City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle fragments of newsprint lay scattered across the dining room table, held in place by a bottle of port with glass beside it. Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood that had drifted down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

  Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years? Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbotton’s family had gotten up in alarm—unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third—that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper—had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.

  It appeared to Hoegbotton as if the family had been eating and simply . . . disappeared . . . in mid-meal. A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.

  Hoegbotton took out his pocketknife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see . . . what? To see the gray caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbotton known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swiftly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all.

  Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half-full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long after the Silence?

  Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate.

  He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two “u” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbotton felt the questions multiply, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

  The baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop running until he had reached the familiar cobblestones of Albumuth Boulevard’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbotton seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?

  That was how it had started—following a cold, one hundred-year-old trail. At first, he convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his office. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element—the bottle of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs—but no further insight came to him. After a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.

  Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbotton. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly-lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom, Slattery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.

  Hoegbotton did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the gray caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion after the other, bringing him closer than ever before.

  Hoegbotton finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbotton’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up—the handle seemed hot to the touch—walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to attend to the needs of his customer.

  4

  That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he came inside of her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.

  She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep besotted, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.”

  She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.

  Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.

  The next day, as he sat in S
amuel Hoegbotton’ s room writing out invoices for the past week’s exports—Saphant carnival masks, rare eelwood furniture from Nicea, necklaces made by yet another indigenous tribe discovered at the heart of the great southern rainforests, all destined for Morrow—he noticed something odd. He drew his breath in sharply. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

  There, growing at a right angle from the green cloth that covered the cage, was a fragile, milk-white fruiting body on a long stem, the gills tinged red. It was identical to the mushrooms that had appeared in Daffed’s mansion. He cast about for a weapon, his gaze fixed on the cage. There was nothing but the bottle of port. Beyond the cage, the fungus that had infiltrated the cracks of the mirror appeared to have darkened and thickened. Irrationally, he decided he had to remove the cage from the room. The room had caused the fruiting body. Picking up a napkin, he wound it around the handle of the cage and carried it out of the room, to his desk.

  He stared across the store, trying to locate Bristlewing. His assistant stood in a far corner helping an elderly gentleman decide on a chair. Hoegbotton could just see the back of Bristlewing’s head, nodding at something the potential customer had said, both of them obscured by a column of school desks.

  Slowly, as if the mushroom was watching him, Hoegbotton slid his hand over to the top drawer of his desk, pulled it open and took out a silver letter opener. Holding it in front of him, he approached the cage. Images of the woman and her son flickered in his mind. He couldn’t keep his hand still. He hesitated, wavered. A vision of the mushroom multiplying into two, three, four came to him. Hoegbotton leaned over his desk, chopped the mushroom off the side of the cage. It fell onto his desk, leaving behind only a small, circular white spot on the green cover, as innocent as a bird dropping.

  Hoegbotton pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and squashed the mushroom in its folds, careful not to touch any part of it. Then he stuffed the handkerchief into the wastebasket at his side. A moment’s hesitation. He fished it out. Decided against it and placed the handkerchief back into the wastebasket. Fished it out again.

  Hoegbotton realized that both Bristlewing and his customer were now standing a few feet away, staring at him. He froze, then smiled.

  “My dear Bristlewing,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

  Bristlewing gave him a disgusted look. “Mr. Sporlender here was interested in a writing desk, for his son. We’ve a good, solid chair but nothing appropriate in a desk. Anything in storage?”

  Hoegbotton smiled, extremely aware of the dead mushroom in his hand. The irritation caused by the handle of the cage flared up, pulsing across his palm. “Yes, actually, Mr. Sporlender, if you would come back tomorrow, I believe we might have something to show you . . . ” Or not. Just so long as he left the shop— now.

  Hoegbotton nudged Bristlewing out of the way and guided the man toward the door, through the crowded stacks of artifacts—babbling about the rain, about the importance of a writing desk, about anything at all, while Bristlewing’s disgusted stare burned into the back of his skull. Hoegbotton had never been more impatient to reach the rain-scoured street. When it came, it was like a wave—of light, of fresh air. It hit him with such force that he gasped, drawing a sharp look from Mr. Sporlender.

  As they stood there, on the cusp of the street, the iron door at Hoegbotton’s back, the man stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Really, Mr. Hoegbotton—should I come back tomorrow? Would you truly advise that?”

  Hoegbotton stared down at his hand, which was about to rebel and throw the handkerchief and mushroom as far away as possible. Some of the early afternoon passersby already stared curiously at the two of them.

  “I suppose you shouldn’t, actually. We don’t have a desk in storage or anywhere else . . . I have a condition of sudden claustrophobia. It comes and goes. I cannot control it.”

  The man sneered. “I saw what you put in the handkerchief. I know what it is. Will I tell? Why bother—you’ll be dead soon enough.” The man stalked off.

  Hoegbotton immediately began to fast-walk in the opposite direction, past sidewalk vendors, a thin stream of pedestrians, and an even thinner stream of carts and carriages, which the rain rendered in smudges and humid smells. Only after three or four blocks, soaked to the skin, did he feel comfortable tossing the handkerchief and its contents into a public trashcan. He already had an image in his head of the Cappan’s men searching his store for traces of fungi.

  A man was throwing up into the gutter. A woman was yelling at her husband. The sky was a uniform gray. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore. Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi was growing. He wondered if anything he did mattered.

  Back at the store, Bristlewing was grumpily moving some boxes around. He spared Hoegbotton only a quick glance—watchful, wary. Hoegbotton brushed by him and headed for the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands red before coming out again to examine the cage. It looked just as he had left it. The green cover was unblemished but for the white spot. There had been no proliferation of mushrooms in his absence. This was good. This meant he had done the right thing. (Why, then, was it so hard to draw breath? Why so difficult to stop shaking?)

  He sat down behind the desk, staring at the cage. The inside of his mouth felt dry and thick. Nothing happened without a reason. The mushroom had not appeared by coincidence. This he could not believe. How could he?

  Almost against his will, he reached over to the cage and pulled the cover aside, the green giving way to the finely-etched metal bars, the shadows of the bars letting the light slide around them so that he saw the perch, gently swinging, and, below it, a pale white hand. Slender and delicate. The end a mass of dried blood. A vision overtook him: that he was Samuel Hoegbotton, staring across the dining room table at the cage, which was the last thing he ever saw…The hand, he had no doubt, was from Daffed’s wife. What would it take to make it go away?

  But then his mind registered a much more important detail, one that made him bite down hard on his lower lip to stop from screaming. The cage door was open, slid to the side as neatly as the cover. He sat there, motionless, staring, for several seconds. Throughout the store, he could hear the hands of myriad clocks clicking forward. No mask could help him now. The hand. The open cage. The fey brightness of the bars. A rippling at the edges of his vision.

  Somewhere, Hoegbotton found the nerve. He reached out and slid the door back into position with both hands, worked the latch shut—just as he felt a sudden weight on the other side, rushing up to meet him. It brushed against his fingers and chilled them. He drew back with a gasp. The door rattled once, twice, fell still. The perch began to swing violently back and forth as if something had pushed up against it. Then it too fell still. Suddenly.

  He could not breathe. He could not call out for help. His heart was beating so fast, he thought it might burst. This was not how he had imagined it. This was not how he had imagined it.

  Something invisible picked up the hand and forced it through the bars. The hand fell onto his blotter, rocked once, twice, and was still.

  It took five or six tries, his fingers nimble as blocks of wood, but he managed to find the cord to the cover and slide it back into position.

  Then he sat there for a long time, staring at the green cover of the cage. Nothing happened. Nothing bad. The sense of weight on the other side of the bars had vanished with the drawing of the veil. The hand that lay on his blotter did not seem real. It looked like alabaster. It looked like wax. It was a candle without a wick. It was a piece of a statue.

  An hour could have passed, or a minute, before he found a paper bag, nudged the hand into it using the letter opener, and folded the bag shut.

  Bristlewing appeared in his field of vision some time later.

  “Bristlewing,” Hoegbotton said. “I’m glad. You’re here.”

  “Eh?”

  “You see this cage?”
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  “Yes.”

  “I need you to take it to Ungdom.”

  “Ungdom?” Bristlewing’s face brightened. He clearly thought this was a joke.

  “Yes. To Ungdom. Tell him that I send it with my compliments. That I offer it as a token of renewed friendship.” Somewhere inside, he was laughing at Ungdom’s future discomfort. Somewhere inside, he was screaming for help.

  Bristlewing snorted. “Is it wise?”

  Hoegbotton stared up at him, as if through a haze of smoke. “No. It isn’t wise. But I would like you to do it anyway.”

  Bristlewing waited for a moment, as if there might be something more, but there was nothing more. He walked forward, picked up the cage. As Bristlewing bent over the cage, Hoegbotton thought he saw a patch of green at the base of his assistant’s neck, under his left ear. Was Bristlewing already infected? Was Bristlewing the threat?

  “Another thing. Take the rest of the week off. Once you’ve delivered the cage to Ungdom.” If his assistant was going to dissolve into spores, let him do it elsewhere. Hoegbotton suppressed a giggle of hysteria.

  Suspicious, Bristlewing frowned. “And if I want to work?”

  “It’s a vacation. A vacation. I’ve never given you one. I’ll pay you for the time.”