by Damien Love
Alex rolled his eyes, scrolling quickly. The daily horror from Kenzie and his minions. Three from David: where are you? you ok? remind me the diff between simile and metaphor again and what even is an allegory? Eight from his mum. Increasingly terse. CALL. ME. NOW.
He put away his phone, took the chunky old receiver his grandfather held out.
“Dial a nine to get an outside line. Yes, just put your finger in, and pull it around . . . There you go. Well, what’s wrong now?”
“I can’t remember the number,” Alex said. “Can I read it from my cell phone?”
“Unbelievable.”
“Oh, hello stranger.” His mother’s voice sounded stern but relieved through the crackling connection. “I’ve been leaving you messages all day.”
“Yeah, sorry, Mum.”
“Is something wrong with your phone?”
“No, it’s fine, I just . . . forgot to switch it on.”
“Could you make sure it’s on now then, please, so you can hear if I call you?”
Alex fumbled one-handed with the settings as she went on in the old phone at his ear.
“Is your grandad with you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes, well, I’ll be wanting a word with him.” Her tone softened. “Are you okay? Where are you?”
“We’re in Paris, Mum. A hotel. We’re fine, just a bit tired. The journey, uh, took a bit longer than we expected.”
“Have you eaten anything?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“So, then. Having a nice time?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it’s . . . good. We only just got here, though.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“We’re going to go visit this friend of Grandad’s, the one he was talking about.”
“And do you know when we can expect you back? I mean, you know, just so I can have your pajamas ironed and warmed, peel some grapes, get the red carpet out of mothballs.”
“Uh . . .”
“Can you put your grandad on, please?”
“Right, Mum. Um . . . Love you. Bye.”
He handed over the phone and lay on the camp bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to his grandfather’s increasingly cowed voice.
“Hello, Anne, and how are y— How’s that, now? . . . Eh? . . . Eh, no. Yes, I can see that. Yes. Yes. Well, we did leave a note, my dea— No, you’re quite right. . . . No, absolutely. Of course you would. But, in my defense— No . . . None at all. No, you’re absolutely right. Yes, but, Anne . . .”
The old man dragged a chair from the table and sat, looking suddenly weary. He passed a hand over his eyes and on back through his hair. The room grew silent, except for the angry buzz of Alex’s mother’s voice in the telephone receiver his grandfather now held slightly away from his head. He winced at Alex.
“Yes, Anne . . . Absolutely, and I do apologize . . . Well, a few days. Week tops . . . Yes. Of course I will. Yes, I’ll tell him . . . Yes, I’ll make sure he does. You have my word on . . . Yes, I know I have . . . Yes, Anne. Yes. Good-bye, my dear, good—”
He stopped talking mid-word, sat looking humbly at the receiver, then dropped it back in its cradle, slapped his hands briskly, and smiled at Alex.
“Right, well, that’s that all smoothed over. But, really, Alex, you should keep in touch with your mother a little more often. I mean, just a text every now and then, not much to ask, is it? Just to let her know you’re okay and where you are? What’s the point of having a cell phone if you’re not going to use it?”
* * *
• • •
THEY TOOK A taxi to a grand terrace overlooking the river. The buildings loomed pale in the night, caught in a swaying net of shadows cast by trees along the street. Alex’s grandfather stopped before a black wooden door set behind a wrought-iron gate, looked around carefully, then pressed a buzzer. The little plaque above the button read simply H. MORECAMBE.
“Harry’s a dealer,” the old man said. “Only topflight stuff. Doesn’t have to advertise. By appointment only, that sort of thing.”
He pushed the buzzer again.
“Ah,” he said after several seconds of silence. “Must be out. Well, not to worry.” Digging in his trouser pocket, he produced a set of keys, used one on the gate, another on the door.
“Here we are.” He waved Alex inside. “Third floor is his.”
A small silver lamp with a shade of thick, dimpled glass glowed on a wooden table beside a door on the third-floor landing. On the other side of the doorway stood a tall cabinet. The top half was glass. Trapped inside could be seen the stern wax figure of a man with unsettling staring eyes, dressed in white tie and tails. One veined and knuckly hand rested on a large ball glowing yellow white. The other was held out, palm up, as if waiting for something to be placed in it. Decorative letters unfurled around the top of the cabinet:
It’s amazing—know your future—true!!!
“That,” said Alex, “is creepy.”
“Ah,” Alex’s grandfather said behind him. “Meet Marvastro. ‘Marvastro the Mysterious Oracle: his stare can penetrate the mists of time!’ From about 1904. He’ll tell your fortune. Here.” He reached over Alex’s shoulder to a bowl-like metal lip protruding from the machine and picked out a large blackened coin.
“Harry leaves these for visitors. Have a go. Curious thing: he has hundreds of fortunes in there, but, once you’ve tried him, he’ll always tell you the same thing. Never could figure it out.”
Alex hesitated, glancing up into Marvastro’s unseeing eyes. He dropped the coin into the slot, heard it roll and fall inside.
Hidden gears started turning, a ticking, pulling noise. Little bells chimed. Suddenly, Marvastro lurched to life. His nostrils flared. His gray head twisted slightly, horribly, side to side. His shirt began to move in and out at the chest, as though he was breathing. His eyes opened wider, seemed to burn brighter, rolled in their sockets, and then glared fiercely down at Alex.
With a painful, far-off grinding, the automaton’s outstretched hand twisted over, palm down, and slammed onto the wooden counter inside the glass. When it lifted and flipped over again, a small white card had appeared in it. The hand dropped forward, and the card slid off, disappearing into a slot in the counter, then shooting out into a tray on the front of the machine.
Alex picked it up. The card was thick and pearly white. He turned it over. One word, typed in simple black letters.
POWER
“Oh, that’s a good one.” His grandfather sounded distracted.
Alex fumbled in the change bowl, held out a coin. “Are you going to have a shot?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. No, he’s told me my future lots of times. Like I said, always the same.”
His grandfather was staring at the door, holding a key, but making no attempt to use it.
“What did it say?” Alex said.
“Hmmmm?”
“Your future.”
“Let’s see. Can’t quite remember. Long life and happiness, eh? Something like that. Now”—he frowned flatly—“don’t much like the look of this.”
Raising his cane, he pushed softly at the door. It swung open. The lock had been ripped out of the frame.
Inside, Alex could see what had been a very elegant suite of offices, filled with what had been lots of wonderful things, mechanical toys and gizmos, large and small. Automatons the size of Marvastro and little white rabbits with drums. Smoking bears and iron monkeys drinking beer. Acrobats and clowns and intricate music boxes with tiny birds atop them. Rayguns and rocket cars, robots and Grim Reapers.
All smashed and broken, strewn around as though a war had been fought in the room.
As his grandfather stepped in, picking a way through the wreckage, Alex saw several powdery white lines stamped here and there into the carpet. His scalp crawled.
He didn’t have to examine it to know it was salt.
VI.
A SCENE BY THE SEINE
“I THOUGHT HE would have tried to follow us,” his grandfather said, more to himself than Alex. “Didn’t occur to me he’d go straight to Harry. I’m just not thinking. I’m sorry, Alex. Sorry, Harry,” he added in a murmur.
They had left the trashed offices and were hurrying through an inky maze of dark, wet streets. His grandfather led the way, picking an obscure, twisting path through only the smallest and emptiest backstreets, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, stopping at every corner to press to the wall and peer ahead before going on. Alex had never seen him look so worried. It was maybe this more than anything that made his own heart race.
“This man,” Alex said. “The man who’s after the robot. Couldn’t we just . . . give it to him?”
“How’s that?”
“Couldn’t we just give it to him?”
His grandfather stopped. A horse’s-head sign hung from a butcher’s shop behind him, sad and sinister. A few snowflakes drifted down.
“Give it to him?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, this whole thing, it’s dangerous. I don’t like it. It’s not worth it. I just want things to be normal again. I mean, look what’s happened to your friend. Do you think he . . . he’s—?”
“We don’t know what’s happened to Harry,” his grandfather snapped, turning on his heel, stalking off. “Harry can take care of himself; don’t you worry about that. And I’ll tell you this, young man”—he stopped again, raising his cane and pointing back the way they had come—“whatever happened back there just makes me more determined to make sure he never gets his hands on it.”
He abruptly sagged and sighed, stood staring silently at his feet.
“Look, Alex, I’m sorry,” he eventually continued. “All of this, there’s more to it than money. I should never have brought you. I thought it was safer than leaving you at home after last night, but that was a mistake. Maybe the best thing to do is get you back on a train out of here in the morning. I’ll put you on it, we can let your mother know, and she and the Id—she and Carl can meet you at the other end. But, right now, we need to get back inside the hotel.”
He strode off, beckoning Alex to keep up. Alex stood, turning over the idea of taking a train back to home and safety. He couldn’t decide if he was relieved or disappointed. A little of both. Another thought occurred:
“But what about you?” he called at his grandfather’s back, to no reply.
“Okay, so what else?” he tried again, trotting after him.
“What else?”
“‘There’s more to it than money,’ you said. What else?”
“I’ll explain, Alex. But later. Right now we need to . . . Shhh.”
He stopped, whirled, listened, and then pulled Alex off the street, into the darkened doorway of a tobacconist’s.
“Very quiet now,” his grandfather whispered.
Seconds of nothing crawled past, measured out in the thin but slowly thickening fall of snow.
His grandfather lifted one gloved hand, pointed to the end of the street, the corner they had been heading for.
A lone iron lamp flickered there. As Alex watched, a large figure stepped under it. Light bounced from his shaved head like a cold halo. The man stood stock-still, staring down the narrow street toward them.
Alex felt his grandfather’s grip tighten on his shoulder, pulling him farther back into the shadows. He found himself staring at a display of black pipes in the tobacconist’s unlit window. His grandfather patted his shoulder reassuringly.
“Hasn’t seen us,” he said in a whisper Alex could barely hear. “Just have to wait till he goes.”
They heard footsteps from the other direction, the way they had come. Alex stopped breathing. The steps grew louder.
The other bald man emerged from the gloom across the street, walking toward his partner, shaking his head.
“Just sit tight now,” his grandfather breathed. “Not a sound.”
The second man was directly across from them, raising his arms in a shrugging gesture, passing by. Alex felt his grandfather’s grip relax.
That very moment, many miles northwest, Kenzie Mitchell lay on his stomach in his sweaty bedroom, working his cell phone with thick thumbs. With a satisfied snort, he hit SEND with a chewed and grimy fingernail.
In the small street in Paris, the snowy silence shattered as Alex felt his phone vibrate, and a rousing, tinny version of the theme tune to the 1960s Star Trek came blaring from his pocket.
“Unbelievable,” his grandfather muttered as Alex fumbled to shut the phone up. “Stay behind me, Alex.”
The nearest bald man had started toward them. He was in the middle of the road, peering toward their darkened doorway. As Alex’s grandfather stepped out, his colleague started running.
“Small world!” the old man called. He raised his cane and held it ready. The man closest made a lunge. A blade glinted dully in his hand.
Alex’s grandfather stepped into the blow, turning his chest almost casually at the last moment. Finding only empty air where his target had been, the man was carried stumbling forward by his momentum. Standing directly behind his grandfather, Alex now had a crystal-clear view of a knife coming fast at him, straight for his face.
A gray blur crossed his vision and the blade and the man were gone. Looking down, Alex saw him curled in the gutter. The knife hand was empty, jerking in a useless spasm.
“Behind me, Alex.”
His grandfather kicked the knife scattering across the street and retreated a few steps. He stood tall in the road, cane loose by his side, watching with curiosity as the other man came running. When he was a few steps away, the old man ducked in a fluid motion, bringing his stick scything forward. It made no sound as it connected with the charging man’s knees. He made no sound as he was sent flying into a helpless dive that landed him heavily, face-first, a few feet behind Alex.
Coat curling out, Alex’s grandfather leapt nimbly. His cane’s silver handle flashed, slashing down across the jaw of the first man, who had climbed to his feet and was now sent reeling back into the gutter.
The old man landed lightly between the two groaning figures, looking from one to the other with a quizzical expression, as though turning over the possibilities of what further damage to do them. A sound of running footsteps made him look up sharply.
Three figures came around the corner at the end of the street, quivering silhouettes echoing in the light from the streetlamp, breath coming off them like smoke in the cold air. One tall, one shorter, one small.
Abruptly, still some distance away, the tallest stopped. The other two came on. Bewildered, Alex recognized the girl from the train and the little man in glasses. Behind them, another man was crouching low, gathering himself oddly.
His grandfather grabbed his arm, and they were running. Alex heard a weird metal creak from behind. Glancing back, he saw the crouching figure leap.
This tall man launched eerily from the cobblestones, high into the air, so far up, the streetlights almost lost him. Then he came curving down, fast, falling out of the night right at them. He spread his arms cruciform as he fell. In one hand, something sharp caught the lamplight.
As his grandfather dragged him around the corner, Alex heard the figure land just behind them with a harsh metallic judder.
The old man pulled him along a thin black alleyway that ran the crooked length of a block. Sprinting hard, they came out onto an empty street, darted across the road, into another alley. Halfway along, his grandfather motioned Alex to stop and stay silent. They listened. Snowflakes wisped. Seconds passed. Alex’s blood pounded. Then running footsteps. Getting closer.
The snow stirred and grew heavier yet as they set off again, sprinting faster, changing directions, losing themselves in a dark
ness of alleys that ended finally in the bright, soft light of a larger thoroughfare. Exploding onto a broad boulevard of shops and restaurants, they sent the evening strollers scattering and kept on running, straight out into a busy road.
Cars with horns blaring swerved around them. Alex had a vivid, frozen snapshot glimpse of the inside of a bus as it whipped past an inch from his nose, sleepy blue and black faces staring out in the aquarium light.
He had lost all sense of direction, but as his grandfather dragged him dodging through traffic, he saw they were somehow back by the riverside. Once across the road, they sprinted down a steep flight of stone steps to the river walkway, the old man taking stairs two at a time as Alex stumbled to keep up.
The dim path was empty. They charged along it. A tourist boat floated slowly along the glassy black water, lit up like Christmas.
“Not far now,” his grandfather said. He slowed, looking back, then stopped. “You know? I think we lost them.”
Alex staggered to a halt. He turned, following his grandfather’s gaze. No one. The empty stairs they had come down looked ominous in the night.
“We’ll just take those steps up ahead,” his grandfather said, pointing off with his cane, “and we’re only a few streets from the hotel.”
“Okay,” Alex wheezed. His lungs burned. His legs trembled. Leaning forward, hands on knees, he thought he might be sick. “Give me a second.” He stood gasping, glancing up at his grandfather, who didn’t even seem to be breathing heavily.
“Who,” Alex panted, “was that? That man. He . . . jumped.”
“Yes,” his grandfather muttered, watching behind them. “He does that.”
Over his ragged breath, Alex heard a high mosquito-like buzz. Something smashed into his ear.