Death of East

by Michael John Grist

  "We need action, not pretty words," said Fotheringay. "In life as in business, we must meet the challenge head on. We must build a giant wall that will hold in all the little children, and their toys."

  "But that won't save Johnny," cried Mr. Mills. "If not the river, then we must freeze the rain. We can use the frozen rain like we might use steps, and step our way down off the edge."

  "Spoken like a true miller!" chimed in Old Man Charlie. "The waters do not hold still like the grain for chopping, sir. We must simply lasso the boy from here. It doesn't do to go over the edge. Perhaps a lasso with a slice of beef on the end would draw him out, as he knows meat so well."

  "Don't upset the Applecarts!" Mr. Mills replied. "Their son is no fish to go leaping at meat on a string. No, what is required is a proper plate of cooked beef, in a cage, that he might climb inside and we can wind him back up."

  And so it continued, with wild ideas heaping atop wilder ideas still. Barnaby Roy tried to keep the peace, while Fotheringay simply watched and listened, along with Mr. and Mrs. Applecart.

  In the end, everybody went home. The next day work began on the wall.

  * * *

  Flatland was a somber place after that. Everybody wore black or grey. Mr. Applecart could often be found crying into his meat.

  And more children went missing. A week later it was Matt, one of Johnny's oldest friends. Sgt. Trunk found a rope tied to a tree at the edge of Flatland, as if the boy had heard the spelunking idea and done it himself.

  The furore began over again. The men of the town claimed they would climb down. Many followed suit and claimed they would take up the rope and follow after Matt, and after Johnny.

  Fotheringay only pointed to the beginnings of the wall, and said, "In life as in business, we must build up the tariffs, and service the need. The wall is the plan."

  Mr. Mills ignored it and suggested a flying auto-car. The vicar suggested they all gather up handfuls of grass and sod and toss them over the edge, that Matt and Johnny might have something to stand on.

  Barnaby Roy the policeman suggested they toss food over the side in case they were there and needed to eat, in case they were hungry in the space beyond the edge.

  This idea seemed to resonate with the townsfolk, who gathered food and dirt and threw them over the edge as if laying flowers on a grave, or throwing life buoys to drowning sailors.

  They shouted at the edge for Matt and Johnny. But they heard nothing back.

  The next day, work on the wall resumed in earnest.

  * * *

  A joint funeral was held for the two boys. On the morning of the funeral, Johnny and Matt's friend Chris went missing.

  The wall crept higher, and further around the circumference of Flatland, but somehow more children must have fallen off the edge, as soon after that more children went missing. The school's numbers crept down to 127 students. Then 121. Then 99. The Mills lost all eleven children within three days.

  The adults set up watches at night surrounding the town, standing beside the wall, as none dared to stand atop it. They set up roadblocks. Fotheringay led them and bolstered them from his limousine, standing up through the sun-roof to bellow them onwards, in life as in business.

  Life inside the skyscraper documenting life outside the skyscraper grew dull and morose. All the people were at the edges watching for another run-away, another child to make a break for an escape over the edge, but the ledger-takers could not use the telescopes to look at the edge as the chains stopped them, so they watched the empty town and made notes about the sheep in their pens, or the one wild dog as it paced outside the butcher's shop waiting for scraps.

  Fotheringay alone encouraged them, inside and outside. His limousine roved around the town, and soon he affixed bull-horns to its roof, so that he could save his voice while bellowing encouragement to all and sundry.

  * * *

  More children disappeared. The adults stood at their posts until they collapsed with fatigue, and still children crept through the gaps. Not only children though, also people snuck out of the locked skyscraper and headed towards the edges, to help, to be where the children wanted to be.

  Fotheringay set up a podium in front of the skyscraper's grand double doors, stood atop it with his waistcoat and top hat on, lined up all the remaining staff before him, and gave them their orders.

  They must all set to the blockades. The work of ledgering could wait. They must utilize all the tanks, and all the cars, and the jail and the barracks, and block all the streets, and lock all the children in.

  "Do not till the fields!" he called from his podium. "Do not cut the meat, or heal the dying and sick. Do not stop the crime, or put out the fires, until our children are safe!"

  The crowd roared their support. Even though everyone knew Fotheringay paid them to do it, it inspired the rest of the townsfolk. So the hospital shut down, and the butcher's shop shut down, and the church and the millery and the pubs and shops all shut down.

  The whole town was locked down. The children were locked in, in their homes, or in the school, or the jail or the barracks.

  Days passed, then weeks.

  The children talked amongst themselves. They hated to be confined. They climbed up the walls, and they smashed their beds to pieces, and they sang long and loud and ignored their parents when their parents commanded them to be quiet.

  So Flatland fell into anarchy.

  There was no food as the farms were not being tended. There were pigs and sheep running wild through the town. The Mills' stepped out with their shotguns and could be heard shooting out over the edge at all hours. The children grew lank and wild-eyed.

  The mill no longer produced bread, so there was no bread. The chickens had all run the coop because the children were no longer there to gather the eggs. Foxes ran the alleyways and cows lowed their way through the marble foyer of the skyscraper.

  "What do we do?" people asked.

  "We hold the course!" replied Mr. Fotheringay from his podium. "In life as in business. Hold the course, and ride out this squall. This is nothing but a passing malaise in our town. Hold the course!"

  The town held the course, until adults started disappearing.

  The first to go were the Mills'. Mrs. Mills ran into town weeping telling of how her husband had fallen off the edge when drunk and shooting. No-one could go help her though, as they were all too busy keeping the children locked in.

  She left to call for him, and was never seen again.

  The townsfolk huddled in their homes as if a monsoon was approaching, as if the edge was creeping up on them. They peered out of letterboxes, slits in the curtains, watching the silent and litter-strewn streets.

  Occasionally the half-starved town dog would scamper by, a cow would meander past, and sometimes a maddened person would sprint for the edge.

  The air hung still and thick over Flatland.

  Fotheringay drove round in his limousine, now tethered to the skyscraper by metal chains for security. He bellowed loudly through his bull-horns.

  "Don't be afraid. We're through the worst of it now!"

  But it wasn't true.

  More and more of the townsfolk were disappearing. Old Man Charlie hadn't been seen in days. Barnaby Roy had gone, after both his children snuck out of their padlocked room at night through the roof tiles. The Applecarts went missing too, their butcher's shop left in immaculately clean condition.

  Fotheringay drove his limousine himself, when his chauffeur disappeared. He drove around the empty town, only occasionally stopping to yell encouragement at some hold-outs, tell them about life as in business and business as in life.

  Soon, he could no longer find any hold-outs at all.

  He walked freely in and out of people's homes, those of families that he'd known, people who had worked for him. Their possessions were scattered round their rooms as if they'd just left to borrow some sugar and were coming back soon. He made notes about what he saw in his portable ledger book until the book was
full, then he threw it by the way-side.

  He left his bowler hat in the dust. He left his cane and suit pants. He locked the doors to the skyscraper, and he moved to the Mills' farm. He taught himself how to bake bread from the notes in the ledgers he'd brought with him. He tended a patch of vegetables, and caught some chickens and reined in some cows and fenced them in, cooped them up, all from the ledgers. He learned how to milk cows, how to slaughter them, how to gather eggs.

  He lost weight. His fat paunch from days spent sitting behind a mahogany desk withered until he was fit and lean and thin.

  Every day after his chores, he walked the whole of the town. He pretended to talk to Mr. Applecart in the butcher's shop, about his son, and how the cuts of tongue were. He pretended to while away the hours chatting with Roy Barnaby in the police station, asking after Old Man Charlie, and had the Mills' brood been up to any nuisance recently.

  He pretended to talk to the people on the street, the vicar in the church, the general in the barracks.

  But they were not there, and he knew it.

  * * *

  He continued to lose weight. He grew thin and sallow. He slaughtered all his chickens and his cows, for their incessant mooing to be milked and clucking to be let out was driving him to distraction.

  He sat on the great millstone in the Mills' windmill and rested his aching head against the cool of the mill-shaft.

  Outside, it began to rain.

  * * *

  The next day he trudged to the edge. He walked up to it without any sign of fear. The world was thin and empty around him. He stood by the rope, and peered down, saw nothing, nothing but blackness all the way down.

  Tears rolled down his emaciated face. They were all gone.

  He walked back into the town, and unchained his skyscraper doors. He climbed the steps to the thirtieth floor and let himself into his dusty office. He turned to the stack of dusty ledgers, as yet unchecked, and set the first on the expensive mahogany desk. He sat at his plush chair, and opened the first page.

  He read that little Johnny Applecart had just found the first conker of the season. Jocie Grey had been watching him while Chris Avaldis was running around in circles underneath an elm tree.

  He read about the Mills arguing over something. They kept running into their kitchen and bringing out bigger and bigger kitchen utensils, pointing at a hole in the ground. Eventually, Mr. Mills knelt to the hole with only a wooden kitchen spoon, and began to fill in the hole, while Mrs. Mills watched.

  He kept on reading. He didn't know what else to do. He kept on reading for a long time.

  6. THE ORPHAN QUEEN

  The orphan Queen slumped like a toad atop her throne, at the head of the palace's great court hall, and commanded us to build her a father.

  "He must be strong," she said, her voice tart as a raspberry, "neither too short nor too stout, but full of wisdom and authority, as a father should be. He ought stand wholly apart of other men, yet speak with a voice his own, of civilized and consequential matters."

  As she spoke, the dead body of her court jester Antonio twitched by her side. He was her latest toy, a corpse hung on strings like a puppet, strings that ran up to pulleys above and back down to her hand, upon which was fitted a marionette glove of the kind I once made her, in kinder days.

  She moved her fingers, and the corpse of Antonio jerked at her whim. I remember a time not long past, when she had clapped while he juggled and ate fire for her amusement. Now she was the Queen, only eleven years old, and he amused her in a different way. I swallowed back my disgust, and raised my hand to speak.

  "Levetti," said the Queen coldly, "have I not been clear?"

  "Majesty," I began, bowing deeply, turning my mind to the matter in hand, "I have but one question. Do you seek a puppet able to locomote itself, entirely independent of support? One that will move in the absence of strings?"

  The four other masters in that grand chamber turned their fearful gazes from the Queen's dead jester to me. I was the puppeteer, after all, and once the orphan Queen's favorite.

  "That is correct," she replied tersely, "as any father ought."

  I steeled myself. I owed the truth, at least, no matter where it landed me. "Then you ask an impossibility, for such a thing cannot be done. The enlivening spark cannot be pressed into the puppet's limbs, through any other means than the strings of the puppeteer. It is not possible for a puppet to stand alone."

  The Queen regarded me sourly. The masters either side of me leaned away, as though I was already lofting up on the dead jester's strings, and they feared I would haul them with me.

  "I had thought to receive better tidings from you, Levetti," the little Queen said. "Were you not amenable to my every desire a year hence? Did you not bring me every silly little toy I wished for?"

  I bowed my head. "I brought toys for a child, then," I replied quietly. "Not a torturer."

  "What are you muttering, Levetti?" she snapped, her nose wrinkling. "Should I have your tongue plucked that I might hear you better? I cannot abide mutterers."

  I looked up to face her. "Was Antonio a mutterer also, my Queen?"

  She followed my gaze to the jester on her strings, then laughed without humor. It was not a pleasant sound. She wiggled her hand, and Antonio danced accordingly.

  "Yes, poor Antonio. He spoke treason behind my back, did you know? I asked but a small test of his loyalty, and he denied me. I asked only that he excise a finger. Just one finger! Is that too much loyalty for a Queen to demand? I should have stopped him, had he bent to it. Rather he did not, and proved himself false."

  "As I would have too, Queen," I replied. "As any man would. How can excising a finger prove loyalty? It cannot. Who has told you such things?"

  The Queen sighed. "I wouldn't expect you to understand. You are but a toy-master. Still, I have heard rumors about you. That you are disloyal to the crown."

  "I am loyal to the last!"

  She smiled with gloating eyes. "Good. But muttered words shall not suffice, Levetti. I require of you a greater proof. You come to me and say a puppet cannot be made to stand alone. Would you follow my jester in your denial?"

  "I only speak of what is possible, Queen."

  She snorted. "You have no imagination, man. Lucky for you I once favored you. It is why I have brought you these others." She gestured to the other four men standing beside me. "Here is Caliarch of the Teslic coils, who once built me a sparking model of the sun. With his aid you will build my father's heart and motive force. Andale here will craft the cords of his throat, that he might sing as sweetly as the organ in Mellorvici cathedral. Gregorii the clockworkist will harness his Teslic heart to the locomotion of his frame, and Aspidarci the abicist will fashion his brain. You, Levetti, will bring these pieces together and birth the soul into my father's body, that he might advise me true and plain, as none here seem able."

  My mouth was dry. There beside the throne hung the last man to deny her. Yet I could not lie.

  "I know nothing of souls, Queen, or of Teslic hearts and brains. I know not how it can be done. I am but a simple puppeteer in the Queen's chamber."

  She smiled then, a joke we had once shared, and for a moment I thought I saw a glimpse of the child I had once known, but it was quickly buried.

  "Then you had best learn, Levetti, hadn't you? You taught me that lesson yourself. We all must learn to adapt."

  I bowed, feeling the bite of my own words. There was no thing I could say in reply, and no thing I could do.

  "Then I ask a year, Majesty. There is much to be done."

  She sniffed. She tugged on Antonio's strings, and he jigged sickly.

  "You have one month. I am not the patient little girl you once knew. I am the Queen now, and must be obeyed."

  I bowed, and I nodded, but in my heart I knew that in one month's time I would be hanging in Antonio's place.

  * * *

  We five masters filed out like chastened boys. I saw the terror in the eyes of the others, as
they stole glances in my direction, perhaps expecting I would be the first to fail. What was all of this, but a way to punish me? I avoided their eyes, and sent them to their workshops, to build what they might to a simple specification, though I knew we would fail.

  "Small," I warned, "and plain. If I am to understand your works and unite them, they must be within my ken. We come together within the week."

  They nodded acquiescence, though their eyes were haunted. I felt I saw the ghost of Antonio hanging above each one of them.

  I returned to my belfry garret in the dun-colored old abbey of San Fossecia. The abbot met me as I climbed the winding stairs to the room that had once been his pigeon loft. He didn't speak, only gazed soulfully into my face. Perhaps he read well therein what was before me, and let me pass without comment.

  I stood in the dusty garret, dappled with bright swathes of warm light shot through the collary-windows, and looked over the life I had built for myself. Everywhere were puppets; some of wood and others of leather and fur, some dressed and painted, others bare Tulsa wood, lying in heaps like dried out victims of the Mantuan plague, hanging limp by their strings like poor Antonio.

  "From this I ought fashion the Queen a father," I murmured, feeling foolish even as I spoke. There were none to hear, only myself. I did not know where to begin, but still, I began.

  From a long log of stout oak I fashioned the two halves of the puppet's torso, larger than any man, large enough to hold within it Caliarch's Teslic heart. From flexible yew I shaped a lattice of faulds for its stomach, within which would be encased Gregorii's mechanic clockworkings. From tempered iron rods I pounded out a skeletal frame that ran up its back like a spine, to which would be attached its limbs, its head, upon which its torso would be hung like a cavaliere's breastplate.

  From hardest ash I lathed the arms, legs, feet and hands that would provide the means of its locomotion. I linked them each with joints of polished marble wrapped in oiled swine-heart valves, hollow through their centers that cords of puppetry string might pass.