Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

There was a particularly high scream then, and the moist wind in the room was suddenly brazen with the taste of blood. There was a new sound now, the rushed footsteps and vegetal rustle of fleeing boys, and then the door was rocking on its hinges, somebody banging loudly.

  “Let me in! Let me in! I saw you go in there, you little—oh, oh God, no, aughh!”

  Big had hardly turned around when the door ruptured, sprouting a protrusion nearly three feet long. The end of it nicked Big in the shoulder, and he screamed. Little nearly retched when he saw the color of it in the moonlight: a bright, fresh crimson, wet like new paint.

  “Run, go!” Big howled in pain. “The fire escape!”

  Little turned instinctively, lunging out of the window even though he had little idea what Big was talking about. He tumbled through the air, coming up against something hard and crumbly. Big landed on top of him a moment later, pulling him to his feet over the outcropping of bricks that had been left jutting out of the adjacent building. As they ran, they brushed past some of the flowers planted there. The smell of lilacs got muddled with the blood, until Little figured people bled candy violets. They could hear the Stranger behind them, tearing apart the little viewing room over the garden.

  At the end of the outcropping, a thick iron ladder hung over the bare brick. With a mighty leap, Big grabbed hold of the bottom rung, jerking his whole weight on his good arm until the ladder came down with a clang. Little found himself bundled up the fire escape, followed by Big with a loose brick. The brick seemed surreal, ill-fit to Little’s suddenly one-track world. The night was dark, and though they could see a vague shape following them, there was nothing solid for his eyes to latch on to. That above all was the most disconcerting, as if they were being stalked by a ghost. Big smashed the glass in the closest window with the brick.

  “Come on!”

  “That’s somebody’s house!”

  But when Little tumbled through the broken window, the apartment was empty and naked. He caught a glimpse of pale white walls, vanilla fixtures like photograms in a brochure, waiting for someone to come nest in it. Splintering the front door on their way out, not a soul emerged to stop them and Little wondered how this beautiful place could stand empty while he and Big huddled for warmth in the alleys below.

  The Stranger’s crashing could be heard not five paces behind, heavy steps tinkling with glass. They plunged down the deserted hallway, Big dribbling blood on the cream carpet. The hallway was lit, though the gas lamps flickered with the shuddering steps of the Stranger, threatening to gutter out. The floors and walls shook, as if the world was crumpling under heavy fists.

  “The light, it won’t come near the light,” said Little, his voice a strained wheeze.

  “Bullshit,” said Big, crumpling against the lift’s big brassy buttons. Cables run through smooth pulleys whirred thickly, and something moved behind the lift’s mesh doors. Cables, pulleys, machinations in the black. Big’s shoulder was a red mess, seemingly held together by his tightly clenched hand. His eyes fluttered in a disconcerting staccato.

  “Christ, look at you!” said Little. He reached up to help, but the matted gore plastered at the hand shook him, froze him in place.

  “Look at yourself,” said Big. “Can’t even stand up straight. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Little hadn’t realized just how terrified he was, and now that he had fallen, he found he could not get back up. His legs wobbled, limp noodles.

  “Big….” he managed.

  “You little shit. Ever since you fell out of Momma I been looking after you,” said Big, somewhat bitterly. “Can’t you get yourself back on your feet? Useless lump. I oughta trade you to Burgess, see if I can’t get her back.”

  “Big, what? What are you saying?” Little was too scared to feel properly angry, but the fire at his throat loosened up his legs. He felt around for the wall, to haul himself back up, but his hand flailed around in open space. The lift! It was here.

  “That’s it. That’s the stuff. I love you, Little Brother,” said Big, and shoved him the rest of the way inside.

  “Big! No, Big!”

  Little whirled around as he tried to find his balance, and also to strike the round copper button that would hold open the door for his brother. But his fingers fell on no button, only a solid lever that shut the mesh doors on Big’s slumped form. That was when the hallway lamps guttered out.

  Little threw himself forward then, leaning on the lift’s lever, the thing that looked like a steamer’s bell command throttle (they’d gone to one, with one of the foster families, hadn’t they? And they’d gotten lost, deep in the warrens of the steam boat’s innards, hoping to sail away to Neverland or really anywhere else. And they’d found the round throttle lever and tried to make the ship go, only there were no men below decks to answer their call) to go down, down. Bricks fleeing upward, like sea birds.

  Little sobbed as he listened to the sound of the lift dropping, a muffled whirring that couldn’t shut out the din from above. Doors were no obstacle, it seemed, and the sound of the mesh tearing nearly made Little forget to stop the elevator. The thing jerked, throwing him off balance. Stupid, stupid, he hadn’t slowed it down first.

  But he got the door open, and was halfway out of it when the ceiling collapsed, in a great roundel of punched-out wood and greasy, dusty machinery. Little felt something long and sharp touch his ankle, feather-light. He tread blood, slick and warm.

  An elderly doorman stood in the lobby, and Little reached out to him, watching the man’s snowy brow wrinkle at the crying, bloody boy trying to squeeze out from between the lift doors. Then the man was there, grabbing at Little’s arms, his pink, papery skin rippling against Little’s. The crisp white uniform was rough with starch, probably the cleanest thing Little had touched in weeks. Little’s foot came free with a pop, dumping them both on the floor.

  “What the…? Damn elevator spewing out negroes now? Boy, are you all right? What in tarnation was that?”

  “Mister, you gotta run. Run!”

  Adults hardly ever listen to little black boys, but this one did, dragging him to his feet by main force. He pointed towards the front door, the vast, interminable lobby glinting in expensive lamplight. Who was it all for? Nobody lived here. The gilt, the live plants drinking up water in their pots. The sofas propped against the walls, untouched and spotless, lonely. There had been nobody in the rooms above to come through this place. Little felt the waste of it keenly, even through sputtering tears. The everlasting lamps in the lobby were sputtering, as if thirsty for gas. Impossible, in all this opulence, how could they?

  It took an eternity to cross the lobby, and all the while the mesh of the door was buckling, shearing aside under the force of something dreadful.

  There was a telegraph booth near the door, and the doorman ducked inside, waving for Little to go, just go. But the door was heavy, and wouldn’t move. Little could see him tapping madly at the graph’s points, sending a message for help out over the wire.

  He stood there, agape. Where could he go? The door was a thick double panel of gilded sunbursts meant to keep the rabble out of the tower of wealth. There was a window in it, too high to climb, but Little could look out. There was a wide court, a winding drive outside, and blessed be, an actual street. Frosted blocks bricked in the door on either side.

  He toyed with the idea of dashing back across the lobby, grabbing one of the heavy cordon pylons and smashing away the blocks, but the thing inside the elevator shaft was shredding away at the wall behind there. It was only a matter of time before it was out, and what if Little was standing close enough for it to grab? The lamps flickered, going out one by one.

  Little’s fingers scrabbled madly, feeling for a latch, a keyhole, something to force the door open. Big would have known how to pick the lock. The other side of the lobby was wreathed in darkness now, the lamps gone, the only light from the streetlamps outside. Terrible rumbling rippled its way through the room. Realization hit Little like a sack
of bricks; the doorman had the key.

  Telegraph cables ripped from the wall without a spark, their wires dead, inoperable. The doorman had slammed the telegraph point to the floor. Fear was palpable on the old man’s face, but as he stepped forward to open the sunburst door, the last lamp went out.

  The Stranger was upon them now, or near as made no difference. Darkness swallowed the booth and the lobby transformed, backlit by the glaring street. Strange shapes lay pregnant in the shadows. The doorman disappeared in a blur, one minute staring wide-eyed into the blackness, the next second taken with a short whoosh of the air being knocked out of his lungs.

  Little stood with his back pressed against the glass, feeling desperately for the handle, for a knob, anything to let himself out. He barely registered the clattering of a ring of keys, dropped as the doorman was taken. The darkness was a living thing, shifting with the dust and the rubble that had come from the ruined elevator. He could feel it there, a presence moving just behind the veil of the world. Somehow it made him think of whales, like the ones he’d seen when his class went to the museum. Of sitting at the bottom of the ocean looking at an imperceptible titan, shifting, sending waves of silt and disturbed creatures across the sea floor just by flicking its tail. Something totally indifferent to a small, black boy on the bottom, being tossed about by their currents. Small wonder it hadn’t taken him yet. He was a minnow, too small to register on the Stranger’s eldritch senses. Were they bulbous eyes perched on stalks? Ears, perhaps, like a cat’s? Or the even more terrible, long antennae flicking through the blinds, tasting for his skin?

  The darkness shifted.

  Quite impossibly, a familiar shape began to form in the darkness, wisps of dust coalescing, like white ink on a black page. A rounded dome of a forehead shone in the street light, a jutting jaw full of defiance.

  Little gasped.

  He could scarcely forget his brother’s face.

  Little had seen it every day since Father left. He nearly rushed out to it, to punch Big in the arm for scaring him. It wasn’t until he’d taken half a step did he realize Big was far too tall, and his neck far too narrow and stunted.

  The Stranger had Big’s head held high in one claw.

  Little screamed. He screamed so hard, his limbs lost feeling. Then again, it might have been from the desperate strikes against the sunburst door. He punched and kicked at it, blows hard enough to draw blood and dent steel, crack the glass portals that so cruelly looked on freedom. Given time he might even have breached the inch or two of art deco, polished to a high shine that was the difference between vile, murderous darkness and the living realms of the light.

  And then it had him, pulling him back through the building, chafing against the rich carpeting. Not up, but down, down, into the basement. The stairs hurt as it dragged him against them. Little caught sight of Big’s and the doorman’s bodies being carried high up on the creature’s back. More pain came, a cruel cleft in the shin from a hard, cold thing covered in a film of filth. He caught a glimpse of brick and grating. Something pierced his eyelid, a loose nail perhaps.

  Then there was nothing then but the pain, and the eternal night, the darkness painted on his skin waiting all of Little’s short life to eat him alive.

  8

  There Aren’t Any Turtles

  Vanessa Hargreaves considered the New York Pneumatic Subway System a fair representation of Hell. Still, she was determined to give a good show of following Rosa Marija into the steaming maw of a station not far from the Cabaret.

  “I say!” Hargreaves protested as a knot of people peppered her with sharp elbows and hard, unidentifiable baggage.

  “Damn tourist,” one elderly woman muttered, before muscling her way past Hargreaves and onto the train.

  The platform was crowded, and much too hot. Though the subway arrived with a rush of air from the massive fans propelling the cars, the wind was stale and wet, stinking from the rotting seepage at the bottom of the tracks. Rosa Marija had gleefully informed her the men who built the tunnels, and the buildings above, had often been buried in the concrete of the walls. Hargreaves wrinkled her nose at the idea the scent infusing her nostrils was the decades-old rank of death.

  “Why exactly are we here, Rosa? Where is Captain Clemens?” Hargreaves asked after the fourth train passed them by.

  In London, the underground was no less crowded, but everything was orderly and the people were polite. In New York, everyone seemed to go wherever they pleased, crowding the doors and jostling into one another instead of establishing clear lanes of traffic. Even the trains arrived with the same sort of idle nonchalance, seeming to adhere to no schedule Hargreaves could see. There weren’t even clocks hanging from the arched, grubby ceilings, once beautifully appointed with mosaics like stained glass. It seemed to her the entire city needed a lesson in how to queue.

  “So eager to see Alby again, Inspector?” Rosa quipped with a smile. She seemed to have a magical knack for being out of the passengers’ way. Hargreaves attributed it to the shocking amount of calf Rosa had on display under her black trench. The muscles stood out, raised by a pair of heels with red undersides.

  “If you must know, it will be a pleasure,” Hargreaves replied. “Did you know the queen wished to knight Clemens?”

  “He would rather be hanged,” Rosa said, shuddering.

  “Do not worry. The captain is a valiant… whatever he is, but I assure you, the impulse was only momentary.”

  Rosa looked over to Hargreaves and sighed. From somewhere in her voluminous coat, she extracted a pair of boots no less extravagant, but to Hargreaves’ experienced eye much less uncomfortable. Rosa tucked away the heels and put on the boots, reaching behind her to tuck in her ankles. It was awkward, like a bird, but there was no façade of drama to it. Hargreaves grinned, feeling at last like she was with the Rosa Marija she had come to know.

  “It’s about time,” Rosa Marija said then, mostly to a large pocket-watch.

  The platform was still full of passengers, but the trains were slackening, coming at longer intervals. Rosa turned on her boots and walked straight down the platform, with Hargreaves hot on her heels.

  “Won’t somebody notice?” Hargreaves asked as Rosa marched off the platform and down some steps, vaulting over a short gate and into the darkness of the tunnel.

  “Look around. Does it seem like anybody is paying attention?”

  Rosa was right. The New Yorkers around Hargreaves seemed to be absorbed in their own little worlds, bumping past one another with their noses buried in penny dreadfuls. A few more affluent seemed to be engaged in some kind of clockwork diversion, puzzle boxes or games.

  Vanessa Hargreaves and Rosa Marija picked their way along a workman’s platform running parallel to the tracks. The path was narrow, with nooks in the walls every few feet for a worker to hide when a train passed. Arclights lit the passage dimly. They did not have to walk far. In one of the nooks, Rosa Marija opened a door, and they passed through into an even narrower crawlspace. A ladder led down into the depths below the tracks.

  Hargreaves could not fathom why they had waited at all—surely they could have ventured into the tunnel just after a train passed. Rosa Marija climbed out of the crawlspace, and when Vanessa followed, she saw the reason why. The chamber they were in was some sort of drainage or overflow room. Large, toothed gears brooded like sentinels directly in front of Hargreaves, biting into chains as thick as her thighs.

  Hargreaves was a Londoner, and so she knew at a glance the vast slabs between each gear were floodgates. More importantly, the high-water mark began somewhere in the middle of the chamber. If they had come a little earlier, the stairs before them would have ended in a flat sheet of water.

  Rosa Marija led the way down slippery steel steps. At the bottom of the chamber, two feet of water remained coursing through into storm drains as big as Burgess’ amphitheater. A flat little boat sat waiting.

  “Most of the city is built on swampland. It’s filled in now,
but the estuary flows back and forth depending on the tide. These floodgates help move the water from places where it’s not supposed to be,” Rosa Marija explained.

  The two piled into the boat, and Rosa Marija kicked at a contraption at the bottom. With a little hiss, bubbles began to emerge from the back of the boat, and they began to move forward.

  “We have to lean. The rudder is broken.”

  Feeling a little foolish, Hargreaves took Rosa’s lead, leaning where the long-legged helmswoman indicated. The little boat tipped alarmingly, but no water seeped over the edge. Instead, they veered marginally, enough to reach the storm drain in the middle. Crisp packets, sweets wrappers and other rubbish floated on the surface of the water. The little boat drifted through a rip in a fine mesh grate leading into a pipe. The pair coursed down the drain, leaning to follow the gentle bend. After about five minutes they emerged into a large chamber dimly lit by a string of arc lights along the walls.

  “Here we are,” Rosa said.

  “Where exactly?” Hargreaves whinged. She was tired of the wet, hot smell of the place, tired of the feeling of damp clinginess.

  “Have you forgotten who we are? We are pirates. Air pirates.”

  Hargreaves snorted, but she looked up anyway. Hanging in the air above her was the rounded bulk of the Huckleberry, anchored in place to the high ceiling.

  “What did you expect us to do, tie up on the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island and hang a sign advertising rides in a real-life pirate ship?” Clemens said to Hargreaves later, in the warmth of Auntie’s galley. The pirate captain was draped over a paisley armchair Hargreaves didn’t remember.

  In fact, the entire galley seemed very different. The nailed-down benches had disappeared, replaced by squashy sofas and tea tables. Rosa perched atop the back of the chair, her bare legs dangling into Clemens’ lap. The couple was apparently oblivious to how sickeningly domestic they seemed, or simply did not care. Hargreaves could feel the cavities starting to form in her wisdom teeth. But Hargreaves also recognized the nicks in the wood from food fights and Rosa’s knives, and the portholes she had looked pensively out of when it seemed the world might end. Being back was a teatime for the soul.