Stone Mad

by Elizabeth Bear

  Hell, there might be one or two out there that’s the real machine. It galled me to think these girls might actually be what they was playing at. But that didn’t stop me from wanting what they was selling, with all my heart and soul.

  Ma. She weren’t nothing but a little girl’s memory to me. That she might know what I’d grown up as and still be proud . . . oh, I coveted that. And there was also the little fact that I couldn’t explain my table flipping over as a wire or sleight of hand. And I would sell my own big toes and the tip of my nose if Priya had been in on it. Dishonesty wasn’t in her, which was one reason she’d made a terrible prostitute.

  Were the Arcade sisters just working my handle to pump out whether or not I’d twigged how their flash operated? Or was this little one and her line about bright-haired ghosts who loved me—just maybe—for real?

  So I stood there and I thought about me and Priya’s table flipping all on its lonesome, like that. I thought about my ma and da, and not getting to say good-bye to Da at all. Ma didn’t die easy, but there was time to get used to the prospect that she was going on. Da just—the hand of God reached down and plucked him, and that was that. I thought about my friend Connie, who met a bad end in a way that was a little bit my fault, and how much I’d like to say I was sorry to her.

  I wondered if apples mourned when one of their number quit the tree, to the hungry wind or a hungry hand. I bet not, or they’d taste like tears and not like sugar. It might be nice to be smooth and dumb as a fruit, and not to know what you was losing.

  I knew what I’d lost. And I missed them so much it must have shown in my face, because Hilaria reached out in what looked exactly like human compassion and concern. She stroked my arm through my shawl.

  It was probably playacting. It still made me choke up. I missed Ma and Da, sure. But I also missed Priya fiercely, especially when I thought about her fighting with her own da, and refusing to go back to India just because he was bossing her around. Was that the same as me feeling bossed around now? And if that was all she knew, wouldn’t it behoove me to help her learn better, like a horse that’s been broke badly?

  We’d parted company in a fight and she’d gone out into the winter without me. How would I feel if something happened to her?

  Just before Priya and me had gotten into the hire carriage that brought us here, we’d taken a last look around the little flat we’d been sharing since December. It was on the top floor of a wood-frame triple-decker that rattled when a big steam contrivance went by, and had an outdoor staircase steeper than some cliffsides. Now the flat was empty of every stick and scrap that hadn’t come with the lease and there was nothing left to show that the second bedroom was just there for propriety. Well, it was Priya’s work space, but other than that we just needed it so as the landlady could rent to us and claim she was ignorant of what went on up there if the law came calling.

  We had been supposed to be going home to our own place tonight. The house—a complete little ranch it was actually—that we’d bought for each other was an easy walk and an even easier ride from town. It was the best use either of us could think of for our reward money from the government on account of us being heroes that month.

  We was lucky we lived in Washington Territory, where women could hold land in our own names. Even married women, which was something of a scandal some places back east, I’d heard. There was a time when I couldn’t have brought my Priya into the Rain City Riverside, seeing as how she’s Indian—Indian Indian, Tamil, not local Indian, and she wears trousers by preference—but the new mayor’s made some changes in the town ordinances and it ain’t legal none for them to deny us service now.

  So it was me all by myself and my native Danish and Irish stubborn that had turned the night into a travesty. Well, to be honest, a touch of Priya’s stubborn, too. But right this instant my indecision had melted away, and to go after her and fix things was all I wanted, and in her arms was the only place I wanted to be. We could work out the wife thing, and who was the boss of whom, in our own good time.

  As long as we got that time. This was just a quarrel. Lovers have them. Surely this was just a quarrel. Not something we couldn’t ever make up between the two of us.

  One of us had to decide to make the gesture, was all. Reach out across the fight. And it was okay if it had to be me.

  “Sorry, ladies,” I said. “My friend and I have tickets to the magic show.”

  “Oh.” Hilaria cocked her head, a meaningless, birdlike gesture—but a pretty one. I’d practiced it in front of mirrors myself. “It will be at midnight, afterward, when the spirit walls are thin. We’re going to the magic show as well. But of course”—they exchanged glances—“your friend doesn’t like us. It might suit your domestic harmony better if you stayed clear.”

  I bristled and made up my mind right then to go to her silly séance, which was what she had been planning all along, no doubt. “Oh, I’ll square things with my friend, all right.” But I couldn’t resist getting a shot back in. “Do you think that’s wise, going to the show, Missus Horner feeling like she does about you two?”

  Hypatia dabbed her water-spotted gown. She said, with a small curve of her lush mouth, “We might as well get our money’s worth,” and laughed lightly.

  It was a joke, of course, being as the hotel was covering their costs. My smile probably looked a little sickly on account of being all churned up inside about Priya getting further and further away, but at least I made the attempt to show I got it.

  I swallowed hard to get my voice level and said, “Maybe I will. What room will you be in?”

  “The Peacock Parlor,” she said proudly. “It will be just a brief demonstration. For Constable Waterson and Missus Horner, among others, since the constable expressed a curiosity.”

  So Mrs. Horner was either taking the bait or painting them into a corner. Interesting.

  “You ladies think that’s wise, given the haint?”

  “I have faith in the protection of my control,” Hypatia said loftily, with a twinkle, and damned if I didn’t still like her.

  I thought about mentioning that the Peacock Parlor used to be the piano lounge, and was where those murders was supposed to have happened. She seemed pretty confident—either in her grift or in her gift—though, and it seemed mean to rattle her. So I said, “Maybe, then. The hotel laundry would probably steam that out for you, by the way. Especially if you tip well, and ask the ladies nicely.”

  She smiled at me and I smiled at her and Hilaria smiled at both of us. And I turned to make my way to the lobby and ask the concierge about a livery horse so I could go running after my beloved, no matter how wrongheaded and rockheaded she was being.

  That was when the Rain City Riverside started to rock on its foundations.

  * * *

  You understand, the earth rattles out here every once in a while. It ain’t like back at Hay Camp where we never felt a shake in my whole lifetime. We’ve got the volcanoes, and some sort of fault in the earth itself that jumps around, but it never does much harm. Still it’s unsettling, and I was glad for the minute that the Riverside was a wood building and not mortar that might shake down on us.

  But then I glanced out the window to judge the damage from a, you understand, outside perspective. And I realized that nothing else was shaking. Just the single building we was in.

  That ain’t natural.

  * * *

  We looked at one another and without exchanging a word we ran for the lobby. All three of us, frilled skirts bouncing with their hoops, little heels clattering on the wood where it showed between the heavy Oriental carpets. I limp a little still—I got hurt in the fight last fall—and my knee and hip was killing me, but I kept up well enough to be out in front when we hit the landing at the top of the grand stairs in the front hall.

  We skidded to a halt, clutching one another’s arms for support. Down below us, the tall carved doors was shut up tight, and two bellhops was pushing at them without even shifting them in their
frames. People surged in that lobby like the sea between the rocks, and going down there looked like the worst idea ever.

  I looked over at Hypatia. “This your doing?”

  Whiter than ever, she shook her head. And I knowed it was stupid to believe her, but I did.

  “The spirits are in great confusion and disarray,” Hilaria said.

  I kept looking at Hypatia, because I’d figured out by now that when Hilaria did that she was trying to distract people from her “sister.”

  “It don’t happen that you are a real medium, do it? ’Cause if you could spirit us up some advice on where to run toward to get out of this place, that would be a kindness.”

  Her pretty mouth went tight. “I am not in control of what the spirits reveal to me.”

  I thought about Ma and Da and I still wanted to believe. And then I felt sick for believing in spite of myself. You get invested in things—love affairs, politics, con games—and you tie yourself in knots trying to make reality match up to what would make you happiest. The mad part is, what would make you happiest is to get your cope on for what is, rather than what you would rather have happen.

  So people follow their prophets, even when the prophets are wrong over and again. And that happens to the white man as often as the red, or any other.

  All that piled through my head, but I didn’t say a word of it. I just picked at my lip, which is a terrible habit, and muttered, “None of us ever is, sister.”

  The Riverside creaked on its foundations. I wondered if the chimneys would topple and come through the ceiling on all of us. The big crystal chandeliers was swaying and flickering something fierce, their fancy new electric lights casting drunken shadows over the nervous crowd milling about below, which didn’t do nothing to settle ’em down to being less nervous. I thought of horses in a smoky barn and shuddered.

  Maybe I was glad Priya’d walked out on me. At least she was safe.

  Hilaria looked around wildly, a tendril of hair escaping her coif and adhering against her cheek, which was starting to shine through the makeup. “Is there anything we can do to get those people out of here?”

  “Something’s holding the door shut,” I said.

  Hypatia said, “What if we went through the kitchen?”

  I thought of all those knives and boiling soup pots, and shuddered.

  “Well,” I said. “Looks like we got a real old-fashioned haint going on here.”

  “There’s no such thing as a haunting.”

  I hadn’t even heard Mrs. Horner come up on us, and here she was, speaking over Hypatia’s shoulder in a voice that brooked no mischief. “My late husband and I investigated dozens of claims. Probably hundreds. Not one had a scrap of truth to it. But people want to believe.”

  People will argue stupid points at the damnedest times, and that, I am shamed to say, is exactly what I did. “What about jackalopes and catamounts? Hoop snakes? That lake monster they got in Scotland? I’ve seen a Sasquatch with my own eyes, you know.”

  Well, I’d got a glimpse of one. Close enough for argument.

  “Those aren’t ghosts. They’re perfectly natural animals.” She pushed past us and went to the wall. She was doing something with a part of the wall paneling. Trying to rip it off with a small pry bar she’d pulled from somewhere.

  Did the magician’s widow keep a pry bar in her reticule?

  “Oh, so what’s causing this, then?” Hypatia snapped. “Earthquake worms? A Cherufe?”

  I didn’t know what a Cherufe was, but I’d heard of earthquake worms. They was only supposed to be a South American thing, though, wasn’t they?

  Rapid City was a long way from Peru or even Mexico. The floor pitched under my feet while I was thinking about that. I hoped nobody was foolish enough to get in the lift. That’s the first thing I heard from somebody when I came to Rapid City: you don’t get in the lift when there’s an earthquake.

  That being the first day I’d come in from Hay Camp, I’d never experienced an earthquake or an elevator before, so it was more useful advice than you might think.

  Mrs. Horner looked at me with irritation on her velvety face. “Won’t you help me with this, Miss Memery? The riot bolt on those doors is thrown, and they won’t come open unless it is retracted.”

  I felt a chill. A lot of the public buildings and fancier houses in our city, like in San Francisco, put in bolts to hold the doors shut in case there’s rioting, again—anti-anybody, they claimed, but what they meant was anti-Chinese. Or, I suppose, in case the Russians come back and try their luck invading Rapid City again and we have got to defend it. Priya’d actually gotten work installing a few of them, since they have been so in demand this winter. They was usually triggered from a central location, like the manager’s office or the desk, and they sealed up every door in the building.

  Nobody would throw a riot bolt when the building was shaking like to fall down on all our heads, though.

  I gathered up my skirts with a rustle and whooshed past the Arcades, who had bowed their heads together for a conference. Getting a little closer, I saw what she was working at. There was a little door, like a cabinet door, set flush into the wall and concealed behind a drapery and some gold cord. She had fitted the pry bar in next to the lock.

  A steady stream of people was rushing down the grand staircase behind us, joining the crowd in the lobby. I didn’t think that was the wisest thinking since Moses just right now, but there weren’t much I could do to help them. So I helped Mrs. Horner instead, and we leaned on her pry bar with a will.

  It didn’t take much. The concealed cabinet was just supposed to be too hard for a hotel guest to open casually. It weren’t a safe or nothing. It popped, splintering, and the Arcade sisters jumped and turned to us, eyes wide.

  Mrs. Horner grinned a somewhat-toothy, somewhat-toothless, completely maniacal grin and handed me her pry bar. Inside the cabinet was a mess of levers and cables and electrical wires. I flinched when the old lady reached in there, but she had exactly the same expression of concentration as Priya got when she was mad-sciencing, so I just held the pry bar well away from the electrical stuff and stood back from it in my own person, too.

  She did something with some switches. The terrible flickering light spun horribly as one of the swaying chandeliers started revolving on its cable. Some drapes around the lobby walls drew back, revealing damasked wallpaper and ranks of looking glasses, which rendered the effect that much more nauseating.

  Mrs. Horner checked the effect over her shoulder and pursed her lips. “Not that,” she decided.

  I was glad to see we was in agreement.

  Somebody downstairs screamed.

  I was probably in agreement with that, also.

  Then Mrs. Horner ejaculated, “Aha!” and grabbed a big lever off to one side in the compartment. She shoved it down confidently.

  There was a big metal grinding sound, and the doors suddenly sagged on busted hinges. A couple of big men downstairs had the wherewithal to grab them and start wrestling them down. First one side and then the other got tossed out into the street, and a flood of people followed.

  “Was it a short?” I asked Mrs. Horner.

  She grabbed my hand on one side, and Hilaria’s on the other, restraining us from following the crowd. “The lever wouldn’t have worked if it was. Come on, girls—let the lobby clear out just a little, and once we’ve got a clear path to the door we’ll go. We don’t want to get trampled.”

  I was limping a bit by then on my bad hip, and what she said was just horse sense. She drew us to the side, out of line of sight, and I thought it was so nobody would come and fetch us. The hotel buckled and heaved around us. Hypatia had grabbed her sister’s hand on the side away from Mrs. Horner, and we all kind of crowded into the frame of the arched doorway at the landing, it being the strongest point.

  Now that the pressure was off, the people in the lobby looked less like water sloshing in a bucket and more like soapy water in a tub being drained out the plughole. The
stream of people in the middle flowed faster than those along the edges, just like you see with soapsuds, but they was all getting there.

  Gilt flaked off the scrollwork over our heads, dusting Mrs. Horner’s black velvet cap and my shoulders. When the desk clerk and Alexandre was crowding the last few hotel guests out the door, having heroically—I thought—stayed until last, Mrs. Horner gave my hand a squeeze and let it go. Hilaria’s too.

  I almost clutched after her, but she said, “Mind you hold the balustrade on the way down,” and that seemed like such sensible advice I did it with both hands. The risers was kicking the bottom of my kitten heel boots with every step, the hotel pitching like a ship in a West Indies hurricane. The chandeliers swung and pitched, making whooshing noises they was swinging so hard now, and I gritted my teeth to run under them as fast as I possibly could. Even its guttering light revealed that the lobby floor was treacherous, littered with shattered glass and torn cloth and spilled drinks.

  We was halfway down the big curving grand stair when the chandeliers crashed into one another. Shattering glass sparkled as it rained down on us, showering along with long arcing orange streaks of sparks. Some of the lights didn’t shatter; those kept burning.

  Clear as if the police were pounding on the door, I heard five sharp, loud knocks.

  Before a cat could have jumped on a bird, the molded and painted plaster ceiling cracked and began to cascade into the space before the open doors. “Back up!” one of the Arcades yelled, or maybe both of them. I wobbled and rocked as the stairs pitched. My stomach dropped sickeningly as I felt my balance go, and my arms was pinwheeling.

  Somebody grabbed me by the shoulders and waist and hauled me back up the stairs. It wasn’t hands, though—it was some kind of metal contraption like spider legs.

  When I managed to crane my neck over my shoulder, I saw Hilaria’s corset had unfolded into an insecty chrysanthemum and the legs were what had me. More of them was steadying her, hooked into the stair carpet and braced against the balustrade.

  We looked at each other for a second, while I felt grateful and she probably wondered if she’d given away too much of her bunco. She might have acted on instinct and be regretting it now, but I was glad she hadn’t let me fall. The spider legs steadied me for a moment longer. Then Hilaria did something with her cuff bracelet and they zipped back under the brocade of her dress. There was a little unsettling wriggle, like she was made of worms, but then her corset was as shapely as ever. I couldn’t even see the openings they had come out of. The gaps along the stiff bodice seams lay flat as a hidden pocket, which was a nice bit of sewing, and professionally I wondered which one of ’em was the seamstress.