The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “They are obviously very unhappy workers.”

  Passing a graveyard with a mortuary chapel encrusted with owls, who peck at mouse gargoyles, Darktree wonders why he experiences a tongue of heat on his nape. The answer stabs inadequately into his awareness, like a melting icicle: eerie locations rely on surrounding warmth for effect. An observer who is already chilled has scant patience with simple gothic shudders. Indeed, if spectres exude a constant temperature, close to the freezing point of blood, and the real world which encases them is colder than this, near the freezing point of beer, then mortals will be able to bask in the horror. Darktree squints and sees movement in the tombs: men and women without shirts, tanning themselves in the ultra-virulent aura. Beneath a hippogriff statue, legs protruding through holes in the broken sarcophagus, a blue dwarf retunes a hurdy-gurdy, protecting himself with a parasol from the phantasmagoric rays.

  Signor Udolpho is explaining local politics, which are more tangled than an octopus netted in spaghetti. His hat, now wholly red, is bulging and Darktree worries that it will burst at the summit. “The Post Office, bless its self-addressed soul, detests the barriers of ice which prevent it from conducting international business. Its leaders plan to dismantle the walls whenever they win power. Many citizens champion the cause, but deem it wasteful to stage a revolution. The structure is due to collapse on its own, without mortal assistance.”

  “Really? And why is that, pray?” Darktree and his companion skirt a pillar of dials and numerals. High above, a balloon bumps gently against the edifice. The occupants of the gondola threaten the sky with clenched fists and unsheathed letters. The tower begins to whistle a silvery tune and Signor Udolpho increases his pace.

  “The ceiling is supported by the 7,777 clock towers of Chaud-Mellé, but the coldness is conducted along their length, causing them to become brittle. When they strike the hour, they often shiver to fragments. Then the ceiling sags a little—without a tower to conduct away the chill in that place, the whole thing grows a degree colder, accelerating the doom of the other towers. They’re presently disintegrating at the rate of six a day; soon there will be none left.”

  Dipping into a cramped backstreet, they elude the main force of the eruption. Cogs crash onto roofs and roll down into the lane with a knock of a tooth on each slate, like stars from a municipal constellation, the Sign of the Bailiff, sawing open the gables to expose salted families in cobweb nightcaps. As they hurry around the little wheels, the chef leans closer and whispers: “You’re exposing yourself to danger by accompanying me. Return to Hauser Park, signor. I’ll reward you well if I survive the quest. With muffins as big as mules!”

  “ ’Sblood! I have three other reasons for leaving the Festival, sir. Avoiding Clarice is one. Also, as a footpad I need to practise my swing. ’Tis impossible among that mob. Lastly, I have an assignation at the zoo and hope to stumble on it by chance.”

  Signor Udolpho pauses at the end of the alley. “Very well, we shall make our farewells here. To find the zoo, follow Calvino Street until it turns back on itself. There you will meet a washing line which serves as a rope bridge. Cross into Sologub Avenue. Head north until you reach the junction of 666th and Main—they’re arteries, not streets. There you’ll find a network of underground thoroughfares. Crawl into the straightest, Wassermann’s Crush, and don’t look back. You’ll eventually emerge in the vicinity of the zoo. Excessive luck!”

  “What if I lose the way?” Darktree splutters.

  “No help for that, signor. Chaud-Mellé is a malady of direction, as cheese is a malady of milk. Just one inhabitant knows the full layout, a seer who can only predict the past, never the future. Her name is Madame Ligeia; she dwells at the Café Worm.”

  Placing both hands on the crown of his hat and pressing down, as if playing a concertina, the chef forces the blood back into his brain. His parting bow has an air of finality about it. He slips into the gloom and Darktree is left to cuddle a sandbag.

  He is single again. What is the worst thing about loneliness? Maybe that it becomes comfortable, like a horrid woollen waistcoat in snow. He dislikes solitude but he is reluctant to abandon it—his misanthropy is buttoned up to the throat. This sartorial sociopathy defeats itself like a cheat who uses his own knuckles as dice. There is nobody around; he is not even able to bludgeon company.

  When Darktree follows a chef to a pâtisserie, he keeps exactly nine steps behind. He speculates that if Clarice has knocked Signor Udolpho’s senses out, he might knock them back in. He sees no conflict of interest in first helping and then mugging the fellow. He is a natural flux, like weather; an oscillation of pressures.

  The problem with this city, as far as Darktree is concerned, is the narrowness of the alleys. Implausible to swing a sack without breaking a window or staving in a door! An opportunity to rush and clobber the chef does not present itself until they reach his shop. Signor Udolpho enters before Darktree can aim his bag. Frustrated, the footpad lingers outside and waits for him to emerge. The pâtisserie is a squat building, swollen on one side as if baked in a damaged oven rather than built with bricks. Peeping beyond the marzipan lintels, Darktree is chewed by décor layered with bohemians and perfumed gluttons.

  Closest to him is a chap who smells, even at this distance, like an engineer, but looks like a poet: an apple which tastes of lime. Stepping back, Darktree glances up. Over the shop, through a second-floor window, a girl with limbs like cream plays sticky chords on a piano. What can be keeping Signor Udolpho? Darktree decides to go round the back and search for another entrance; he does not wish to club among dandies. He circles the pâtisserie, like a tongue around a tart. Here, in a sunken courtyard piled high with rusty pans and defective whisks, he spies a trapdoor. At the rear of the yard, a steep lane curls its cobbled lisp over the house of cakes, trickling crumbs of rubble.

  With a mighty effort, Darktree lifts the trapdoor. Far below is the shop’s cellar, full of barrels arranged in rows like greedy skittles. In their midst, candle held high, the chef rummages in each, taking a pinch and licking his fingers. “Where are you hiding, Signor Self-Raising?” He plainly has a long night’s work ahead; there are over a thousand tubs. A sigh bubbles from Darktree’s lips as he leaves the courtyard, forgetting to shut the trapdoor. He will have to be satisfied with a substitute, an ordinary customer. Loitering at the front again, he strikes at the first patron to depart. It is a fine sandbagging, but a poor catch. Apart from a cane carved in the visage of a harpy, the fellow has nothing of value. Darktree walks off in disappointment.

  It is time he searched for the zoo, before Conrad annuls his supper invitation. Following Signor Udolpho’s directions, the footpad—more an anklepad, he thinks in disgust—gains Calvino Street easily enough, but crosses on a wrong washing line. Knickers and vests impede his progress, brassières smother his optimism as he dangles over private gardens, many containing dogs and allotments. The relentless dripping from the ceiling slicks his hands, numbing his fingers into tiny scythes. He drops safely into Olaf Stapledon Crescent, fall broken by a perspicacious dog. Dented and frightened, he scurries to the end of the street, turns a corner and nearly collides with a huge catapult.

  The anachronistic war machine, all lacquered wood and silver nails, is pointing directly at the Opium-Arsenal, which dilates in the distance like a pregnant midwife, suffering what it delivers. Darktree is pleased to encounter a familiar building—he will be able to locate Hauser Park again—but the ludicrous contraption disrupts his equanimity. Reclining on the gigantic spoon, like a sack of naphtha, is a hunched shape with a stony expression. He wears asbestos lace and a granite jacket and glares from beneath slated brows. A modern example of the Oreopithecus hominid? Darktree is wary but eager to please.

  “Ho there! May I release you from this onager?”

  The captive shakes his head sadly. “I’m too poor. I need the money. Herr I. M. Wright has promised to give m
e five farthings if I land in the Artist’s Quarter. I believe I can do it.”

  “This is most peculiar. Why volunteer to be dashed to pieces? Coins won’t bandage your limbs, sir, though they might splint your lashes. Let me smite your bones with my sandbag.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I’m not a charity. I am Rodin Guignol, a sculptor down on his luck and chisels. Herr I. M. Wright has offered me this job to test his theories on ballistics. I am protected with clothes I carved myself—note the strata of this waistcoat. My socks are spiked with fossils. Once clear of the Opium-Arsenal, I’ll be safe: puffed egos in the Artist’s Quarter will provide a soft landing. If you wish to beat me unconscious, you must pay me first.”

  “I’faith! You drive an igneous bargain! But tell me more about this Wright fellow. Has he propelled plums?”

  “Often. Also walnuts, magistrates and canoes. Of all the ballistics experts in the city, Icarus Montgolfier is the neatest. He even launched another catapult once: when it reached the apex of its flight, it sprang a third catapult yet higher, and this went on, with diminishing onagers, all the way round the globe. The last catapult, which was no bigger than a dimple, landed exactly on the first.”

  “Bravo! But what use is a sculptor in science?”

  Adjusting his feldspar collar, the hunched figure sighs: “Herr I. M. Wright is mapping the city. Artists fly in a straight line, unlike other citizens, and are more useful for measuring distances. This is my second discharge today; on my first, I almost grazed the ceiling. I’m certain I discerned a mare on the other side.”

  “I suspect you of lying, sir. Equines never prance on frosty eaves. I’ll have words with your employer!”

  “He’s on his lunch break. Be back in an hour.”

  Snorting derisively, Darktree passes the catapult and heads for the Opium-Arsenal, which is presently flirting with balloons. Trams converge at its base; this is a ganglia for the current vehicles. Approaching the windowless bulk of the black sphere, the footpad is alarmed to disturb a woman squatting next to a sealed door. She is stabbing at the metal with a marlin-spike. At once a flood of grey powder bursts from the incision, sweeping Darktree aside. His protests are feeble: “Halt, pickpotter! You are no lady, madam. ’Tis vandalism.”

  Clarice doffs her tricorne. “I’m following you from the front, sir. Marry me or I’ll cruel you up like a ruddock! ’Tis an easy choice, dear, and one you’d best make ’fore dawn.”

  “Curse your stylish persistence, foul stalker!”

  The stream of opium and gunpowder, blended into a single substance, continues to roar past. When Clarice lunges at him with open arms, he is quick to react. He jumps onto the granulated river, removing his hat and using it as a sledge. It bears him back the way he has come, down a lane parallel to the one which contains the catapult. Twisting and turning on the cobbles, snatching up cats and rag pickers, the dry deluge takes him by a circuitous path toward Udolpho’s pâtisserie, approaching the house of the rising bun from the rear. Before it deposits him over the incline into the jumbled yard, Darktree leaps off, brushes himself down and runs deep into the shadows of a random direction. Explosive and narcotic, his encrusted coat is now illegal. It advertises his criminal character like branded cheeks or cropped ears. He takes it off and turns it inside out, exposing its despicably pink lining.

  He emerges onto a relatively wide highway, the Champs-Poe. Down its pitted and pendulous length he ventures, panting with horror. How can he possibly evade a pursuer who always keeps ahead? Turning more corners in a frantic attempt to shake Clarice off, walking backwards to confuse his trail, he finally comes to another important street, the Rubellastrasse, where a building looms over a puffed pavement as if it has burrowed from another part of Chaud-Mellé. It is the Café Worm. Signor Udolpho’s words return to inspire hope: inside he will find a soothsayer who will surely be able to direct him to the zoo. He enters, dragging his sandbag behind him like a colostomy in the wake of an hourglass. The colour of his garb earns him applause as he pushes through the patrons to the bar, where he requests to see Madame Ligeia. He is directed up a flight of flea-hopped stairs weighed down with black cats.

  Ascending to a crepuscular landing, he raps on a door engraved like a sweaty palm. The voice which hisses from behind the teak lifelines has a doubly mournful quality, lagging after its own nostalgia: “Enter!” The footpad turns the handle and squints into a chamber bedecked with mystic apparatus. There are zodiacal charts and runic tablets, jars filled with captive clouds and a gigantic teapot belching steam. In the centre of an oroide table stands a quartz ball bristling with knobs and dials, aerial branching from a socket in its side. Darktree gropes his way through the room toward a figure seated on a pyramid of cushions, a woman of placid beauty with eyes as old and decaying as cities on the Rhine. His brow is charmed by her demeanour, though not his jowls. He bows awkwardly in the cramped space and clears his throat.

  “I have come for a consultation, madam. In return I shall not crack your spleen. Were you expecting me?”

  “No, but tomorrow I’ll know all about it.”

  With a marble hand she indicates an ottoman, but Darktree sits down on his sandbag, which moulds itself to the floorboards, robbing knots. A surge of Assam washes over his sock.

  He grimaces: “Your teapot seems to be leaking.”

  “So it does! Somebody must have drilled a hole in the bottom. Later I will be able to predict the birth of the culprit. Foretelling the past is a savage gift, a power given to me by the VTOL Hermes after I refused to help him defraud the stock market. His shares crashed and he declared himself spiritually and financially bankrupt. He sold himself to a vicar and was converted into a barometer!”

  Darktree begins to rise from his position. Has Clarice preceded him even here? There are no movements in the shadows; if she was responsible for spilling the tea, she has already moved on. He relaxes. His host has extended her arms to gesture at a bizarre contraption hanging on the far wall, a combination of scientific instrument and classical statue. There is something familiar about its anthropotomic elements; they make up the limbs and adjuncts of Quicksilver, though instead of wings on hat, staff and sandals, this version has rotors.

  “You are a pagan, madam? ’Tis a toga’d notion.”

  Fluttering her jetty lashes of great length, the seer groans: “It’s a requirement of the job. The VTOL Hermes was a lazy patron, I never got much out of him. Forever hovering over decisions, he was; I’m happier as a freelance. But you have come to seek guidance and I won’t distract you with my history. Would you like a reading? What is your star sign? First we must measure your inside hyleg. Which side do you dress your destiny? Come now, there’s no need to be shy.”

  “I was born under Ophiuchus; the second constellation which defines me is the compassion of Lucy Reeves.”

  “Pshaw! I have no pencils to draw up those charts. Perhaps we ought to try a little crithomancy? Pass me down that jar of clouds and another of bread crumbs. We’ll cut a cirrus and sprinkle grain over its entrails. What’s that? You are allergic to high altitude meteorological phenomena? I’d better utilise the crystal ball.”

  Leaning forward, Madame Ligeia flicks a switch on the quartz sphere and adjusts a dial. Static dances in the depths of the device. Suddenly, there is a picture: Darktree approaching the Café Worm. The footpad sees his recent life played backwards, his conversations with Clarice and the sculptor on the catapult. Then the mirage wobbles and the fortune teller strikes the top of the set, twisting the aerial with her other hand. The image stabilises for a moment before sliding off the screen, reappearing at the top and falling yet again. Darktree is shocked. Perpetual motion? The seer urges him to ask a question.

  “I seek Conrad Slawkenbergius, the Warrior-Chef of Otranto. Can you show the moment when we lost each other? I wish to know the direction he took so I may follow him to the zoo.”
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br />   Fussing with the glittering orb, eyes wider than the gazelle orbits of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad—wherever that is—the prophet pouts her gothic lips. “I’ll try, but the dashed thing’s on the blink. I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, it was last serviced. Long years have since elapsed, my memory’s feeble through much suffering, and the guarantee has expired. Wait, here’s something! I don’t think it’s you, though. I must have tuned in to another persona; a horrid frame wrapped in three capes!”

  Darktree recognises the face which briefly looms before him, rising on a contraption not dissimilar to the VTOL Hermes. “ ’Tis the fellow who first persuaded me to enter Chaud-Mellé! Why is he revolving through the air? Named himself Xelucha Dowson Laocoön—an agreeable wight in all. I toasted his calluses with sour beer.”

  “This is before the ice walls were built. We’re going too far back. I’ve got another fix on you, but it’s from years ago. What are you doing with those pistols and ormolu clock?”

  The footpad peers into the scene before him, gnawing three knuckles in trepidation. Clarice and himself are exchanging threats and booty. He can hardly resist admiring her ankles and brutality. As the melodrama is reversed, gaining an absurd beauty from the process, like porter filling a glass from a gullet, he watches his womanly counterpart ride backwards into the undergrowth. He follows her regress to a boisterous tavern near Abergavenny where she is greeted—or waved farewell—by a filthy stake of a man, blistered on the personality and thumbs. They embrace like the jaws of an aching gin-trap and suck back guffaws and friendly blows. Now Darktree sweats with stoked insights.

  “Heavens! ’Tis Tom Jackstraw: my arch-enemy! Then he must have been Clarice’s lover before she left him to pursue me! Small wonder he became a beggar at the base of Ysgyryd Fawr. I’m humbled by the revelation. May I plash your drapes with lachrymals?”