out over the harbor. He had chosen the thirtieth floor of a medium-sized building as his final observation post, though he might have put himself many stories higher. But it made little difference, in view of what he hoped to witness, whether he was thirty stories off the ground, or ten miles. And this perspective—neither too high nor too low—suited him best, because he had always said, rather cryptically: “All ages pass most swiftly through the median doors.” Not even Mootfowl or Mr. Cecil Wooley knew exactly what he meant, but they did know that everything he did echoed his central purpose, and that when he chose the median floors it was a decision that had evolved over many thousands of years, and that had its origins in one great event, when something huge, broken, and laced with flame had tumbled through the air after being hurled from a place so bright that compared to it the sun straight on seemed as black as pitch.

  The machine he had established no longer needed his control, but just his looking on while breathtaking hierarchies flowered below him. A thousand directors faced a thousand powerful screens. They, in turn, were controlled by supracontrollers who had in turn their captains and captains of captains. In a score of great underground rooms and in crystal towers on the ships, the work proceeded at maximum speed. The ground had been prepared most thoroughly.

  In the tranquillity of his carefully guarded refuge, Jackson Mead saw his plan unfold. Cecil Mature and Mootfowl sometimes approached him quietly and spoke a few words. But most of the time he watched his lifters and his ships as they warred to build, rapid-fire, on the ice over the harbor.

  Mootfowl approached Jackson Mead, who was staring through the slightly smoke-colored walls of glass at the lights weaving to and fro outside. “The city is beginning to burn,” Mootfowl said quietly. “There’s a general rising.”

  “Where?” he was asked, in complete calm.

  “In the remoter sections of the city of the poor, fifty miles out. Probably as I speak the fifty-mile line has been breached.”

  “Are there firestorms?”

  “Yes, little ones, scattered about. From the top of the highest towers, the outer belts look like burning stubble, like a slow-moving grass fire.”

  “In a few days,” Jackson Mead said, “there will be pillars of fire outside these windows, as high as the clouds, and the sky, black with smoke, will be as heavy as a vaulted ceiling
.”

  “Do you want me to inform the new mayor?”

  “Doesn’t he know?”

  “As far as we can tell, he doesn’t.”

  “No. Let him find out himself.”

  “If we warn him now, he might be able to stop it.”

  Slowly shaking his head, Jackson Mead turned to his subordinate. “Doctor Mootfowl,” he said, “we have always failed before, though we have come close, not because we lacked the science, but, rather, because we lacked the circumstances.”

  “Sir?”

  “It is true that the prayers you generate so splendidly for grace, Reverend, accumulate, but they have yet to trigger the event that will allow our undertaking to succeed. Our bridge is now ready to spring. But unless something draws us closer to the opposite shore, we haven’t a chance in hell.”

  “The burning then?”

  “Not the burning itself, but what will occur within it. The high energy and dissociation, the abstractions of light and fire, and the extremes to which they drive the human soul put our mechanisms—as beautiful as they are—to shame. The city is going to burn because its time is over. Everything in the world, Mootfowl, comes down to love or a fight, which, when they are hot enough to be flame, rise and combine. Should the fires push a human soul to the highest state of grace, at that moment we will throw our bridge.

  “No matter how skillful you are, my friend, you cannot rope a horse in an open meadow unless you draw him in close.”

  “I understand,” said Mootfowl.

  Cecil Mature emerged from the shadows. “The fires have crossed the thirty-mile ring,” he reported. “There’s no accounting for their sudden speed.”

  “What about Peter Lake?” Jackson Mead asked, taking his eyes off the panorama for the first time.

  Cecil shook his head and closed his narrow eyes. He snorted, and then sneezed. “Not a trace,” he answered.

  ABBY HAD been still for so long that her own mother knew she was dead only when the monitor held to a straight line and set off alarms that brought nurses and doctors running. Despite everything they did, and despite the machines that they wheeled in on silently rolling carts, Abby Marratta would not be revived. She had probably had enough of machines, after being attached to one for so long.

  The electronic whine from the monitor of vital signs seemed to Virginia to be the music that announces the end of the world. Even after it was switched off, the machines were withdrawn, and the bedsheet was pulled up to cover her daughter, she continued to hear it.

  Mrs. Gamely bowed her head and cried. She had been unwilling to believe that a little child with only a few years of life would die before she would. It did not seem proper according to her vision of a future that, she had been sure, belonged to her granddaughter.

  Virginia found it very hard to breathe. She could not imagine that she would ever have another moment free of grief and terror. She stared at the cloth over Abby, trying to make some sense out of the simple pattern woven into it, but it would tell her nothing. Seconds passed, and then long minutes and long hours in motionless silence during which nothing happened and there was no redemption, no rising, no miracle.

  And then an intense and brilliant picture came before her eyes. She was ashamed to harbor such a lively image when the world should have been irredeemably gray. It was like laughing in chapel during a deep and ponderous sermon. She saw a beautiful and giddy thing, in a waking dream that drew her into another time.

  It was blatant, gorgeous summer. The mist was so thick and hot on the harbor that it turned everything to sepia and black. But that which was white, by contrast, glowed with unusual strength and seemed to float lightly in the sun-spoiled daze. A ferry with a tall dark stack materialized from the mist and drew closer and closer to its whitewashed pile moorings just off the Battery. Virginia watched in disbelief. This was no dream. It was stronger than anything she had ever felt in life. From the position of the sun, and the heat, she knew that it had to have been July—ninety or a hundred years before, to judge from the sheen and integrity of the ferry and passing lighters which seemed different altogether from the battered museum pieces that now limped and begged on the water when the harbor was not frozen over. The ferry’s passengers stood forward on the decks, waiting to disembark into a July morning long passed, and silently observing the convergence of boat and dock, as if they were at the wheel themselves. Dozens of scalloped white parasols as light as floating dandelions twirled in impatience and gently fanned the air. Men without jackets glowed like white lanterns in their carefully pressed cotton and linen shirts. They looked with disdain from pier to wheelhouse to protest a less than perfect docking. But then the ferry drew into the slip and bumped up against the land. Engines disengaged, and waterfalls shot from bilge pipes as if the ferry were sighing with relief. The shaving-mirror gates were collapsed into tight metal plates, and everyone streamed forth past Virginia, whose eyes were guided to the back of the crowd, to a young woman whom she did not know or recognize. Nonetheless, she followed this frail and pretty girl, who could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen, up the ramp and through the terminal.

  Just her presence moved Virginia very deeply and made her happy. Then the young girl walked between a set of iron gates through which Virginia was not allowed to pass, and vanished in the dark and lofty canyons that buzzed with summer as if the light itself were a swarm of never-contented gnats. As she disappeared, Virginia wanted to drop to her knees and cry, for, as long as the girl remained in view, until her white blouse was a dancing speck that didn’t seem real, Virginia was overcome with a feeling of benevolence and gratitude.

  But the sight of the small form under the shroud made her horribly bitter. She could not bear the contrast between the powerful, reassuring image that she had so clearly in mind, and the fact that Abby lay dead. She needed Hardesty. Where, in God’s name, she wondered, was Hardesty?

  “YOU KNOW,” Hardesty said in between breaths of dank air as he and Peter Lake ran through a darkened subway tunnel, “when you buy that little token, it entitles you to more than just the right to use the tunnel.”

  “I know that,” Peter Lake responded, running effortlessly, while, behind him, Hardesty strained to keep up.

  “Then what are we doing this for?”

  “Didn’t you see them?”

  “Who?”

  “The ones in the black coats!”

  Hardesty panted. It was hard to keep up a conversation with this mechanic who must have doubled as an Olympic runner, for he sailed down the ties apparently without effort, restraining himself only for the sake of his companion. “The short ones?” Hardesty asked.

  “Yes, the ones who kill, rob, and set fires. They’re right behind us.”

  They stopped. After a few heavy breaths, Hardesty was able to listen, and he heard what sounded like hundreds of ratlike padded feet. Then he saw a wavy, jiggling motion as the Short Tails’ alternating strides pushed them up and down and they blocked the dim lights in the tunnel.

  “They’re always everywhere,” Peter Lake said, “though, at times, they do seem to disappear. I’m glad they exist. When they chase me, they make me do things I never thought I could do.”

  “I saw them at the Coheeries,” Hardesty said. “I didn’t know they were here, but I should have figured it out, because they seemed to be heading someplace with a vengeance, and people usually take their vengeances to New York.”

  “The Coheeries,” Peter Lake echoed. “That sounds familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

  “The Penns have a summer house there.”

  Peter Lake didn’t respond.

  “Harry Penn,” Hardesty said, “our employer.”

  “Never met him,” Peter Lake answered, with a surliness that surprised him.

  When they came to the Thirty-third Street Station they vaulted onto the platform, amazing waiting subway riders who were then much further stunned as a hundred or more Short Tails, with bird-like gurgling cries and high-pitched speech, v
aulted after them in a river of cheap nineteenth-century formal clothes that had been altered and savaged by tailors, friction, and time. The Short Tails carried brass-knuckled knives inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and pistols that were engraved with the kind of reclining nudes one might expect to see above a bar.

  Hardesty and Peter Lake ran directly through Gramercy Park—without opening the gate, which seemed to disappear as they went through and reappear only when the Short Tails were inside the park, trapped like a flock of sweatered weasels, cursing a lock they could not pick from the inside, hanging by their suspenders after they had tried to scale the posts and slipped. But enough of them squeezed through, or under, to continue the chase, which then led swiftly through Madison Square, now gaudy with gentrified restoration and new corporate headquarters. They raced under the old copper skywalks with whitened sides that glowed in the mercury vapor like sheet-metal moons, and they passed the huge old clocks decked out with incandescent berries which told the time in red and white. Now Hardesty was warmed up, and he followed Peter Lake’s long weightless strides with some weightless strides of his own.

  They thought to get the Short Tails off their track by taking a circuitous route through the Village. But wherever they turned they saw Short Tails, as ubiquitous as the thin and acrid smoke that tainted the air and darkened the longer views up and down the avenues. The Short Tails’ sentinels would summon the others, and the fox hunt would resume: not with hunting horns and red riding coats, but with ululations and glottal gurgles, helium screams, witches’ shrieks, and midgets’ sighs.

  Peter Lake came up with a proposal. “Look,” he said, “they’re everywhere and every place, and they always will be. And I admit that they can be terrifying. But whenever I’ve fought them, I’ve won, and I always seem to get better and better at it. Now, there are about fifty on our tail at the moment. Though I haven’t dealt with fifty at a time, while I was in back of the sky I seemed to feel that I could do something with my hands, something unconnected to physical laws, something amazing.