City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbotton said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under . . . under better . . . ” But he could not finish his sentence.

  The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.

  Hoegbotton later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.

  The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a soft popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that drifted to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.

  * * *

  Outside, Hoegbotton tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path to Albumuth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green grass, the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldered gray and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinpricks break his reflection in the fountain. He shivered as the water shivered.

  He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long after he left. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the soft pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.

  When his assistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he often did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbotton would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upswelling of excitement and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.

  The boy’s arm, fused to his suitcase.

  Holding onto the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbotton plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It prickled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose. A sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection—and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.

  Hoegbotton stood up. Across the courtyard, the Cappan’s men had abandoned the bodies to begin the task of nailing boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.

  One look at his face as he staggered to safety had told the Cappan’s men everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for the bribes and his previous record of survival.

  Hoegbotton wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The merchandise he had bought would molder in the mansion, unused and unrecorded except in his ledger of “Potential Acquisitions: Lost.” Depending on which hysteria-induced procedure the Cappan had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself might be put to the torch.

  The clock struck midnight.

  The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbotton had gripped its handle so hard during his escape—from every corner, Daffed’s infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him—that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a delicate filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.

  Blinking away the rain, Hoegbotton let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. It was heavier than he remembered it, and oddly balanced. It made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. He would have to hurry if he was to make the curfew imposed by the Cappan.

  Ambergris at dusk, occluded and darkened by the rain that splattered on sidewalks, rattled against rooftops, struck windows, hinted at a level of debauchery almost as unnerving to Hoegbotton as the way, whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his left to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same.

  The city that flourished from wholesome activity by day became its opposite by night. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene. The fey illustrated books of Collart and Slothian enjoyed a popularity that placed the authors but a single step below the Cappan in status. In the Religious Quarter, the hard-pressed Truffidian priests tried to wrest back authority from the conflicting prophets Peterson and Stratton, whose dueling theologies infected ever-more violent followers.

  At the root of this immorality: the renewed presence of the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide—now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark, night and day. Always, the city reacted to their presence in unpredictable ways. What choice did the city’s inhabitants have but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next, blind to all but their own misfortunes? It was now one hundred years since the Silence, when thousands had vanished without a trace, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory. Most people no longer thought of the Silence on a daily basis. It did not figure into the ordinary sorrows of Ambergris’ inhabitants so much as into the weekly sermons of the Truffidians or into the worries of the Cappan and his men.

  As Hoegbotton walked home, street lamps appeared out of the murk, illuminating fleeting figures: a priest holding his robe up as he ran so he wouldn’t trip on the hem; two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces. Of the recent Occupation, no sign remained except for painted graffiti urging the invaders to go home. But Hoegbotton still came upon the faintly glowing, six-foot-wide purplish circles that showed where, before the Silence, huge mushrooms had been chopped down by worried authorities.

  Hoegbotton’s wife was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by to see Rebecca.

  A dim half-light shone from the living room to his left as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungi guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.

  Hoegbotton found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up the uncomfortable weight of the cage, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A medley of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a book case, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.

  The fey light almost transformed the living room’s contents into the priceless artifacts he had
told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Little of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.

  Hoegbotton set the cage down on the living room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.

  The light came from the bedroom, which lay to the right of the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the left, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her left thigh. He ran his gaze over it lustfully. It glistened like obsidian.

  Hoegbotton walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.

  Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and soft, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.

  The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosphorescent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip to Stockton, after the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.

  Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

  2

  The next morning, Hoegbotton woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment better than he did—knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway—and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once and Hoegbotton agreed with her.

  To an extent. There were things Hoegbotton wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A letter had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he smoothed out the letter to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.

  The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight—pale and green and lukewarm—suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: gray spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.

  Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green- and-blue sweep of fabric, fit her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.

  As he came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without . . . ? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?

  Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”

  “I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”

  “Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.

  “Not very.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?

  “Well . . . ” he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.

  “You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.

  “How did you know?” he said, although he knew.

  “I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.

  “It was just sad,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a little suitcase.”

  The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confetti. The boy’s gaze fluttering between him and the cage.

  “I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised to Slattery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”

  She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.

  “Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these little sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.

  “Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to the Morhaim Museum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”

  Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum in Stockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him. Hoegbotton had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbotton sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.

  “I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”

  For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.

  “Isn’t it good?” she asked.

  “It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”

  He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, after a two-year wait. Before, they had gotten jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet spluttered and his glass gradually filled up.

  “It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from
behind him.

  “Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.

  “Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”

  He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”

  “That cage you brought home with you.”

  The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?

  Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s funny, because your empty cage was rattling earlier. At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing in the cage.”

  Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.

  For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.

  He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard—but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”

  Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her left hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”

  He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.

  “It’s quiet in here,” he said softly, already expecting the reply.

  “No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”

  The left corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”

  Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love—a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them”—her eyes narrowed—“I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, muttering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping—unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”