The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  In a bunch, all four of them began a retreat. “Which way?” Rector asked.

  “Follow me. Don’t take your eyes off the fog.”

  “Couldn’t if I tried.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  If the footsteps, scrapes, and ragged breaths from deep within the fog could be believed, the sasquatch trailed them. Not closely, but without much space between them, either. “How much farther to the jail?” Rector asked.

  “Not so far, Red. Keep your calm. The sasquatch don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Then why’d he try in the first place?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe he didn’t.”

  There she went, harping on that again. Well, she wasn’t there when it happened. Rector was there, and he knew when something or somebody wanted to tear off his head and play catch with it. Frankly, the sasquatch hadn’t been the first to consider it.

  Inch by inch, foot by foot, they clustered and sidled and ambled along, no one breaking from the group. When it seemed as though the sasquatch might be falling behind, or losing interest in armed prey that outnumbered him, Angeline reminded him of the fish. She urged Houjin to hold it up and let it sway back and forth.

  “Come on, big fellow,” she told him. “Don’t you smell that? Don’t you want to come in close, and take a big bite of it? There ain’t much to eat inside the wall, I know. You must be hungry as can be.”

  Houjin waved the fish like a pendulum, his arms straining against its weight. “You think he can actually smell this?” he asked.

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “Because the Blight smells like rotten eggs and cat piss, that’s why,” Rector murmured. “If he can smell the fish through the gas, then his nose deserves a blue ribbon.” You didn’t have to breathe the stuff day in and day out to know the reek of it. The odor permeated everything—clothing, wood, and supplies. And of course, Rector had burned enough sap to have a much more intimate familiarity with the concentrated stink.

  “He can see the fish, even if he can’t smell it,” Zeke tried.

  “Then his eyes need a blue ribbon, too.” Rector couldn’t see more than a dozen feet in any direction, and sometimes not even that far.

  “Boys, don’t argue. The jail’s just at the end of this street. Keep yourselves focused. We’ve almost got him.”

  Rector didn’t recognize the street. It looked like any other neighborhood inside the swamped city: low, squat buildings that were sometimes houses, sometimes stores, and occasionally something else. The taller structures were all farther to the southwest, down nearer to the water. There weren’t any hotels this far up the hill, or train stations, either.

  This corner of the wall-wrapped space hadn’t been developed much. Rector supposed that was why they put a prison here. And when the prison came into view, it wasn’t an imposing sort of place, or a particularly cruel one in appearance. It was flat and single storied, built of stone gone slimy with the years and the gas.

  “There it is,” the princess said.

  “That’s it?” Rector asked. “Don’t look like much.”

  Angeline said, “It ain’t much. The main jail was downtown, on Third Street at Jefferson. But that one was emptied before the Blight got too bad. The people who were here … they were the ones left to die.”

  Zeke turned his head to stare at the unimpressive rectangle with the tiny barred windows. “So these were the ones my granddaddy saved. I always thought it was the big jail, the main jail down on Third Street.”

  She shook her head. “No. He’d have saved more than a couple dozen folks if he’d emptied that one.”

  “Stories get bigger in the retelling,” Houjin noted.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Zeke shifted his grip on his old fireman’s ax, which he’d reclaimed from Rector. Like the fish Houjin wielded, it was almost too big for him to swing and it looked ridiculous, but Rector had gotten tired of arguing with him. “He saved them. Including Captain Cly—he was there. Him and his brother. He told me about it.”

  Houjin dutifully tipped the fish back and forth, even though his arms were shaking. “I’m glad he did. Saved the captain, I mean.”

  They reached the corner where the jailhouse stood, melting on its foundations.

  Angeline said, “Zeke, I want you to do something for me, all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I want you to go open that front door. If it’s locked, the lock won’t hold. Move as gentle as you can. Don’t startle the fellow we brought along with us.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He swallowed hard and left the group.

  Moving with exaggerated slowness, as if to show that he was utterly harmless—never mind the ax—and that his task was wholly uninteresting to any creatures that may lurk in the fog … he approached the jail’s door.

  Rector could see the doors from his vantage point pressed against Angeline’s back. Although someone had chained them years ago, the chain looked about as strong as wet twine. Eaten up with rust and moisture, it crumbled when Zeke gave it a tug and clattered to the ground, disintegrating into a puff of damp red dust and a pile of rubble.

  “Sasquatch won’t follow us inside,” Houjin speculated.

  Angeline told him, “You don’t know that.”

  Zeke disappeared over the lockup’s threshold. Angeline nudged Houjin and Rector to do likewise. Together they crept over the last of the rubble, Houjin holding forth the fish like a talisman, as if it could protect him—and Rector thought maybe it could. If Rector were a sasquatch, faced with the prospect of eating a boy or eating a fish, he believed he’d go for the fish first.

  So he did what Angeline told him and stumbled backwards, forward, spinning slowly as they calibrated themselves to move together. And one by one—Rector first, then Angeline, then Houjin, who stayed at the threshold with the fish a moment longer—they stepped inside.

  Darkness washed over them all, blinding them until their eyes adjusted.

  “Huey, get in here. Keep showing him the fish, that’s right. Keep coming. I’ve got your back. He won’t hurt you—just bring him along. I’ve got my net.”

  “He isn’t coming.”

  “He’ll come.”

  But he didn’t. Not at first.

  He camped outside the jailhouse and—as its occupants soon realized, with no small degree of nervousness—he peeked in the windows and ran away. Then again. And a third time. A fourth. He lingered, skulked, and mulled the whole thing over. The fish. The jail. The four small things inside.

  Zeke watched for a bit, but as the sasquatch contemplated his next move, the younger boy left the team and wandered back into the gloom. The bland, uniform, brown-black shadows were cut only by slats of weak sunlight, filtered too many times to be stronger than a candle in the overwhelming darkness. Zeke slowly chased them anyway, following the little rays as far as they’d take him.

  While Angeline and Houjin watched the entrance and waited for company, Rector watched Zeke, then joined him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, whispering without knowing why. The place felt like a graveyard, but that wasn’t right, was it? No one had died here. Even Maynard hadn’t died until he got back to town, or that’s how the story went.

  “Just looking,” Zeke murmured. “Never been here before, but I heard so much about it.”

  His hands trailed along cabinets and cubbyholes for mail; they dragged furrows in the dust along a solid plank desk covered with brittle scraps of curling paper. A metal stamp was on the floor. Rector found it by accident, kicking it with the edge of his boot. He retrieved it and examined it.

  Zeke asked, “What’s that?”

  And Rector said, “Looks like something for making dates, over and over again.” He placed it beside a long-dried-out ink pad. “The kind of thing you use on official papers. Like birth certificates. Or court papers,” he added, thinking that it was more likely the prison processed felons than babies.

  “Oh.”

  But Ze
ke’s attention was already elsewhere.

  He puttered over to a board on the wall, about the size of the blackboard back at the orphan’s home. It was covered in rows of hooks, and each hook held an iron ring set with a single key. A small plaque beneath each key indicated which cell door it fit. Each of the keys was too corroded for anything but looking at, so Zeke didn’t molest them.

  And at the board’s far left, a single hook was empty.

  Beneath it was a grimy plaque that read, “Master set.”

  He touched the empty hook with one gloved finger, then tugged it as if it would grant him a wish. “This is the one,” he said. “The master set. Maynard took the keys, and he went…” Zeke turned on his heel and disappeared down the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. He continued. “Down here. He went down here. And one by one, he opened the cells.”

  It was true, the doors were open. Some of them hung sadly on their tracks, ready to fall over if anyone so much as breathed on them. But back in the past, they had indeed been unlocked—and thrown aside so the occupants could escape.

  Zeke left the only footprints.

  “He let them go, so they’d have a chance. Not all of them lived,” he mused. “Some of them were already weak, or sick, or what have you. And nobody knows how much gas it takes to turn somebody, or how much it takes to kill. But my granddaddy’d already run a mile through the Blight, up the hill. He was already poisoned.”

  Unbidden, a thought rose in Rector’s mind.

  Nobody knows how much sap it takes, either.

  He did not say this aloud. Instead, he asked, “Do you think he knew he was dying? Your granddaddy, I mean.”

  Zeke stood between the rows, facing Rector—and backlit by the small barred square of a window that barely let in enough light to notice. Still, it cast a funny striped halo around the kid’s head; it made him look like a ghost.

  “Dagnabbit,” Angeline complained from the main room.

  Zeke sighed, and Rector shivered free from whatever spell he’d been under.

  The princess continued to blaspheme. “The damn thing is sticking to his guns.”

  Rector and Zeke both returned to the main room, kicking up dust and bumping into things in the dull ambient light. Rector asked, “Where is he?”

  Angeline shrugged, and said, “He’s staying outside. Maybe we should go back out again.”

  Houjin nearly agreed. He seemed fully prepared to agree, standing at the threshold same as before, holding the shimmering dead fish with a drooping arm. He began to say something to that effect—that he thought they should go back outside, and take another try—but he didn’t get the chance.

  He was beaten to the punch by a long, hairy arm.

  It whipped inside and seized him with a snatch so slick that, for a split second afterwards, nobody moved. No one was sure what had occurred, or what ought to happen next. One moment, Houjin was standing there with the fish and looking like he felt a little silly. The next, he was simply gone.

  Zeke snapped to attention first. He barreled past Rector, and though Angeline shouted his name, commanded him to wait, he dashed out into the Blight-thick air.

  “Come back here, boy!” she shouted, but she followed him, her net poised and ready for throwing. And Rector went, too, right behind her, because he didn’t know what else to do.

  Out into the Blight they burst. Somewhere in the fog, Houjin began to holler, then abruptly stopped.

  “Huey!” Zeke shouted.

  “Houjin, where are you?” Angeline called.

  Rector swung his head back and forth, trying to place the sound of Houjin’s breathing, or the rumbling shakes of the big thing moving—carrying the boy off, or doing worse to him. “Huey?” he called.

  He shut his mouth after that and listened. He brandished his miner’s pick in every direction, spinning around and hunting any noise that meant the monster was at hand. He halted, sharp as a compass needle, pointing toward a thick spot in the Blight.

  Zeke needed no further instructions, so he charged—but Angeline grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him back.

  “Don’t you just go rushing in,” she ordered, and some faint memory at the back of Rector’s head added where angels fear to tread. “I’ll go—you’re too worked up. Houjin?” she cried again, and nobody heard anything except soft, wet munching sounds.

  Zeke tore himself out of Angeline’s grasp, twisting his body to unfasten her grip, and launched himself forward once again. This time he was too fast; she missed with her second swipe, and Rector took off after him like a sheepdog herding a wayward lamb.

  “Boys!” she shrieked.

  But he didn’t quit running, chasing after Zeke’s disappearing back. Behind him, he could hear Angeline on his heels; he didn’t turn around to look, and she quit wasting her breath telling the lot of them to stop.

  Zeke zipped in and out of the gas, zigzagging around obstacles and pushing himself through the thick air; it moved like curtains, billowing in a storm. Zeke ran like a phantom, darting into the mist. It gave Rector flashbacks—nasty ones—but he shook them free. He shook Angeline free, too, without meaning to. Her footsteps disappeared behind him, and again, he didn’t look back. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to see, or why it would matter.

  He had no idea where he was, no idea what Zeke was chasing, and no idea what they’d do when they caught up to the sasquatch.

  Zeke wasn’t much farther ahead in the planning process, and when he drew up short, Rector collided with the back of his head, nearly knocking his chin straight up into his skull. Dazed, he stumbled backward as Zeke stumbled forward. He caught himself on a splintered crate, then bounced over to a wall and held a corner of it until the stars that speckled his vision could be persuaded to die down.

  The stars died down. The Blight gas thinned.

  And Rector saw them.

  The sasquatch was facedown in the last of the salmon, ignoring the needle-thin bones and slurping the scales, blood, and juices as if he was half-starved—which he probably was. How long had he been inside? Weeks, at least. What was there to eat within the wall? Nothing, except for rotters. And how good could they taste?

  He hunkered forward, and even in that position he looked bigger than Captain Cly, heavier than three or four men put together. He was covered in hair the color of tobacco and cherry pits; his hands were long enough to play two octaves at a stretch on the piano in Maynard’s. As the creature ate, his body quivered and the ratty, clumped locks of his fur trembled and swayed.

  Houjin was seated against the same building that Rector held for support. He did not look hurt, but his arms were curled around his knees and he panted, trying to catch his breath inside his mask. Zeke was between Houjin and the sasquatch, his fireman’s ax held up in warning. The weapon shook in his hands, too heavy by half, but he planted his feet and dared the creature to take a step toward his friend.

  The sasquatch didn’t care. Yet.

  Rector kept his voice as calm as he could, and said, “Fellas, come on. While he’s eating. Let’s go. Zeke, put that thing down. Huey?”

  Houjin turned his head to see Rector, but he didn’t otherwise move.

  “I’ll … I’ll help you,” he said, in case Huey was too scared to move, or in case he was hurt and Rector couldn’t see it. “I’m coming,” he added. Still clinging to the wall’s edge—purely because he believed it was stronger than the long-armed brute before him—he followed it to the stunned or injured boy and bent down to reach him.

  Neither of them looked away from the sasquatch.

  But Rector whispered down, “You all right?”

  “Yes,” Huey whispered back. “Zeke? Zeke, let him go. He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t want me. He just wanted the fish.”

  “And he’s almost out of fish,” Rector warned.

  Zeke seemed glad for the excuse to lower the ax. It swung from his hands like a clock pendulum, until it knocked against the ground. “I don’t want to hurt him, anyhow.”

&
nbsp; “I know you don’t,” Rector said, still afraid that one loud word would shatter the fragile moment. “Let’s go, us three. Let’s go back to the jail, and find Angeline. Let’s leave while that thing’ll let us.”

  But now Zeke hesitated. “Look at him. He’s in real bad shape, same as the fox was.”

  “We’re none of us in tip-top condition, kid. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait,” the younger boy said plaintively.

  Houjin climbed to his feet, using the wall to brace his back as he scooted to an upright position. Rector held out a hand to him, and Huey took it—and it was only then that Rector saw that his shirt was torn, and his chest was covered in long scratches where the creature had seized and absconded with him. If they didn’t hurt now, they’d hurt later. The Blight would see to that.

  Rector pulled Houjin over, helping him step across a fallen slab of brick and drawing him back, farther away from Zeke … who still hadn’t moved.

  Huey found his voice. “Zeke, let him alone. We’ll find Angeline and come back.”

  “You two go without me.”

  “Nothing doing,” Rector said. “We’re all three leaving.”

  “Be patient. Just be patient,” he urged. “He didn’t hurt Huey. Not bad, and not on purpose if he did. He could’ve hurt him, and he didn’t.”

  The sasquatch had eaten the innards and had moved on to the fins, picking them apart and gnawing the chewy, tough flesh as if he’d consume every part of the fish—even the parts that should not be eaten. The fins were tougher than they looked, but he scraped them between his teeth, nabbing every stray sliver of nutrition.

  And then he was finished. His hands were empty—licked clean, even—and there was nothing else to distract him. He turned his attention to Zeke, who was standing closest. The ax was still head down on the street, threatening no one and nothing.

  The sasquatch lifted his massive head and grunted.

  Zeke swallowed hard. “Your eyes,” he said to the sasquatch. “They’re going gold, like the crows.”

  “Maybe his eyes have always been gold. Zeke, I swear and be damned…” Rector complained.