Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  Noir snorted.

  “Sorcerers!” she said scornfully. “Reshka talks of sorcerers as if there were others like her. There aren’t, Nin. There aren’t! Before I had you, I traveled—well—I traveled everywhere, wherever I could, searching for others. Reshka was always whispering warnings about them: to beware, to guard my tongue, to learn everything and grow strong. A day will come, she said, when my powers would be pitted against another like me, only far more puissant and merciless. There were nights I couldn’t sleep for terror.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  But Noir merely patted her head. “There are no sorcerers in the real world, Nin. There are used car salesmen. And lawyers. Boys in black overcoats who pretend to be wizards. Pregnant teenagers working at McDonalds who call themselves High Priestesses of Discord. Peyote-swallowers and acid-tasters—even true shamans. But there is no one like Reshka Stix of Stix Haunt, or like her mother before her. There was no one like me, born of a sorcerer and a ghost on Dark Eve. And no one like you, my Nin, although I chose for you a living father, that you might be more alive than dead when you came into this world.”

  By now both Noir and Nin were sitting upright, arms locked wrist to forearm. Two pairs of gray eyes gazed at each other.

  “Noir?” Nin’s voice was very small.

  Noir’s grip on her daughter relaxed.

  “Reshka has no equal,” she said. “She has no living friends and her enemies are not alive. The house she lives in was built by the dead. That’s why people are afraid. Reshka is unnatural.”

  “Are you unnatural?” Nin asked. She wanted to ask, “Am I?” but knew better, even dreaming.

  Her mother pinched Nin’s chin and smiled, and her smile was like a lilac blooming in the snow. All she said was,

  “Reshka will start teaching you soon.”

  Nin cocked her head to one side. “And should I learn?”

  “Oh, yes,” breathed Noir. “Learn everything. Grow bold and strong. And stay awake!”

  Nin woke.

  * * *

  Learning the instruments took the better part of the next two years. There were only four songs, one for each wind, but Nin had to learn them pitch perfect, note perfect. She had to be able to play them dancing, or lying down, or walking barefoot on the ridge of the roof. Four songs for the four winds: lure with the piccolo, bind with the flute, braid with the oboe, and with the bass recorder break the stone.

  But songs were not all she learned. When Nin turned fourteen, Reshka taught her how to make grave-rings out of silver clay, a substance made of fine silver powder, water, and organic binder. Nin learned to etch the entire alphabet on the inner band of a ring, in tiny, precise letters so small they could only be read by magnifying glass. She learned how to fire the rings in a kiln until they were hard, how to tumble them and finish them until they shone like mirrors, smooth as satin.

  “Why silver?” Nin asked her grandmother. “Why not gold?”

  “Silver’s a repellent,” Reshka said. “Like salt. Some say running water—but they lie.”

  They worked in the Ring Room, as Nin called the small chamber off Reshka’s bedroom. Illuminated by dazzling electric lights, it was the brightest, harshest room in the house. Reshka had installed salt trenches along threshold and windowsills. Silver wire ran all around the room at the baseboards so that no ghosts could enter. An enormous worktable and two long wooden benches took up most of the space. Supply shelves crowded the walls.

  In that room, Nin fashioned hundreds of silver rings, and Reshka destroyed them all. The work of hours, weeks, months gone in an instant, slapped to the floor, and the worker slapped too, for good measure. Nothing satisfied her grandmother.

  “No!” she would croak. “Another! Again! They must be beautiful. They must be perfect.”

  “Why?” asked Nin.

  “Because, Nin the Dim—” dry, dry, Reshka was dry as an old well with bones at the bottom “—they are each to become a tombstone.”

  * * *

  As Nin’s fifteenth birthday neared, the new difficulty became choosing her first ghost.

  Pieta Cemetery lay between the town and its woodland like a farm that grew only corpses. Nin sat beside her grandmother in the parked truck, staring out over the desolate miscellany. Mausoleums and monuments, tablets and tombs, vaults, angels, cherubs, reapers, veiled Madonnas, all spread out before them in orderly serenity. Like a country girl come to the big city for the first time, Nin felt flushed and giddy. She was used to the dead outnumbering the living—but not on this scale!

  Smiling to herself, she muttered, “Pick a gravestone, any gravestone.”

  “Not any gravestone!” Reshka shouted. “Stupid girl!”

  Nin smoothed out her smile.

  “You must choose your ghost with care,” Reshka explained in her raspy, exasperated way. “It must not be an infant. Infants are fractious, unformed. Nothing appeases them. They teethe on the furniture. They break things. They’re always underfoot. Nor do you want an old ghost—imagine!” And here Reshka laughed, a skeletal sound. “Imagine! Raising me as your ghost! You couldn’t boss her around. She’d boss you! She’d own you! Never let a ghost own you, Little Miss Nin the Grim. You own it. You got that? You own your ghost! Or she’ll eat you up, all but your teeth.”

  Nin nodded. The cab of the truck, she decided, smelled like mildew. She was surprised the engine had coughed to life in the first place. Probably Reshka kept a ghost as a mechanic.

  “No,” concluded Reshka, “you do not want the very old, or the very young. You do not want a teenager—don’t I know? How tiresome they are, moping around and popping pimples. Choose a ghost in the full strength of its youth, a beautiful ghost in its prime, who will do as you bid or be whippedfor it. Go.”

  Nin slipped out of the truck and entered the deserted cemetery. The grass underfoot was warm and wet. Nin, who never went shod at Stix Haunt, had gotten out of the habit of shoes. The grass tickled her ankles and the sun pounded on her scalp. She began perusing the stones.

  1896-1909. A boy. An adolescent. Timothy Hearn. No.

  1890-1915. A soldier. Robert John Henehan. Nin did not want a soldier.

  1856-1934. Mary Pritchett had outlived all of her children and her husband. Too sad. Too sad and too old.

  At Reshka’s step behind her, Nin asked carefully, “How do you whip a ghost?”

  “Ah!” cried Reshka. “Ha! Why, you have his name! With the song of breaking, you destroy his gravestone. He can’t remember who he is. Nobody alive knows or cares. This site,” she gestured around with her manicured claws, “is a historical landmark. No one uses it anymore. But you—you’ve got his name, his birth and death, etched in silver on a ring. You wear it against your flesh, and he must return to you. You’re his gravestone. You’re his home. Your power over him is complete. With the songs of binding and braiding, you’ve trapped his soul; you’ve twisted his spirit into your hair, until he’s so tangled in the strands, he’ll never come loose. Say he misbehaves. All you have to do is this.”

  She pinched one of her skinny blonde braids between her fingers. From the very tip of it, she plucked a single hair. Then she dug around awhile in her large suede purse, at last drawing out a lighter.

  Flick of the wheel—flame. It made nothing of that little hair in an acrid instant.

  Howling filled the steamy August afternoon. A great coldness rushed over Nin, followed by sobbing. One of her grandmother’s ghosts was near, she knew. Must have followed them from Stix Haunt.

  Even with her hands clapped over her ears, Nin could hear the ghost crying.

  Reshka held out one hand to the air, like a queen to her vassal. The silver rings she wore, two for each finger and three on her thumbs, glinted smugly. The sobbing quieted, replaced by a whispering unwet suction, like fervent kisses.

  If she squinted at the air around Reshka’s hand, Nin could almost make out the ghost. It was more difficult in daylight. But, yes, there was a haze—a disturbance, colorless, like a
mirage, not of heat but of deep and biting cold.

  Reshka waved the ghost away.

  “Do you see?” she asked.

  Nin nodded.

  “They must be disciplined.” Reshka’s pursed pink mouth smiled. “When you have a ghost of your own,” her outthrust fingernail caught Nin squarely on the nose, “I expect your bed to be made every morning. I don’t understand why you’ve salted my ghosts from your room, but your slovenliness is intolerable. Of course, what else is to be expected of Noir’s daughter? She was a slob too, and ungrateful. But come your first raising, you’ll have no excuse for your messes. Either in your room or on your person. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Reshka.”

  But Nin was no longer paying attention. She had found what she was looking for.

  The gravestone read:

  Mason Ezekiel Gont

  1901-1924

  Son, Brother, Friend

  Mason Ezekiel Gont.

  The words rang like bells. The sweetest, most clangorous, most dangerous clamor. Mason. Ezekiel. Gont. Mason Ezekiel Gont.

  Son. Brother. Friend.

  * * *

  The night of the raising, Nin dressed with care.

  She had grown up wearing Reshka’s castoffs, or ancient garments rifled from attic and cupola. But for this special occasion, which marked her fifteenth birthday and her very first ghost, Nin ordered a new wardrobe from online catalogues like Gypsy Moon and the Tudor Shoppe. She used Reshka’s credit card.

  Most of what Nin bought came in some shade of red.

  Her poppy-petal skirt fell to her ankles, embroidered and deeply flounced. Her shirt was dyed a vibrant arterial red, with scarlet ribbons running through the collar and cuffs. Around her waist she tied a golden scarf with firebird patterns and a beaded fringe. She wore bells on her ankles. Her hair, black and rough and loose, covered her bare arms. Her skin, scrubbed with salted water, shone pink as hope.

  She did not want her ghost to mistake her for a mere shade. She wanted to be seen.

  Reshka had commissioned Nin a carrying case for the four winds. It was ebony, lined in blue velvet, with separate compartments for the instruments. Flute, piccolo, oboe, bass recorder, each fit cunningly in its own place.

  “It’s better than you deserve,” Reshka said.

  Nin did not argue. Neither did she say thank you.

  They accomplished the drive to Pieta Cemetery in their customary silence, arriving at an hour so late it was technically morning. There was no telling sky from tomb, everything was so black and still. Pulling up outside the gates, Reshka let the truck idle. Old Stix and young Stix stared straight ahead, neither looking at the other.

  “Tonight,” said Reshka, “we’ll see if the sorcery runs true in you. I’ll never know why Noir insisted on diluting your bloodline with a living sire. You favor your bag boy father in everything but the eyes.”

  Nin sprang out of the truck. Before slamming the door, she leaned in and stared Reshka dead in the eye.

  “I look like Noir, except I’m taller and my hair is black. I look like Noir Stix, you old bitch. Don’t wait up.”

  And she turned and stalked away.

  But no sooner did Nin step through the gates than she felt the ire slipping from her shoulders. To be alone at last, and a year older, and dressed to tryst! All around the graveyard sang, in cricket song, frog-throb, and the call of night birds from hundred-year-old trees. Moss fell from low branches like silver veils.

  The dead are close, Nin thought, but not awake. The dead are underfoot.

  She knew the way to his grave by heart. Since discovering him, Nin had visited often, sneaking off early from Stix Haunt to tramp those five miles down the dark road on foot, just to bring him wildflowers. Wooing him, she hoped.

  Mason Ezekiel Gont. 1901-1924. She wished there had been room to etch, “Son, Brother, Friend,” on the inner band of the grave-ring, but she carried the words hard in her heart, that they would not be destroyed when his headstone fell.

  And there it was, his quiet resting place.

  Nin laid a shallow bowl of alabaster before his headstone, lighting the coals inside it. Then, sifting resin of red myrrh over the smolder, she knelt and placed a circle of white lilies in her hair. Bitter smoke snaked skyward, leaving a pale echo of vanilla in the air. She opened the ebony carrying case.

  First, the luring song.

  Pipe it on the piccolo, high and sweet and blithe. Pipe it playful on your tiptoes, and dance you ’round his grave. Three times three, you dance—and trill and tease and coax:

  Come out to me!

  Come dance and leap!

  Rise up, rise out!

  Come play!

  Nin played the lure perfectly. But it was very, very hard.

  Reshka never told her that it would hurt. Or of the horrors.

  Her lips burned. Her tongue burst into blisters, which burst into vile juices that ran down her throat. The sky ripped open and a bleak wind dove down from the stars, beating black wings and shrieking. Reshka never said how a greater darkness would fall over the night like a hand smothering heaven, how every note she played would cost her a heartbeat, how the earth shuddered away from her naked, dancing feet as though it could not bear her touch.

  And then Mason Ezekiel Gont appeared in the smoke of the burning myrrh.

  “Ghosts can’t take flesh,” Reshka had said. “But they can take form. In water, in windows, in smoke and mirror, in steam and flame. If you are lucky and if they’re strong, they can shape a shadow you can almost touch.”

  He was there. The lure was over. Nin stopped playing and stood still and looked her fill.

  The ghost rose uncertainly from the burning coals, upright and blinking, but not quite awake. His hands, which were vague, which were vapor, moved to touch his face, before falling to his sides again, in fists. A look of terrible confusion made his whole body waver, shred apart, form again. He could not feel himself.

  Remembering just in time, Nin snatched the crown of lilies from her hair and tossed it over his head. The flowers fell through him, landing in a perfect circle around the alabaster bowl. She had practiced that toss a hundred thousand times.

  The ghost glanced down at the lilies, then back up at Nin. She was not supposed to speak until he was hers for sure, but she smiled, hoping to reassure him.

  Don’t worry, she wanted to say. They’re to keep you safe. Keep you from straying.

  She put the piccolo away and picked up the flute.

  The binding song was a lightning series of notes, arpeggios and scales both wild and shrill (Nin had never really mastered the flute; Reshka kept telling her she played like a flock of slaughtered turkeys), and even the ghost winced to hear them.

  The flute screamed, and then it seemed the ghost screamed, and frost settled over Pieta Cemetery. It came from nowhere and everywhere. The graves began to glisten. The trees were draped in diamonds. Nin’s lips froze to the lip of the flute. Her fingers slowed on the notes, turned blue, stiffened and stuck. It was like she played an instrument made of angry ice.

  It was not music anymore. Nothing like music. Only one long, sustained, horrible noise, like a stake hammered into frozen ground, making a claim.

  You are mine

  You will stay with me

  For all eternity

  And then the binding was over. The flute fell from Nin’s nerveless hands.

  The ghost stared at her. His eyes were the color of burning myrrh. The trees were white and still beneath a sheen of frost, and he was still too, trapped within the chain of lilies.

  Nin began to braid a single lock of her hair. It was no simple braid, but a sturdy rope of many strands, with a series of intricate knots at the end. She had spent a year practicing this braid, first with embroidery thread, then with spiderwebs, then on a doll with human hair that had been from the head of her great-grandmother’s grandmother.

  “The hair of a madwoman,” Reshka had said. “So you know what lunacy feels like.”


  Nin had practiced the braid in her own hair too, but it had not been like this. There was a song of braiding. She hummed it now, and would later seal the braid with the same tune on the oboe, after the last knot was tied.

  The song filled her mouth with wasps. She kept humming, though the wasps stung her tongue and crawled over her teeth. She hummed and braided, even though her hair was suddenly tough as steel, sharp as needles, poisonous as nettles. Already burnt and frozen, now her hands stung, now they trembled and bled, until her hair was wet with her own blood.

  And still she braided and hummed, and the ghost watched.

  Bind and wind and knot and weave

  A labyrinth of grief and need

  Way and wall and maze and path

  A labyrinth of want and wrath

  Mason Ezekiel Gont—I braid thee, my ghost

  I braid thee in my hair

  She tied the end of the braid with silver thread, coughing out a mouthful of crawling white wasps as she did so, and took up the oboe, and sealed the braid with a song. When it was over, Nin wept.

  The ghost looked on her tears with curiosity, maybe even pity, but his fists did not relax.

  The bass recorder was a lean length of polished ivory, ending in a gentle bell. It shook in her hands.

  Break, she played

  Break, stone, and be forgotten

  Nothing but bones beneath, and those are dust

  Break stone, break name, break birth and death

  Break old, forgotten words and go to dust

  I will keep him, I will hold him

  My flesh shall be his gravestone

  I alone shall name him

  Break, break, stone—and be forgotten…

  Nin did not know how long she played. She played until “Son, Brother, Friend,” collapsed to pebbly rubble. Until the day her ghost was born and the day he died turned to gravel, and his name, his beautiful name, decayed to dirt and fell to dirt, indistinguishable from the rest of the earth.

  When the song was done, she packed up the lilies and the alabaster bowl so that nothing would mark the place. She slung the strap of her carrying case over her shoulder.