by Ann
The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbotton, had been the first Hoegbotton to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.
For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbotton became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed only a matter of time before more of the Hoegbotton clan moved down to Ambergris.
However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbotton, his wife, and his daughter disappeared, just three of the many thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence – leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and both dread and emptiness in the lives of those left behind. With no clues as to what had happened or how. It was now one hundred years since the Silence, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory, for wanting to ignore the horror in the idea that the gray caps might have been the cause. Everyone still thought it, but few said it. What could not be proven should not be given voice. Should be forgotten.
Hoegbotton remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: ‘I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain what happened to me. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise. It is a wound that never heals.’
Sitting in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open before him, the young Robert Hoegbotton had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbotton? He had spent many summer afternoons in the attic, surrounded by antiquities, trying to find out. He combed through old letters Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities.
His mother merely disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother actively taunted him. ‘Yes, waste your life with that nonsense,’ she would say from the huge throne of an ancient king they’d bought on the cheap, which seemed to best suit her rock-hard old bones. ‘You won’t get any farther than your father, or his father before him. The lot of you aren’t smart enough to cook an egg properly.’ He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home. But he had them both to thank for something at least: he prided himself on rarely sharing his opinions with anyone. Appearing to be a blank slate stood him in good stead in his business.
With his sister, the young Hoegbotton continued his investigations behind his grandmother’s back, would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncovered the meaning of words like ‘gray cap.’ On his thirteenth birthday, he helped himself to an old sketch in his grandmother’s upstairs bedroom that showed the apartment’s living room – Samuel Hoegbotton surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit. Then, with a profound and uncomplicated sense of happiness, listened from downstairs to her shrieks of displeasure upon finding it missing. But for his sister all of this was just relief of a temporary boredom, and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.
By the age of twenty, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris, surprised to see his grandmother crying as he left. No Hoegbotton had set foot in Ambergris for ninety years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times – at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time – thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.
The day after he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbotton visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s letters. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbotton an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read ‘Off Limits By Order of the Ruling Council.’ The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.
When he finally stood in front of the apartment – on the ground level of a three-story building – he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.
After a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Ten minutes later, he had pried up the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale ‘X’ running across the dark wood. He realized he was breathing in shallow gasps. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet anticipation surged through him, and he didn’t know why.
Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was perversely ordinary. In the even more dimly lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent. Dog droppings were more recent. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings lay in tumbled flight against the floor. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room – a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi. Hoegbotton relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.
Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle pages of newsprint lay across the dining room table, held in place by a bottle of port with a glass beside it. Infiltrated by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood, the table also held plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.
Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last century? How could anyone know? Unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third – that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper – had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife s
awing into the flesh beside it.
A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin. Had the family been eating and simply…disappeared…in mid-meal? The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing he and his sister had imagined could account for it.
Taking out his pocketknife, Hoegbotton leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from a priest; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see…what?
Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half-full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. When had the port been poured?
Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate – and the plate was nailed to the table.
He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the strangeness of the fork, the plate. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two ‘u’ shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, the questions overwhelmed him, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.
The thing that might have been a baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. When he did stop, gasping for breath, having reached the familiar cobblestones of Albumuth, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a virus.
What had Samuel Hoegbotton seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?
After that visit, even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbotton. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring artifacts from such places, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom, Slattery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. Then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion after the other, bringing him closer than ever before.
That was the hundred-year-old trail that had led him to this point, now, in that room – moved at great expense – staring at a cage that might or might not contain an answer.
4
That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he reached release, the light registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his skin, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.
She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep besotted, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, ‘I love you.’
‘Your eyes are full of fireflies,’ he replied.
She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.
Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.
The next day, as he sat in Samuel Hoegbotton’s room writing out invoices for the week’s exports – Saphant carnival masks, rare eelwood furniture, necklaces from Nicea, all destined for Morrow – he noticed something odd. He drew his breath in sharply. He pushed his chair back and stood up.
There, growing at a right angle from the green cloth that covered the cage, was a fragile, milk-white fruiting body on a long stem, the gills tinged red. It was identical to the mushrooms that had appeared in Daffed’s mansion. He cast about for a weapon, his gaze fixed on the cage. There was nothing but the bottle of port. Beyond the cage, the fungus that had infiltrated the cracks of the mirror appeared to have darkened and thickened.
Irrationally, he decided he had to remove the cage from the room. The room had schemed with the cage to produce the mushroom. Picking up a napkin, he wound it around the handle of the cage, which felt hot, and carried it out of the room, to his desk.
He stared across the store, trying to locate Bristlewing through the clutter. His assistant stood in a far corner helping an elderly gentleman decide on a chair. Hoegbotton could just see the back of Bristlewing’s head, nodding at something the potential customer had said, both of them obscured by a column of school desks.
Slowly, as if the mushroom were watching him, Hoegbotton slid his hand over to the top drawer of his desk, pulled it open and took out a silver letter opener. Holding it in front of him, he approached the cage. Images of the woman and her son flickered in his mind. He couldn’t keep his hand still. He hesitated. A vision of the mushroom multiplying into two, three, four came to him. Hoegbotton leaned over his desk, chopped the mushroom off the side of the cage. It fell onto his desk, leaving behind only a small, circular white spot on the green cover, as innocent as a bird dropping.
Hoegbotton pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and squashed the mushroom in its folds, careful not to touch any part of it. He stuffed the handkerchief into the wastebasket at his side. Then he fished out the handkerchief, decided against it and placed the handkerchief back into the wastebasket. Fished it out again.
Hoegbotton realized that both Bristlewing and his customer were now standing a few feet away, staring at him. He froze, then smiled.
‘My dear Bristlewing,’ he said. ‘What can I help you with?’
Bristlewing gave him a disgusted look. ‘Mr. Sporlender here was interested in a writing desk, for his son. We’ve a good, solid chair but, rather horrendously, nothing appropriate in a desk. Anything in storage?’
Hoegbotton smiled, intensely aware of the dead mushroom in his hand. The irritation caused by the handle of the cage flared up, pulsing across his palm. ‘Yes, actually, Mr. Sporlender, if you would come back tomorrow, I believe we might have something to show you.’ Just so long as he left the shop.
Hoegbotton nudged Bristlewing out of the way and guided the man toward the door, babbling about the rain, about the importance of a writing desk, about anything at all, while Bristlewing’s stare burned into the back of his head. Hoegbotton had never been more impatient to reach the rain-scoured street. When it came, it was like a wave – of light, of fresh air. It hit him with such force that he gasped, drawing a sharp look from Mr. Sporlender.
As they stood there, on the cusp of the street, the door at Hoegbotton’s back, the man stared at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Really, Mr. Hoegbotton – should I come back tomorrow? Would you truly advise that?’
Hoegbotton stared down at his ha
nd, which was about to rebel and throw the handkerchief and mushroom as far away as possible. Some of the early afternoon passersby already stared curiously at the two of them.
‘It’s up to you, really. We might have a desk in storage…’
Sporlender sneered. ‘I saw what you put in the handkerchief. I know what it is.’
‘Well in that case,’ Hoegbotton said, ‘why don’t you take it with you, instead of a desk,’ and held the handkerchief out toward the man.
‘Keep that away from me,’ Sporlender said and hurried off down the street, concentrating on putting as much distance between them as possible.
It was of no consequence to Hoegbotton in that moment. Ignoring the stares of those around him and feeling strangely lightheaded, he started off in the opposite direction, past sidewalk vendors, a thin stream of pedestrians, and an even thinner stream of carts and carriages, which the rain rendered in smudges and humid smells. Only after three or four blocks, soaked to the skin, did he feel comfortable tossing the handkerchief and its contents into a public trashcan. He already had an image in his head of soldiers searching his store for traces of the wrong kind of mushroom.
A man was throwing up into the gutter. A woman was yelling at her husband. Two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces. The sky was a uniform grey. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore.
Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi was growing. He wondered if anything he did mattered.
He wondered if Sporlender would tell anyone.
Back at the store, Bristlewing was grumpily moving some boxes around. He spared Hoegbotton only a quick glance – watchful, wary. Hoegbotton brushed by him and headed for the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands red before coming out again to examine the cage. It looked just as he had left it. The green cover was unblemished but for the white spot. There had been no proliferation of mushrooms in his absence. This was good. This meant he had done the right thing. (Why, then, was it so hard to draw breath? Why so difficult to stop shaking?)