Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  From her pocket, she drew the silver grave-ring and slipped it over her finger.

  “Mason Ezekiel Gont,” said Nin Stix. “Follow me home.”

  * * *

  Even the silence changed after that. Everything was music.

  When the last of her wounds healed, the frostbite and heat blisters and wasp stings leaving numb spots and small scars, Nin started reading to her ghost. All her old favorites, Pushkin to Pratchett, Yourcenar to Yolen, J.M. Barrie to Gene Wolfe: dog-eared and thumbed-through as these books were, she took them out and began them again, this time out loud. She read the ghost her old letters to Noir, showed him her sketchbooks, and led him to her secret place beneath the willow tree. She even vacuumed the salt from her threshold and windowsill that the ghost might come and go as he pleased.

  Because he shared it with her, Nin straightened her room every day. She made her bed with what Noir had called “Marine Corps precision”—hoping that Reshka would never suspect it was Nin’s work and none of the ghost’s. She began to wear perfume and dressed in her new clothes every day. For the first time in seven years, Nin was happy.

  And she was beginning to see the ghost more clearly.

  * * *

  One night, several weeks after the raising, Nin sat at the edge of her bed and lit a candle. Like magic, the ghost’s shadow sprang to the wall, man-sized, as though he were standing right in front of her, with her flame shining bright upon him. Nin smiled. The shadow stepped off the wall and sat down at the foot of the bed.

  “Mason,” she whispered.

  He turned towards her, rayless, faceless, dense. She could not see through him.

  “I’m sorry you can’t sleep,” she said. “You must miss dreaming.”

  The ghost gave a small shrug, out of courtesy or despair. It might have meant a thousand things.

  “Rest, please, you must rest—if you can,” said Nin. “On the bed, if you want. I’ll sleep on the floor. If you want.”

  In answer, the ghost drew back her covers, his shadow hands deliberate and careful, and then gestured Nin beneath the sheets. The moment her bare feet brushed the footboard, he pulled the blankets up to her chin, smoothed them, and lay down beside her, on top of the white eyelet lace. Nin turned onto her side, facing away from him, barely breathing. The ghost gathered her against him, one arm tucked snug against her stomach. For a long time, wrapped in his shadow, Nin stared at the candle and did not sleep.

  She awoke with dark blue bruises on the places he had pressed against all night. Her stomach, the back of her neck, all along her spine. Frost hung in her black hair where he had breathed on her, a mist of crystals everywhere but on a single braid.

  Soon after this, she took him to meet her mother.

  * * *

  Beneath the willow tree, Nin dreamed her willow dreams.

  It was September, and the Heron Marsh was restless. Greens bled to gold, gold grew dense and dry. Insects chafed. Long-legged birds took wing. The ghost followed Nin into dreaming.

  “Oh, my,” said Noir the first time she saw him.

  They were curled on the boulder, out in the middle of Lake Argentine. A warm green breeze moved down from the languid sky.

  Mother and daughter regarded the ghost as he treaded the too-blue water, splashing about, sometimes diving under to swim with the black fish-cat who lived beneath, a sleekly furred beast with the head of a panther and the body of an eel.

  Once or twice, it twined with the ghost’s feet as he swam, trying to pull him under.

  Mason dodged the fish-cat and swam up to rest against Nin’s legs where they dangled in the water. His dark, wet head nudged her knobbly knees. Nin stroked his hair.

  “I can see him so clearly here,” Nin said. “He’s like a silhouette that grew dimensions. And he’s not cold at all!”

  Her mother ran her fingers through her own short curls, her smile rueful, and glanced from Nin’s face to the ghost.

  “Well,” said Noir. “Nice to meet you finally. What’s your name?”

  The ghost glanced at Nin, radiating inquiry.

  “Mason Ezekiel Gont,” Nin replied with a proud smile. She could never say his name without smiling. She said it whenever she could. “Mason Gont. The Gont of Haunt. Mason. His name is Mason.”

  “Mason,” Noir repeated, never taking her eyes from the ghost’s face. “Mason.”

  “Mason,” said the ghost. Then, “I won’t remember it.”

  Nin clapped a hand to her mouth in shock. Her ghost had never spoken before. Her mother did not look surprised, only compassionate. And a little angry.

  “I know you won’t remember, Mason. But while you’re here, we’ll do what we can.”

  The ghost spread his hands, palms up, treading water. Noir leaned down to touch his shoulder.

  “Is my daughter kind to you?”

  “Is she kind?” He lifted his head from Nin’s knees to stare at her. His eyes were darker than the rest of him, a deep and glossy black beaming like volcano glass from the chiseled planes and contours of his face. Every eyelash showed in spiky, sharp relief.

  Nin and her ghost watched each other, forgetting to breathe. Both remembered the shower they had shared that morning. How he had spilled into shape, hot spray and viscid steam, touching her with hands that were rivulets, that were waterfalls, soaping her body and washing the suds from her hair. Nin had not asked him into the bathroom with her. But he had entered anyway, uninvited, and she did not order him away.

  After the shower, when she was clean and sweet smelling, when his icy and invisible arms wrapped the towel around her flushed body, she had wiped the steam from the mirror with the heel of her hand and saw them both inside it. The ghost stood behind her, vivid as any man.

  Mason’s nose was too large for his face. His eyebrows grew straight and ferocious, very dark. Most of his skin was luminous with spectral pallor, wet and bare, steaming from the shower, but his cheekbones were hectic, as though fever-eaten. His hair was shaggy, almost as curly as Noir’s, almost as black as Nin’s—a warm black, with hints of brown and glints of red. His lips were thin and seemed naturally pensive.

  Nin wondered if she could ever make him laugh.

  Even as she thought this, he began to smile, matching the thoroughness of her inspection with the intensity of his own. And then he bent his head. And placed his mouth on her neck.

  Soft as lilies, sore as stinging nettles. The shock went through her like a bitter wind. And when he lifted his head again, they stared at each other in the glass, stunned, and she knew that he had felt what she had felt, on his side of the mirror.

  “Yes,” Mason Ezekiel Gont told her mother, in the water of Nin’s willow dream. “Nin has been very kind.”

  “My name is Noir,” said Noir, with a terrible pity in her eyes. “You are welcome beneath my tree any time.”

  * * *

  In the second week of October, Reshka summoned Nin to the Ring Room. The ghost accompanied Nin up to the door but no further; the salt trenches on the threshold stopped him.

  When she stepped through the doorway, Nin could no longer see him, or even sense his presence. The braid in her hair hung listless, but the silver grave-ring burned against her finger. By this alone she knew the ghost was disturbed. He could not find her. He could not follow her. He could not even know the room existed.

  “What do you want?” Nin asked, not patiently.

  Reshka hunched like a harpy on one of the benches. Mockery whetted her round blue eyes.

  “All Souls’ soon,” she said.

  Nin never paid attention to the holidays. Mostly, she slept through them.

  “So?”

  “So?” Reshka sneered. Her voice was like taking ice cubes to a cheese grater, always at odds with her varnished face. “So? You’ve not lived through a Souls’ Day yet, girl. Or the Eve of it, either.”

  Nin sighed.

  “Every Dark Eve,” Reshka went on, “I’ve drugged your food and drink to make you sleep. I’ve circled y
our bed with salt and locked your door with a silver key. I’ve kept you safe from the ghosts of Stix Haunt—and so, you ask? So! You have no idea, do you, girl, what happens when the dead walk? When the dead take flesh and come walking!”

  That parched old voice, never less than awful, now cracked under the strain of something more. Nin had never seen Reshka’s fear. She did not know how to respond to it.

  “They come walking?” she asked. “In the flesh? But you said…”

  Reshka ignored her. “I won’t drug you this year. You’re grown—got a ghost of your own now, don’t you, girl? I’ve seen. You’re careless, treat him like a pet, let him walk all over you. Let him take liberties. You’ll deserve what happens when he walks. He’ll destroy everything you own, searching for that little ring you wear. Might be he’ll gobble you in your bed. But I don’t know.” Reshka’s pink lips curled. “Might be you want that, to die as ghoul food? Noir’s daughter is fool enough for such, I guess.”

  Nin clenched her hands. “Leave Noir out of this, Reshka! If you have something to teach me, teach me!”

  Her grandmother’s immaculate claws shot out, quick and callous as they had been seven years ago at Lake Argentine, when they drowned the black cat Behemoth. Now they closed around Nin’s wrist and sunk deep, drawing blood.

  Nin’s grave-ring flared—agony! agony!—and her knees gave out. She fell hard at Reshka’s feet, her arm twisted in her grandmother’s grip, seized fast.

  “The dead will come walking.” Reshka’s voice shook, but her talons never faltered. “They come looking for their names. You stay in your salt circle, with a silver veil cast over your braid, and you keep still. You don’t move. You barely breathe. They’ll take the house apart searching. That’s of no matter—I make them put it to rights again the next day. They’ll do it, or I’ll hurt them as only the dead can be hurt, I’ll burn little bits of them to dust.

  “But that’s for morning. At night, on Dark Eve, so long as they walk, you stay still, you never leave the circle. And you never, ever remove your silver veil. Or else they’ll see. The salt might stop them—maybe, maybe not—but best not test it. Do this and don’t stray, Noir’s daughter, or I’ll hang you from that willow tree you love. Then I’ll raise you up again by the four winds, and you’ll be scrubbing my back and brushing my teeth for all eternity. You got that, Nin the Necrophilian? Am I clear enough, Miss Nin?”

  “Clear!” Nin gasped, hating herself. She might as well have cried mercy. Reshka flung her wrist away with a disgusted hiss.

  “Then get out,” said her grandmother. “And prepare while you still can.”

  * * *

  It rained all day on the Dark Eve.

  No trick-or-treaters came skipping down the road from town, plastic pumpkin heads in hand. No teens dressed in black T-shirts and glow-in-the-dark bones came to teepee the lawns and throw stones at the windows of Stix Haunt.

  Nin stayed at her window all day, pretending to watch the rain. But it was Mason she watched, following his restlessness as he paced wall to wall in the reflection of her room.

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “You’ll walk tonight.”

  He paused long enough to give her a single, unfathomable look.

  “I wish I could go to the willow tree,” Nin said. “But on a day like this I’d drown.”

  The ghost drifted towards her in the window. Nin felt him at her back. But before he touched her, before his arctic breath sent chills down her neck, he turned away. He walked through one of her walls, and he did not return.

  Nin tried not to cry. She’d wanted him out anyway. Now she could begin her preparations. The first part was easy. All she needed was scissors.

  * * *

  The hour before midnight, Nin lit a line of red pillar candles. Hot cinnamon wax scented the air. She had covered her windows with shawls and scarves, so that no one outside—alive or dead—could look in.

  By candlelight, Nin laid her circle of salt, three thick lines of it. Sea salt, then road salt, then perfumed bath salts that smelled like lavender. When the circle met itself, when even Nin forgot where it began and ended, she stepped out of her clothes and shoes, folded them neatly and put them away, and flung a dark gray veil, heavy with silver embroidery and longer than she was tall, over her head. Then she moved over the lines of salt into the heart of the circle, and sat on the floor to wait.

  Reshka’s grandfather clock struck midnight. Dark Eve was over, and All Souls’ began. So did the noises.

  Downstairs, down the hall, starting in the kitchen, a great clashing started up. Glass broke. Drawers pulled out and upended. Knives hurled at the walls. A huge, frightening crash—perhaps the refrigerator tipping over. Bookcases toppled. Books ripped apart. Curtain rods torn down. Someone singing an awful song. Someone flushing and flushing the toilet. (Nin wondered what they were flushing.) Cabinet doors ripped off. Doors slamming. Outside, shrubs uprooted, banged against the house, tossed through the windows. Someone pounding holes in the porch with something blunt. A furious gibbering. People who had forgotten how to speak. Whistlings and whispers and wet slobbering sobs sliding through the cracks in the plaster.

  The ghosts walked in flesh. The search was on.

  Below, Nin knew, Reshka was in hiding, sealed in the Ring Room behind salt and silver. The ghosts could not harrow her from that secret place, to reclaim what she wore on her fingers, in her hair. Thwarted, they grew restless. Further and further out they ranged, into the woods and the marshes, maybe as far as the town, knocking on doors, rapping on windows, searching for their names. The calamity of their passing faded to a distant wailing.

  Nin’s door opened and Mason Ezekiel Gont stepped inside.

  He did not see Nin, invisible behind her barrier of salt, with the gray veil over her. He walked to her bed and stared at it for some time, then stroked the white eyelet lace. He could feel what he touched. He did not, precisely, smile.

  Mason moved through the candlelight, a ghost in the flesh, casting no shadow. He ran his fingers over everything, the fringes of her scarves, the beads hanging from her ceiling fan, the cotton underwear in her drawer. Always with that expression that was not entirely sweet or bitter, but concentrated. Perhaps hungry.

  Three times he passed the mirror before he dared look at himself. When he did, he stepped right up to the glass, pressed his nose to it. Forehead to reflected forehead, he studied himself. His left palm flattened to his breastbone, where no heart beat. Mason and Mason-in-the-mirror stayed that way for a long time.

  While he stared, Nin stood up in her circle. Almost carelessly, almost by accident, she stretched one bare big toe towards him. The toe smudged a few grains of salt out of place. It took only that, and Mason Ezekiel Gont turned to look at her.

  Two strides, and he reached through the circle, pulling the veil from her face.

  He said, “Your hair.”

  “Yes,” said Nin. “Now I know why Noir kept it so short.”

  He shook his head, wordlessly reaching out again. But Nin sidestepped his grasp and backed away, until the back of her knees met the edge of her bed and she sank down. She rubbed the stubble on her head, more acutely aware of its unpredictable tufts than of her nakedness.

  Frowning down at her feet, Nin could not see him coming, but she heard his tread. And then he was there, standing knee to knee with her.

  “Will you sit?” she invited him.

  “Do you command it?”

  “No.”

  “I will not sit.”

  Nin glanced up. For the first time since he had entered her room, she recognized the expression on his face as anger. He was so angry, heat simmered off his skin. He looked not into her eyes, but at her skull, her scalp, the absence of her hair—the absence of the braid where his soul was bound. Once she saw his gaze flicker to her ring finger, which was bare.

  “It—it—was never right to call you,” she stammered. “Or, having called you, to keep you. But I was so…” She shrugged. She could not say th
e words she had practiced a hundred times.

  “Where is it?” asked Mason in his soft way. “You still have it somewhere. You have not released me. It’s here. Very near. My soul, braided and bound in you. Do you think I can’t feel it? Is this a trick? What did you do with your hair?”

  “I was going to give it to you…”

  “Do it now,” he said. “Do it, please, before the others come back and pull me into their madness. I am that close to going over…I am so close, Nin.”

  Nin, he said, and his rage broke a little.

  Nin began to weep. The ghost placed his hands on her naked shoulders. His hands, heavy with borrowed life, were smooth and lineless, without fingerprints or scars or calluses. They bore her against the mattress, and she did not fight, knowing that he was no more relentless than she had been.

  “Nin,” he said, “I need my name. I need it. I need it back. Where did you put it? Where is your hair?”

  Her nose was clogged from crying. “You are my only friend.”

  “And I’m here, Nin,” he whispered. His breath was white waste and winter night. “I’m right here. And I am your friend. But I have neither eaten nor drunk for one hundred years. I have not felt flesh beneath my fingers in one hundred years. Nin, I am hungry—and I have no name to recall me to myself, or the honor I once believed in!”

  His hands were warm, and his breath was cold, and her own breath was coming too fast.

  “Please,” said Nin.

  “Stop me,” begged the ghost. “Nin, stop me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please.” His voice grew ragged. His hands moved down her body, fingers hard on her thighs. His mouth suckled at her skin, not so much kissing as tasting raised flesh, heartbeat, the pulse of the artery running through her belly. She grasped his curls and his head slid lower. Even his hair was alive, twining around her fingers like damp, sleepy ferns.

  Nin reached one hand beneath her pillow to draw out a silver-embroidered sack ungainly with salt. The knot that bound it was simple, but Mason’s mouth complicated everything. When her trembling fingers finally undid the knot, salt spilled everywhere, along with a single black braid, which she had bound on both ends in silver, and looped through a little silver ring. The inner band of the ring was engraved with a name and two dates.