Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  Felipe struggled to his feet and headed through a side gate shrouded in foliage. Felipe walked slowly; whether from pain or to allow Feetmeat to keep pace, it wasn’t clear. They wended through the garden, wet and fragrant with rose blossoms and mint, until they passed through one of the western gates onto the cliffs that held back the roiling sea.

  Feetmeat’s dread grew with each of Felipe’s steps.

  When Felipe neared the eroded edge, Feetmeat cried, “Don’t!” and hobbled forward as fast as he could. He flung out a hand, intending to snag the scraps of robe as Felipe tumbled over the edge. Instead, Felipe’s hand swept down and landed in his with the precision of a bird.

  “I’m not going to jump,” Felipe said. His laugh turned into a cough. They gazed down the jagged slope at the rocks below, where the sea thrashed and foamed. Felipe’s one exposed nipple protested the bitter wind, as hard as Feetmeat’s cock.

  No one had ever held him with such charity—once a doctor, for money, and once a crowd, in the attempt to burn him. This warm touch, made all the more intense by the cold air, was like petting a fallen star. He was afraid his callused grip would extinguish its light, but he clung tightly nonetheless.

  Felipe’s injured voice frayed in the wind, but the connection of their palms seemed to amplify the words.

  “Thank you. You saved me, but also my books. I wanted to work in the Scroll Tower since I was first admitted to the school. It’s the only place I belong.”

  Feetmeat belonged on the outside of the towers, with the birds and the carvings, but he couldn’t trust his voice. He squeezed slightly to show he understood.

  Felipe let go, and cold wind filled Feetmeat’s palm. “But I should jump. They’ll find me again, and they’ll take my key. The Administration would rather lose me or a roomful of rare books than anger those monsters and their influential families.”

  He didn’t move. The wind made flags of his tattered garments, and his crown of muddy hair blew straight back from his face as he stared at the furious ocean.

  “I care about…the books,” Feetmeat said, and again he squeezed Felipe’s hand.

  “You’re fierce,” Felipe said. “All books should be so lucky, to have a strong gargoyle like you.”

  He smiled without joy.

  Feetmeat’s chest tightened, and tears burned his eyes as he thought of the gnarled stone creatures with their snaggle-teeth and bulging eyes. He should have known better than to let himself hope. He turned, because he would rather leave Felipe now, before he saw him cry.

  Felipe suddenly went to one knee, so they were eye to eye. He grabbed Feetmeat’s hand again, with both his own, and held him in place. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “You know why the gargoyles are there?”

  To scare away pigeons and rats, Feetmeat thought, but he only shook his head.

  “Historically, gargoyles are placed as guardians. They chase away evil. You did that, today, and if I heard right, you’ve done it before. So yes, maybe you’re not shaped as men expect to see; but every part of you is only mismatched so that you’re the size and shape you need to be who you are. Behind those beautiful green eyes, you are as tough as stone.”

  Felipe smiled and pulled one hand away, revealing Feetmeat’s callused palm. “Tough as stone doesn’t mean it can’t be a beautiful sculpture.”

  For long seconds, Feetmeat tried to enjoy this moment. Instead he panicked, knowing that somehow this would end. Nothing good lasted—not for long. Not for Feetmeat.

  He remembered the ghost in the attic of the Shadow Tower, the only one of the school’s five towers which was short enough that he had been able to climb all the way to the roof. This dead girl had been blonde, with prevalent freckles made even darker by death. Her ghost hadn’t looked out the window, but had instead gazed at her desiccated body, curled like a spider in the corner where she’d slit her wrists. Her cavernous eyes swallowed the sorrow of her own death for such a long time that Feetmeat had fallen asleep against the glass as he watched her.

  He thought of Felipe with hole eyes, with his long graceful fingers frayed into smoke at the first knuckles, staring at his own open chest cavity on a forgotten landing in a disused stairwell—or of his body smashed against the rocks below, his ghost flown away so that Feetmeat couldn’t even have that much of him.

  Felipe was right. The Court would get to him, one way or the other. They were the thing that would ruin this moment, that could flay the dedicated grip on his hand, that could dim these brown eyes so they no longer glowed with admiration.

  “I would like to borrow your key,” Feetmeat said. “I’ll use it to save the books again. This time, forever.”

  “I owe you a favor. If it’s my key, so be it,” Felipe said.

  “I may need more from you,” Feetmeat admitted. “We may need to sacrifice the Scroll Tower’s clock.”

  Felipe shrugged. “The worst—and only—noise in the library is the clock upon the hour.”

  Each of the next four nights, Feetmeat climbed the Scroll Tower in a different way, carrying a heavy coil of chain in his haversack.

  The Scroll Tower’s twenty-seventh story was a giant clock, floating about the twenty-sixth story, which was a solid ring of giant windows, impossible to climb. This glass level was held aloft by a circle of languid, willowy caryatides on the twenty-fifth story. Each of them held a vase, lyre, or switch in one hand, the other above her head to support the windows.

  Feetmeat wired the chains among the feet of the caryatides into a safety net wide enough to support all of the Court. If anyone noticed the chains during the day, no matter—they wouldn’t be there long.

  On Jovis, the night before he was to guide the Court up to the ring of caryatides, he used Felipe’s key and climbed the stairs inside the tower. After hours of wrestling with steps built for a different shape of legs, lugging a sackful of tools pilfered from the gardener’s shed, he finally emerged inside the giant clock. It faced north, toward the Teeth Tower, where the lectures were attended.

  He finished just before dawn.

  When the clock next struck midnight, the hour hand would wind up the last of the rope, and the rope would pull the holding pin, and The Court would be cinched into a net of chains. Feetmeat didn’t look forward to what he had to do—in fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he could do it—because taking care of evil was an evil in itself.

  But he knew what was required of a protector, and if he was also caught in the net, he was prepared to burn himself as well.

  When Feetmeat thumped down onto the roof of the toolshed where he lived, he barely had the strength to swing into the loft window and land on his bed. He still had work to do, however.

  When his hands regained their strength, he penned a note to Felipe. He stuck the key to it with grey wax, made from stolen candle ends.

  “Yours in flesh and heart,” he signed, and below that, in lieu of a name, he wrote simply, “Not Yet.”

  He crept into the vestibule of the dormitory and placed the missive in Felipe’s box. Now that he knew his love’s name, if he survived, he could write more letters.

  Maybe he would write entire books.

  King, Genevieve, Bestra and Bulgar arrived late, nearly an hour past dusk.

  “We must hurry,” Feetmeat whispered. “If we’re to climb all the way to the great windows, we’ll need time.”

  “Relax, Feetmeat,” said King. “We’re faster than you think. After all, we can use our legs.” Genevieve tittered. Bestra and Bulgar waited for orders from King, as always. And the clock on the Scroll Tower struck nine.

  Feetmeat began dragging supplies from the bushes. Pails with tin lids, brushes and palm-sized sacks of powder. He gestured to their clothing.

  “The moonlight is already against us—tar your clothes, that we might pass the sentinels in peace.”

  “Sentinels?” King scoffed. “What sentinels?”

  “I said I would take you where you’d never gone,” Feetmeat said, his heart thumping. Tar was more flammabl
e than their clothes. “If you want to reach the caryatides, and paint the windows they hold, you’ll find it takes more cunning than throwing a rope around a gargoyle’s horns and scrabbling up.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. The Admins are all asleep anyway, and even if they woke up, who cares if they see us?” King said.

  Feetmeat still had a flask of turpentine to pour on them, once they were trussed into the chains, and that would have to be enough. Perhaps it was best that they delay no longer—they still had several gardens to traverse before they reached the foot of the tower.

  “Fine, then let’s hurry,” Feetmeat urged.

  “Bulgar, he’s right,” said King. “Carry our twisted little friend that we might make better time.”

  Feetmeat protested, but Bulgar leaned down and scooped him up, holding him like a babe. He didn’t struggle, lest Bulgar accidentally snap his bones. The boy’s breath smelled like wine and wet dog.

  “Where are your stencils?” Feetmeat asked, afraid they had left them and would need to go back.

  King chuckled and pointed to Genevieve. “Tonight, we need only words, and Genna has a fine hand.”

  “Words, to go on the library,” Bestra said, as if she was explaining something profound that a mere window washer might not understand. Genevieve pinched her, and she was quiet.

  Feetmeat endured the journey in silence, sick with second thoughts. They were wicked, but perhaps not evil, not enough for the cruel example he planned to make of them.

  When they reached the base of the Scroll Tower, Bulgar flipped him around like a doll, one arm crossing over Feetmeat’s chest and arms, the other reaching between Feetmeat’s legs and roughly palpating his privates. “What would you need all this for? Seems a waste.”

  Feetmeat kicked as the others howled with laughter, but he couldn’t get free.

  “Book boys, is what he needs ’em for,” Genevieve added. “Maybe they’ll make little babies, little butthole babies!” Her giggles took flight like bats, shrieking up the side of the tower.

  “Let me go,” Feetmeat snarled.

  “You couldn’t keep up with us, not on the stairs,” said King, and he held up something that glinted in the moonlight. A key.

  “Turns out another bookboy was more agreeable. So we changed our minds.”

  He unlocked a small side-door, and the Court filed in after him, Bulgar last.

  Feetmeat’s chest seized. He thought of the note he’d left Felipe that morning:

  Your regard for me is more than I could have ever hoped, even if only as a protector. I fear the price of being a gargoyle, however, is that one must also be a monster. Perhaps you can be my friend even after I become what I must; perhaps not. We shall see what you make of me, if you meet me at the library’s northern window at midnight.

  He’d intended to wave through the glass, to deal with evil the way they had in the caravan, to see if Felipe could still look at him the same afterward. Now, Felipe would walk right into the library as the Court was destroying it, and there was no doubt they would be happy to vandalize his body along with his beloved books.

  Feetmeat struggled, but Bulgar wrestled him sideways, one arm still gripping his chest, pinning his hands to his sides, and one arm around his legs, so he could no longer kick.

  The dark stairwell coiled like a snake. As they passed the dormitory doors on the first three floors, Feetmeat thought about screaming for help, but he knew they’d toss him down the stairs and say that’s why he’d yelled. They’d make sure his neck was broken before an Administrator got close.

  If he didn’t come up with a plan, he would end up broken anyway. He stared at the dark wall as it passed, his stomach clenched as he bounced with Bulgar’s footfalls and eternally leaned to the right as they followed the steps. He was too small, too weak.

  Every four turns, a window poured harsh moonlight into the stairwell, and then they marched back into darkness. The fifth window they passed illuminated a drab ghost, her white skin clay-like in the harsh moonlight. She looked out the window, her posture haughty, uninterested in the living. The Court had no use for a dead victim when they still had a live one, so they ignored her as well. As Bulgar passed her, Feetmeat’s face went through her shoulders.

  Cold air burned his eyes, stung the inside of his nose, raked over his brain like a cat’s claws. Her memories settled into his brain like leaves sinking into a pond. His despair grew heavier, and he tried not to think about what they might do to him, even as he remembered what some other long-ago bullies had done to her.

  She’d been proud, though. She refused to give in, had thought it meant something that she never cried or begged. She endured, and then she poisoned herself.

  Feetmeat would rather be alive than be proud.

  He counted ten more windows, just to be sure they couldn’t go down the stairs quickly. On the fifteenth floor, he pissed all over Bulgar, who predictably dropped him with a shriek of rage.

  Feetmeat swung out the window faster than they could grab him, trusting the tower to save him. He caught himself on a stone vine, his fingers cupped over the slick leaves, and then he climbed faster than he had in his life.

  Their hooks and harnesses clacked against the stone near him as they tried to snag him. He climbed up, so it would be harder for them to swing their equipment toward him. Once they gave up and retreated to the stairs, he would climb down and wait by the fourth-story window to warn Felipe. To tattle on the Court to the Administration would be suicide—they would force Feetmeat to swallow every key they could find and then cut them all out with separate holes—but he could at least prevent them from having a human victim to go with the library.

  When they disappeared back into the stairwell, their whispered curses still skittering like insects in the night air, he began his descent, only to seize in horror.

  There was a small glow by one of the library windows far above him, like that of a single candle.

  Feetmeat climbed at speeds he usually didn’t dare. He stopped just short of true recklessness—some voice in his head reminded him that he couldn’t warn Felipe if he was motionless on the ground below—but he barely paused to wipe the sweat from his hands or mentally map his hand- and foot-holds.

  However fast he climbed, there was the risk that the Court would have climbed the stairs quicker.

  When he arrived at the feet of the caryatides, slicked in sweat and breathing hard, he still couldn’t see who was behind the glow.

  He grasped the stone tunic of the nearest caryatid. The folds were smooth and he didn’t have the best purchase, but it was the only way to reach the window on this side—the chain he’d left dangling from the clock was on the north face, and the stairwell went up the west, the side that faced no other buildings, only the sea. When he reached the window, his stomach sank. He’d hoped it was a cranky Administrator who’d fallen asleep at a window desk, but of course it was Felipe, who jumped when Feetmeat knocked on the glass.

  “The Court is coming,” he said. Felipe shook his head, and Feetmeat said it louder. Screamed.

  The glass from the windows was too thick.

  Shaking, Feetmeat slipped his small knife from his belt and held it in his teeth so he could slice the pad of his index finger. Using his blood as paint, he wrote Hide backwards across the glass.

  Recognition dawned on Felipe’s features, but it was too late.

  He jerked his head, drawn by some commotion Feetmeat couldn’t hear, and dashed off into the stacks.

  “The candle!” Feetmeat yelled, but moments later, King appeared. He saw the candle first, then the message in blood on the window, then Feetmeat’s face.

  King’s blank face stretched into its first smile. He walked off the way Felipe had gone.

  Feetmeat clung to the caryatid’s arm like a bug on a branch, motionless even with the predators behind glass. He could never wake an Administrator before it was too late. If he climbed his way down to the stair window and back inside, it might still be too late. Besid
es, he was barely four feet tall. There wasn’t much he could do.

  The Court punctuated his failure by returning with Felipe squirming in their midst. Bulgar and King pressed him onto the desk while Genevieve snatched up the candle. She singed his hair.

  Something cool touched Feetmeat’s leg, and he glanced down to find a pale hand offering him a stone jug. The caryatid looked at him with eyes as blank as King’s, and though Feetmeat should have been afraid, her stone face was gentler than King’s flesh.

  Feetmeat grasped the jug by the handle, and she released it, placing her free hand out to form a second foot-hold. Feetmeat looked down at the other caryatides. Their faces were all turned toward him, and below them, all down the building, the gargoyles faced his direction as well, baring their teeth. One flexed its wings; another lashed its tail. They seemed to guess he was about to destroy part of their home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “If it helps, I won’t last long after I do it. But the tower can be fixed, and Felipe can’t.”

  He swung the jug and smashed it into the glass window. That drew the attention of the Court for a moment, but King narrowed his eyes and shrugged.

  Feetmeat imagined King’s foot connecting with his chin, knocking him out into the air, just as he knew King was imagining it. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t sit here and do nothing, and he wouldn’t retreat. Felipe was going to die either way; he deserved to know someone cared enough to go with him.

  The stone jug shattered the window on the fourth hit. Feetmeat used it to knock aside the largest shards. Bestra, who was closest to the window, was still shaking off her shirt when Feetmeat stepped onto the shard-strewn carpet.

  He swung the jug into her left knee, and the sound was quieter than the breaking window, but loud enough to hear. That one moment of triumph blossomed: if Feetmeat could just injure each of them, just slow them down, Felipe could carry him down the stairs in time to get away.

  His fantasy lasted less than second before Genevieve hit him in the head with a book and dragged him across the glass by the back of his shirt. She rolled him off the sill.