Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  He watched the couple scramble away down the stairs, the girl weeping, the man blustering empty threats. Then he retreated into his darkened office again, to hide, and pity himself, and sulk like a ruined frightened beast. He turned the card over and over in his sweating hands until it wrinkled soft and grey. There was an address; he didn’t dare destroy it, though nor did he dare visit it. If he ever saw Lucia again he didn’t know what he’d say to her, how he’d face her.

  In the morning, orders came, via messenger, that he was to return to the sky, and he was able to put the incident out of his mind and return, with relief, to his duty.

  A t the end of another week, Arjun collected up his notes and went to pay a visit to Holbach. Outside, it was pouring rain, but it had been pouring all morning, and all the day before, and seemed unlikely ever to let up.

  He had a new rain-cloak—the old one having suspiciously disappeared from his room at the Cypress, along with his books. He’d purchased the new one from a spacious and handsome store on the edge of Foyle’s Ward, on the recommendation of Olympia’s coachman Hoxton. It was apparently quite smart. “For a student,” Hoxton had said. “Only for a student, mate.”

  Arjun held his notes under his arm, under the cloak, pulled up his hood, and stepped outside. He made it only halfway down the street.

  First his foot landed in a puddle, and a dreadful damp cold squeezed him. The puddle seemed deeper than he would have thought possible; he was drenched almost up to the knee. He nearly dropped his notes. His leg went numb and heavy and he was suddenly afraid. He walked stiffly on.

  Then, as he walked past the graveyard, his hood blew back and the rain drove into his face. He cried out in shock and annoyance, and swallowed water. There was suddenly something slimy and unimaginably foul-tasting in his mouth, something thick and weedlike that pressed down on his tongue and threatened to block his throat.

  He choked and coughed up a wet black leaf.

  Another leaf brushed past his face in a swirl of wind and rain. The air was thick with them. The trees over the graveyard shook and swayed and disintegrated in the downpour.

  He thought about what fed those trees and felt sick. He could still taste the muck in his mouth.

  When he looked to the end of the street, all he could see, framed by the vague shadows of two tall terraces, was the rain. Beyond that everything was grey mist and fog.

  In the depths of the rain something moved, and Arjun turned and ran.

  His hands numb with terror, he dropped his notes, and as he ran he trod them under, and the overflowing storm gutters swallowed them.

  T he day before, the trees had been cleanly bare of leaves. The next day they were bare again. But it rained that day, too, and Arjun preferred to go hungry indoors rather than brave the streets.

  The day after, the rain abated. Arjun ventured out to the nearest greengrocer and purchased dried fruit, dried meat, in bulk supply, as if—as the grocer put it—he were traveling north through unfriendly districts.

  “Rain’s moved on,” the grocer offered.

  “It’s hunting for me elsewhere,” Arjun said. “Ah, that’s just something we say where I come from,” he lied, when he saw the grocer’s dubious expression; and he took his groceries and hurried home. That night it rained again.

  Two days later a messenger came with a note from Holbach. The note read simply:

  Hmm? —H.

  Arjun ignored it.

  His notes would take forever to reconstruct, and he lacked the will even to begin. Increasingly he doubted that he would have the time to finish.

  A rjun wasn’t sure when he had first begun to suspect that the Typhon was hunting him. After Norris’s death, surely. That poor old man’s death was Arjun’s first clear and irrefutable piece of evidence that the monster was no longer content—as it had been, apparently, for a thousand years—to prey on whatever innocents the city happened to offer up: bargemen, fishermen, children, strangers to the city, or anyone else unwise enough to go too close to the water. The Cypress was nowhere near water. Norris’s death was explicable only as malice; as a sign that the monster was following Arjun’s trail.

  Arjun had never quite reasoned the matter out. When he’d first set out, nearly three weeks ago, to bring his notes to Holbach, he’d already known it. That first time, he made it half a mile before coming to a street that ran east alongside the leafy and café-lined banks of the Quiller Canal. The thought—If I go near the water, it will find me—sprang fully formed into his mind, and he found that he had known all along that he was being hunted.

  If he ever doubted it, the proof was in the hungry beating of the rain at his window; in the cold moan and laughter of the drain-pipes; in the deathly stink that rose off the water, and that everyone else pretended not to notice.

  O n the first day after he’d moved into the new flat, Arjun had gone to Holbach. At the time, Arjun not yet been sure about the situation, and perhaps the Typhon had not yet found his scent, because he had been able to walk all the way to Holbach’s mansion without incident.

  Arjun found Holbach in conference with a thin pale man; the two of them were busy dissecting and slicing at the little flayed corpse of a pigeon. Arjun found the procedure repellent, and the two scientists’ conversation utterly obscure. He followed Holbach when the Professor left the laboratory. “Professor,” he said, “Professor, I have been thinking about the Typhon. I think you may misunderstand its nature. It saw me, Professor, and I think…”

  Instead of offering help or information, Holbach gave him more metaphors. “Imagine,” he said, that time, “that the gods are like reflections in a mirror.” Holbach stopped before the mirror in the hall and waved his hand in front of it. “Now, there, my hand moves in the mirror. See, now, my mirror-hand takes my pipe from a mirror-pocket. You might think the mirror-pipe moves because of the action of the mirror-hand upon it; similarly you may ascribe the intention of moving to the mirror-hand. Yes? As these images are to us, so the gods are to the city. They can no more see you or hate you than mirror-Holbach here can. Which is not to slight the significance of the gods; what could be more potent than images? Here we are talking about them, after all. They do not care about us, but we care about them.”

  Holbach returned the pipe to his pocket and waved his hand one more time at his reflection. His fingernails were still stained with the pigeon’s blood.

  Holbach said that he hoped he’d helped set Arjun’s mind at ease, and excused himself: he had an appointment with a man from the Sentinel.

  The next time Arjun broached the subject, Holbach offered him a detailed and ingenious analogy between the gods and memories.

  T he day after Arjun first understood that the creature was hunting him, he set out again for Holbach’s house. He refused to allow the…thing to terrify him. His disgust for it overwhelmed his fear. Besides, it was a bright, cold winter day, and the sky was clear.

  He took a different route from the previous day, skirting east around the edges of Foyle’s Ward, along broad, busy market-streets. He plunged north into backstreets only when he had to.

  He quickly found himself confronted by water again.

  A canal cut across the street. It was steep-sided and narrow as a ravine. It was wide enough, barely, for a single barge to pass. It smelled of moss and damp and rot.

  There was no bridge; the street simply ended. The houses on either side of that unpleasant obstruction looked empty. Their windows were broken and their gardens rank with weeds.

  To his surprise, Arjun was able to approach the canal. Looking west down it, he could see an arching iron footbridge some half a mile away, and beyond that the canal receding into the distance, straight and severe; to the east the canal curved and twisted only a couple of streets away and his view was blocked by a windowless wall of brown brick.

  It was impossible—it was an impossible trick of geography. If the canal stretched west as far as it appeared, it should have crossed Arjun’s path yesterday, but it had not.
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  The waters had shifted overnight, twisting like a snake.

  There was no sign to indicate the name of the street, or the canal. Maybe they had no name yet; maybe their names had been forgotten. Arjun wondered whether the empty houses had been abandoned, or whether they had not yet been settled.

  In the garden nearest the water’s edge, he found a sort of answer. The fence around that garden had been torn down, and the garden opened to the street; but unlike the other gardens, someone cared for it.

  The grass was long but not altogether wild. The garden was full of wooden totems—upright poles, with a second shorter strip of wood nailed lengthwise across. Arjun had no idea what creed, if any, the totems stood for; they resembled the Tuvar character for the syllables “on” or—depending on context—“loy,” but he thought that was coincidental. He thought he was looking at a shrine for the dead.

  There were names cut into the wood on the lengthwise beam of each totem. First names only; all the women seemed to be called Mary or Elizabeth, and the men were mostly John.

  Thirteen totems.

  Plague deaths? Perhaps some foul miasma of rot and stink crept up off the water, and rolled down the street like mist. Perhaps a barge sank here? Something about the absence of last names made Arjun think these might be the names of children.

  The sky was shadowing over and a single drop of cold rain hit Arjun’s cheek. Instantly his nerve broke and he ran.

  H e could never find that grave-site again, or that canal.

  On wet days Arjun stayed indoors, trying not to listen to the rain hammering on the roof, or the hail clattering against the windows. He moved his desk into a corner, against a wall, so that he would not have to look out over the city, and tried to lose himself in his work. He began a heavy tome on Tuvar agricultural practices and their unhappy efforts to bring them to the city. It was dull reading; he inched through it.

  On days when the sky was clear it was safe to go out.

  Sometimes Arjun went down to the waterways. He never had to walk too far in any direction before coming to a canal, a reservoir, one of the ornamental lakes of Faugère, or one of the shallow marshy ponds that formed on condemned ground north of Fourth Ward—and the River itself, had he ever been brave enough to face it, would have been only a few hours’ walk to the east.

  Arjun set the Tuvar aside and began work on a map of nearby waterways. He placed his flat in Stammer Gate at the center of the page, and marked around it with dotted lines for what he judged to be industrial canal, unbroken lines for the prettified recreational waterways to his north, and so on. No dreadful pattern emerged. He disliked the tight and angular way those broken lines seemed to crowd around the vulnerable white heart of the page, but it was hardly evidence. To be sure of the significance of his map—to be sure that the convergence of waterways it seemed to show was unusual, anomalous, significant—he needed something to compare it to. He needed to venture further afield, to sample other districts of the city. The project far exceeded Arjun’s meager resources.

  He scraped together some notes and half-finished pages—just enough work to justify a visit to Holbach on the next clear dry day of winter. Arjun thrust the map into Holbach’s hands and Holbach let his eyes politely and blankly drift over it, and said, “Yes, I see, if you’ll excuse me…” Then Holbach glanced at the map again, suddenly attentive, and said, “Hmm.” The Professor folded the map into the nearest drawer, and said that tomorrow he was meeting with the Countess, and the day after he had a lecture to give on certain improbable architectural survivals discovered in the reconstruction of Stross End, and the week after that he had an experiment to supervise that would take him north, and then east, to make comparative observations of the sunset rising behind the Mountain, but the map was quite interesting, quite interesting, and he would give it more thought on his return.

  Arjun went home in high spirits and worked vigorously on the Tuvar for a week. He translated fully half of the thick history of the Tuvar’s agricultural practices, and the interminable controversy that arose when the Tuvar began purchasing and destroying local blighted property to turn streets into fields, and the riots that ensued. On the next clear dry day when Arjun was able to return to Holbach, he learned that the Professor had lost the map; had, in fact, forgotten ever seeing it. That night there was a burial in the graveyard outside Arjun’s window for someone snatched from us in the prime of her youth and beauty by such a terrible sickness, and the muffled echo of the mourners’ keening kept him awake long after they had all gone home.

  W inter gripped the city. It rained more often than not and it was nearly always dark. Arjun let the Tuvar gather dust again, and began avidly reading the newspapers for reports of deaths.

  He found the bigger, grander papers—the Sentinel, the Era, the Commercial Intelligencer—essentially useless for his purposes. They wrestled ponderously with the great issues of the city. The Sentinel and the Era were always full of stories about the wonderful progress of the reconstruction of Stross End. The Commercial Intelligencer, which was published somewhere in the north and available only rarely in the newsstands of Stammer Gate or Foyle’s Ward, mused darkly and obsessively on the irresponsible menace of the Countess and her unholy Thunderer. They were above tallying the insignificant dead.

  Fortunately, a dozen local rags did little else. Arjun found the Stammerer especially useful. Its editor had a fascination with the subject that rivaled Arjun’s own, so that Arjun began to wonder if the man had shared his own vision of the thing that haunted the waterways—but Arjun’s letters were never answered.

  Arjun was interested in two classes of deaths: deaths (of any cause) in or near the water, or deaths (wherever located) from diseases similar to whatever claimed Norris—Black Lung, or Langshaw’s Disease, or the Shivering Greys, or other sicknesses of rot or damp or industry or poverty or desperation.

  He kept two piles of clippings, on either side of his desk. Winter dragged on and the piles grew with unnerving speed. Foyle’s Ward was full of students who seemed prone to falling, in the dark of the winter nights, into the canals on their drunken ways home; they accounted for a fair number of the dead. Black Lung claimed the elderly at an impressive rate. Three children disappeared; four the next week. The Stammerer lamented the plague of wild children in the streets, who were a danger to themselves and others, and deplored a recent rash of violence against the Houses of Correction. The next week, two children were found strangled in a pumphouse, and one more disappeared from a wealthy home in Foyle’s Ward. In the same week, a barge disappeared en route between the Blake & Blake Brewery and Foyle’s Ward, and the crew—father and son—were lost. After a while Arjun had to subdivide the pile of deaths by the water into murders and drownings and other; he could not decide how to subdivide disease, and that pile swelled enormously.

  Was that normal for the time of year? Arjun had no way to be sure.

  W hen Olympia first came to visit him—she’d happened to be passing on business—Arjun conceded that no, he had not been seen at Holbach’s mansion lately. It seemed pointless to lie to her—her eyes were too sharp and clever—so he admitted that he had no work to show Holbach, and no particular prospect of producing anything in the immediate future.

  She looked as if she was about to say something cutting and unkind, but thought better of it.

  Anyway, he explained, his circumstances made it hard for him to come to the mansion at all. It was not only that he could only travel on dry days; he had to set out after the damp grey fog of morning had dissipated, but early enough that he could be sure of being back before dark. He had to take a circuitous route to avoid water. These were just some of the rules he’d developed as a defense against the monster; he wasn’t sure that they worked, exactly, but he had nothing but instinct to guide him.

  Olympia was dressed somewhat less outlandishly than usual, in a black winter cloak. She had brought with her a long-haired young man in an expensive fur coat, and introduced him as Mochai, a pai
nter. As Arjun explained his situation, Mochai shook his head and consulted his pocketwatch. It appeared Mochai and Olympia were lovers, because when Arjun was finished, Mochai took Olympia’s arm with an attitude of commanding familiarity, and said, “This poor fellow’s mad. Why did you say you removed him from the hospital? We should leave him be.” She pushed Mochai’s hand away and told him to be quiet, and he rolled his eyes.

  Olympia passed Mochai her cloak, under which she wore a dark velvet jacket, and leaned against the wall by the desk.

  She said, “Arjun, I’m sorry. Have you spoken to Holbach about this? He’ll tell you this doesn’t make sense.”

  “He’s explained his theories to me, yes. At great length.”

  “You see, whatever you may have felt or seen, the god isn’t interested in hunting you. You care about it but it doesn’t care about you. Imagine a mirror—”

  “Let me tell you my theory.”

  She allowed him to interrupt her; she nodded slightly to say Go on.

  “I won’t argue with you about the normal operation of your city and its gods. You are all very clever and you have studied the matter more deeply than I. Of course. And you may think I am very simple, but we had our own god where I came from. There was only one, so we had nothing to compare it to, and perhaps we understood it less well than you understand yours. But we understood it well enough—until one day it surprised us.”

  “That’s different. They come and go; they always have. Holbach always says he’s half-historian.”

  “I think the Typhon is sick. Broken. I don’t know what word to use. I think it is a process that has become corrupted.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about this.”

  “Of course. Will you understand if I say it makes me think of a piece of music, in which a theme is being worked out, developed, elaborated upon, and one is still composing as one goes along, improvising it with every moment, if you can imagine that. Into that piece of music is introduced an error, an imperfection in the theme. An unexpected ugliness. One cannot ignore it; one cannot simply begin again; one has to explore its implications. The imperfection grows. Soon it threatens to swallow the music. One tries to work it away but each correction only raises new imperfections. It defies all your efforts to expunge it. Now you find yourself playing what it demands of you, what it makes necessary. You are trapped. You cannot stop playing or the ugliness will be all that’s left, but each moment you play causes you increasing pain. Wouldn’t you call that poisoned music your enemy?”