And he meant it. Turned away. Disgusted with himself. Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
Wearily, Wyte said: “How could you know? What it's like living with something else inside me. While on the outside I keep changing.”
Worse than a dead man talking to me?
Finch didn't want to think about it. Took the flask. Downed half of it in a gulp. Felt the liquid rage through his capillaries. Like a forest fire that left ice behind it. He handed the flask back. “Good stuff.” They started walking again.
Wyte laughed. “Still can't really hold it, can you? Any more than you could when you were working for me.”
Slapped Finch on the back hard enough to make him stagger.
Fair enough.
Wyte. The story.
He'd gone to investigate a death about a year ago. By himself. No one else in the station. The call sounded simple. A man found dead beneath a tree, beginning to smell. Could someone take a look? Most days, not worth bothering with. But it was a slow morning, and Wyte took the job seriously. The woman seemed upset, like it was personal.
The body was down near the bay. Beside a cracked stone sign that used to welcome visitors to Ambergris. Holy city, majestic, banish your fears. No one was around. Not the woman who had called it in. No one.
The man lay on his back. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Connected by tendrils. The smell, vile. The man's eyes open and flickering.
Wyte should have left. Wyte should have known better. But maybe Wyte was bored. Or wanted a change. Or just didn't care. He hadn't seen his kids since they'd been sent out of the city. He'd been fighting with his wife a lot.
He leaned over the body. Maybe he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Something moving. Maybe movement meant life to him.
“Who knows? Just know that it's a dumb move.”
A dumb move. That's how the detectives would say it during the retell. At their little refuge, not far from the station. Blakely had discovered the place. In front of what used to be the old Bureaucratic Quarter. Looks like a guard post. Nondescript. Gray stone. Surrounded by a thicket of half-walls, rubble hills, and stunted trees. With a moat that's really just a pond that collects rainwater. From the inside, it's clear the structure is the top of a bell tower pulled down and submerged when the gray caps Rose.
Always half out of their minds with whisky or homemade wine, or whatever. When they told the story. A dumb move. Like they were experts.
“Point is,” Albin would say, because Albin usually told the story, “he leaned over, and the man's head exploded into spores. And those spores got into Wyte's head.”
White spores for Wyte. Through the nose. Through any exposed cuts. Through the ears. Through the eyes.
Although he fought it. Twisted furiously. Jumped up and down. Cursed like the end of the world. So at least he didn't just stand there and let it happen.
“But by that time, it was too late. A few minutes later and he's just somebody's puppet.”
Wyte became someone else. The “dead” man. Someone who didn't understand what had happened to him. Wyte ran down the street. Taken over. Screaming.
“Screaming a name over and over. `Otto! I'm Otto!' because that was the dead man's name. Wyte thought he was Otto.”
Or most of him did. Wyte, deep inside, still knew who he was, and that was worse.
Sometimes, out of a casual cruelty, a kind of boredom, one of the other detectives, usually Blakely, will call Wyte “Otto.” Until Finch makes him stop.
“Well, they found him a day later. Once they figured out who the dead body was. Cowering in a closet. Saying `Otto' over and over again.”
In the dead man's apartment.
“A caution to us all.”
Then they would clink glasses and bottles, congratulating themselves on being alive.
Truth was, they told the story less to humiliate Wyte than to keep reminding themselves not to take any chances. Ambergris Rules. No dumb moves.
Wyte got Otto out of his head. Eventually. Most of Otto. But not the fungus. That became worse. The gray caps couldn't or wouldn't help. Maybe they saw it as some kind of perverse improvement.
No one had ever found out who had lured Wyte there. Or why.
Finch knew they never would.
They split up. Wyte headed back to the station. Finch decided to return to the apartment on Manzikert. He'd have more than his fill of the station later.
“Do I mention Bliss?”
“If it comes up, no. His file's already being pulled. That's enough for now.”
“He made us look like fools.”
“We made ourselves look like fools.”
Black trees. Odd fruit. Pissed-off cat. Hallways that still squeaked from wax. The stairwell still collected darkness. But a silence had crept in, too. An emptiness that hadn't been there before. No sounds of a mother and child. No smells of cooking.
On a hunch, Finch stopped at the fourth floor again. Knocked on the door of the man who had dressed up for Finch's mild interrogation. Held his badge up to the peephole.
The door creaked open. A Partial stood there. Stockier than the one who had catalogued the crime scene. His face even paler. Red teeth. As if he'd been eating raw meat sloppily. Dressed in black dyed leather, but wore beige boots. Like he'd been caught trying on someone else's clothes. In the belt around his gut, two holstered guns and a hammer, of all things.
Finch held the badge in front of him.
“I'm the detective on the case in apartment 525,” he said. “Where's the old man who lives here?”
The Partial considered him for a moment. The glittering black eye was flickering madly. But the rest of him was like a chilled tortoise. Arms at his sides. Almost paralyzed.
“Gone,” he said slowly. Making the syllable linger.
“Gone where?” Finch asked.
“Gone somewhere else,” the Partial said with an effort.
Like you, my friend. Wondered if the flickering eye meant his attention was elsewhere. Reviewing not recording.
A new thought, horrifying him. “Are they all gone?”
The eye stopped flickering. Blinked twice. In a more normal voice the Partial said, “The building has been cleared.”
Cleared how? Escorted out and rehoused? Sent to the camps? Liquidated?
But he didn't ask, just nodded. Smiled. Stepped back.
The Partial parroted the nod and receded from him into darkness. Shut the door.
Finch stood there a moment. This place was now a Partial stronghold. No witnesses.
He took the stairs to the fifth floor in leaps. As if running fast might prevent the crime that had brought him here. Bring back the old man in the too-tight suit.
The door. The gray cap symbol, glistening and obscene. The hallway. The bedroom, empty. The living room; no sign of the Partial.
The bodies.
Correction. Body.
The gray cap's body had disappeared.
Finch stood there a moment, brought up short. Trying to process that sudden ... lack. Then realized: Heretic must have removed the body. If not, they'd send Finch to the camps. Scapegoat. Returning: the chill that had come over him talking to the redtoothed Partial. It hit him as it hadn't before. This case was a threat to his life. To the little security he had. His apartment. His relationship with Sintra.
But the man was still there, under a blanket someone had thrown over him. The dead man satin the chair next to him, smiling. In the same position. The blue of the preservatives still stippling his features. The man laughed again. Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it.
Finch went over and pulled the blanket back from the man's face. Sat on the couch, looking at the body. He would have to meet with Heretic soon. The thought unnerved him. Wished now he'd asked Wyte for the whole flask. Wished he could just go home. Find Sintra waiting for him.
“You know what those nonsense words mean,” Finch said to the man. “You know why it's important.”
Peaceful. The man looked peaceful, to be so dead. How perfectly preserved in the light from the open window. Ignoring how that light changed as it was interrogated by the space between the twinned towers in the distance.
Finch got down on his knees. Searched the body again. Not the careful search of yesterday. Fuck the spore cameras. Fuck the Partial.
Roughly, he rolled the body over and went through the pockets. As if he'd killed the man himself.
There must be something else.
But, no, there wasn't. Just lint in one pocket. A few bits of sand and gravel, maybe a grain of rice?, in the other.
He began to rip up the fabric. It tore easier than he would've thought. Hurting his hands. Red lines on his palms. Aching wrists. Still nothing. No hidden pockets. He forced himself to stop tearing.
The upturned corners of the man's lips seemed to say, “You'll never solve me.”
I'm not a detective.
But he would be judged as a detective. Convicted as a detective.
A desert fortress. The HFZ. A phrase. Never lost. Falling from a great height. A gray cap even the gray caps couldn't identify. An operative from Stockton who was on the same trail. Another operative, probably from Morrow, attacked by Stockton spies and appearing in a dead man's memories. Now disappeared.
Stark. Bosun. Bliss.
It would drive him mad, he realized. If he let it.
I need a better gun.
Looked at his watch.
5:20.
Time to leave.
Let the horror show begin.
Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
5
ack at the station.
5:50.
No sign of Wyte. The other detectives had left, too, except for Gustat, who was frantically packing up his things. Finch looked at the smaller man with a kind of scorn. Gustat ignored him in his haste. Strange horse-like footfalls across the carpet. The croaking bang of the door behind him.
Then it was just Finch.
Soon the curtains at the back of the room would part. Night would truly begin.
Wyte had placed a hasty typo-filled report on Finch's desk about the situation in Bliss's apartment. “John Finch” typed at the bottom. Brave of you, Wyte. A blotch of purple obscured a few words in the middle. A smudged green thumbprint on the left corner. Wyte had tried to wipe it away, which just made it worse.
Under it, another sheet, handwritten, with some crude facts about Stark.
“Stark is now the operational head of Stockton's spy network.”
Stating the obvious. No one started liquidating the competition unless they were already secure in their position.
“He carries a sword.”
Who didn't, these days? Thought about pulling his own sword out. As he did several times a week, when he thought the others weren't looking.
"He has a taster for his food . . . He's a psychopath . . . He's been well, practically everywhere and nowhere, if Wyte's seen . . . 11 information was correct.
Nothing solid. Nothing that linked Stark to the case except Bliss saying Stark had asked him about those words they'd found on the scrap of paper. Bellum omnium contra omnes. Wondered what Bliss would've said if he'd shown him the symbol too.
Finch kept a stack of cigars in his desk in a box converted to the purpose. He took one out. Trillian brand. Several years old. Common and popular in its day. A little dry now.
Nothing new in this city. Not whisky. Not cigars. Not people.
The kind of thing his father used to say.
He cut the tip. Used his oil lamp to light it.
The ash was even. The burn slow. He puffed on it, waiting. The congregation will be here soon enough.
His thoughts went back to Wyte's flask. In a flush of inspiration, Finch went over to Blakely's desk, opened the top drawer. Sure enough. Something plum-colored in a bottle. Homemade cork. He pulled it off. Took a whiff. Rotgut, but good enough. Took a couple of swigs right from the bottle. His throat burned. His tongue felt numb.
Saw double for a second. Another puff on the cigar fixed that. Went back to his desk.
Waiting this way, helpless, his vision became apocalyptic, false. In his mind, mortar fire rained down on the city. Artillery belched out a retort. Blasted into walls, sending up gouts of stone and flame. The war raged on, unnoticed by most. He was an agent of neither side. Just in it for himself.
Tried to think past the evening's torment. The walk back to his apartment afterward. In the dark. Thought of who might be waiting.
If he didn't screw up before that.
A little after six, the gray caps began to arrive. The night shift.
The first one pulled aside the curtain. Had emerged from the awful red-fringed hole at the back. Perfect parallel to the memory hole. Only much larger. Finch could see the gray cap's face under the hat. Pulsing. Wriggling. The eyes so yellow. What did they see that he could not?
The gray cap stepped forward, onto the carpet.
In the light of day, on certain streets, Finch could almost pretend that the Rising had never happened. But not here. Not now. Any fantasy was fatal. Any fear.
Finch walked out onto the carpet. Puffing. Feeling the brittle squeeze in his chest even as he released the smoke from his mouth. Let the cigar burn down toward his fingers to feel the distracting pain.
A strong scent of rotting licorice as the gray cap pushed past him. Ignoring him as it sat down at a desk. Gustat's desk.
One.
Nine more. One for each desk. Along with whatever familiars they had decided to bring with them.
Finch wished he had a club. A knife. Anything. The fungal guns didn't work against gray caps. Thought again about the sword. About bringing it across Heretic's rubbery neck.
He drove the image away as irrational. Heretic had asked him to be here. If Heretic ever wanted him dead, he'd send a present to his apartment. Or dissolve him into a puff of spores in front of the other detectives.
Five times he'd stayed after hours. Survived each encounter. But talking to a single gray cap during the day was different from being among many of them after dusk. It brought back memories of the war. It reminded him of night duty in the trenches, the crude defenses House Hoegbotton had created for its soldiers. Sighting through the scope at some pile of rubble opposite. Hoping not to see anything. Feeling the sweat and fear of the others to each side. The flinch and intake of breath at the slightest movement.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Moving past him. Soft rustle of robes. Hushed sigh of their breathing, as if they slept even while awake. Oddly heavy footfalls. A smell that ranged from sweet like syrup to rank and disgusting. Did they control it? Were there signals they gave off humans could never read? Those eyes. That mouth. The ragged claws on the doughy hands.
Sitting at the desks like distorted reflections of their daytime counterparts. He had never learned their names. Thought of them only by the names of the humans who'd been assigned the same desks. Or once had. So there sat Dorn, and there sat Wyte, and there were Skinner and Albin.
The fifth was Heretic. He'd brought something with him. On a leash. Finch didn't know what it was. Couldn't tell where it started or ended. It had no face, just a sense of wet, uncoiling darkness. Like an endless fall off a bridge at night, under a starless sky, into deep water. That one glimpse and Finch never looked at it directly again.
The light in the room had faded to the dark green preferred by the gray caps.
“Do you like my skery, Finch? Do you find my skery pleasing to the eye?” Heretic asked in a voice rough yet reedy, standing in front of Finch. Emphasis on pleasing to the eye. As usual when Heretic tried out a turn of phrase. “No? That's a shame. The skery is a new thing, and useful to us. Very soon, it will save us a lot of effort, allow the Partials to do other work.”
Finch had no answer for that.
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Together, Finch, the gray cap, and the skery went to his desk. At night, Heretic walked with a kind of effortless forward movement. More at ease and more deadly. As if daylight affected a gray cap's equilibrium.
Heretic sat down, dropping the leash. The skery went right to Finch's memory hole and began worrying the edges with its wet gobble of a mouth. Cleaning it of parasites.
Finch put out his cigar in the ashtray at the edge of the desk. Stood in front of Heretic. Take the initiative. In a calm, flat voice, he said: “I went back to the apartment. The body ... one of the bodies was missing.”
“I took it away.” A clipped quality behind the moistness. Some continuing thread of amusement. The eyes looked as though embedded in a rubber festival mask. “We're testing the body for a variety of --.” The word sounded like tilivirck.
Finch nodded like he understood.
“We also harvested another memory bulb from the man.”
Utter paralysis. Unbidden: an image of Sintra's face as he entered her. The way she sighed and relaxed into him. As the blood of his tears dropped onto her cheeks, her lips.
“What did you see?” Finch asked.
Heretic shook his head. A simple motion rendered alien, frightening. “Perhaps you should tell me first, Finch. What you saw.”
“It's in the report,” Finch said. Too quickly.
“The report. It's all in the report. How could we forget? Perhaps because the report was disappointing. Very disappointing, and not what we've come to expect from you.” Still a secret amusement there, mingled with the threat.
His stomach lurched. The room felt hot. At the other desks, the last of the gray caps had sat down. At their feet, their familiars curled, mewled, foraged.
“It's only been a day,” Finch said.
“Finch,” Heretic said. “Are you telling me everything?”
Bliss had disappeared from a ten-foot-square room. With no windows.
“I left out nothing important,” Finch said. “Up to that point.”
Heretic said something in his own language that sounded like a child arguing with a click beetle. Then, a half-expected blade held to the throat: “What about the scrap of paper the Partial says you took from the body?”
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