by Ben Peek
The sky was red when we finished, red like freshly spilled blood as we lowered the coffin down, said our words, and wheeled Mother over the dust-stained trails out of the graveyard. And it was red like dried blood when we returned in the night without her.
Henry and I navigated the cemetery silently, the electric brass lamp that I held a weak yellow eye to guide us. My Brother, jingling metal with every step, carried the shovels and stretcher over his broad, muscular back without complaint. My own body ached from the unaccustomed work. In addition to the digging we were about to return to, I had, just before, bribed the man at the gate. He was covered in blue tattoos stronger than Mother’s and had a mechanical monocle over his left eye. My bribe had been to close that eye while we came and left. We did not fear the authorities, but we had no desire to upset Mother should it be reported to her. With the eye closed, she would never know.
That bribe, I was to learn quickly, was not necessary. In the artificial light, and with tombstones stretched like paid mourners around us, we came upon the already opened and violated grave of our sister.
“She’s gone.” Henry spat in disgust and dumped the shovels and stretcher on the hard ground. “She wasn’t here more than a handful of hours.”
I approached the edge of the grave, looked down: the wooden cover had been broken half off and Fiona was truly gone.
“Bastards,” Henry repeated behind me. “Bloody bastards. What’re you looking at?”
Quietly, I said, “Her clothes.”
“What do you mean? Her clothes are still there?”
They lay half in the shadows of the coffin and half beneath the loose dirt. I swung the lamp down and my eye caught the flash of a bracelet.
“She’s naked,” Henry said. His voice had been drained of its anger and in its place was a bewildered, almost naïve sense of disbelief. “What kind of man would want a naked girl who died of starvation?”
I eased my way down into the hole. “Snatchers do not care about the way one has died.”
“Why strip her?”
I could not begin to understand it. I picked up the bracelet. Beneath it was a necklace, the chain broken. “They did not take the jewellery, either.”
“Do you think they’ve sold her?”
Beneath the necklace a ring with a piece of jade in it.
“William,” Henry demanded.
“I do not know.” I pulled myself out of the grave with Fiona’s jewellery deep within my pockets. The three pieces that she had loved most stabbed at my thighs. If they had drawn blood, I would have understood. “She has been dead for three days. In another seven she’ll be useless to them.”
“Ten days.” He rubbed his thick hands over his face, trying to push away the grief and concern and anger that ran across him like spilled blood. Lowering his hands, he said, “How will we even be able to find her? I’ve no idea where to begin.”
“We will need a Mortician.”
“We’re not their people. They only look for marked people. They won’t help us.”
Staring into the empty grave, I replied quietly, “I know of one that will.”
2.
He erected pavilions beneath the red sky while we marvelled at the sight of the horses’ brains, clear as our hands in their heads.
Henry and I parted outside the bronze gates of the graveyard. He climbed into a passing carriage, the shovels wrapped in the empty stretcher, and disappeared into the sound of gears and the smell of oil as two mechanical horses pulled his carriage down the paved road. Atop, the driver slowly diminished in a black and greasy smear.
Despite my weariness, I was pleased to see Henry leave. He was my brother, but while we were family, we lived very different lives, and there were parts of mine I did not wish for him to learn about. Henry had earned a fine reputation as a metal artist, his skills in demand more than ever as the population of Ledornn grew and the industrialization of the country rose with it. He was serious and dedicated to his profession and had even bought a small factory to produce his work. I, on the other hand, had none of these traits. I was frequently unemployed, had no real marketable skills outside the odd book review I wrote, and relied, as even I will admit, too readily on Mother’s money for survival. However, unlike Henry, I was a man with weaknesses and loves not supported by society, most of which I had kept private for the family’s sake, and wished to continue to do so. I did not want Henry to meet Jonas, the Mortician, and learn about the aspects of my life that had introduced me to him. He would be able to guess at the first of those reasons, even now, but I did not want him to know how I planned to force Jonas into doing what I wanted.
Jonas lived in a large flat in the City of Ledornn, which, from the graveyard gates, was marked on the horizon by a sharp tangle of fiery red light that sat like a jewel in an uneven black crown. It was a long walk from the gates, but I found a second carriage before long. The short, greying driver nodded at my directions, and pulled his tattered black coat tightly around his thin, tattooed frame. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator and the mechanical horses took off in a burst of steam while he hugged the long steering wheel. Inside the sparse carriage, I dozed off. It was uncomfortable on the flat, ripped cushions and did nothing to improve my physical disposition by the time I had reached my destination, but I did feel somewhat rested. After paying the driver, I stood on the street and stretched and twisted my body, trying to bring it back to shape. Drunken men and women passed me and one of the latter shouted a greeting. I waved, despite not knowing her. Once they had left, I crossed the street and entered a narrow alley.
On either side, soot covered buildings reached up seven floors. Scars of light shone feebly from the wounds. Within minutes I had stepped into a narrow stairwell and was deep inside the building on my left. The railings of the stairwell gave me the impression that I was climbing through a mouth of broken teeth—though if I was climbing out of danger or into it, I was not yet sure, but for Fiona it did not matter. I had shared everything with her—including my relationship with Jonas.
Finally, I reached the fifth floor and a door with the number 86 on it. I knocked. It was late, but I knew Jonas would be awake.
The door cracked open a moment later. A single, dark green eye stared out. “William?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
A pause.
“It is urgent, Jonas.”
The door swung open.
Jonas was a big man: tall, and made from bones too sizeable for his skin, which had left his body with the taut, stretched impression of undernourishment. He was not wearing a shirt, but even had he been, I would have been able to tell anyone who asked that his whole body was as bony and thin as his arms suggested, for it was a body that I knew intimately. Jonas’ face was similarly formed, and it did not suggest a kind man: it was defined by slashes: cuts made to signal a mouth that was pressed into a straight line, and dark eyes that squinted beneath heavy black eyebrows. He had thick hair that was never combed and a thin, scratchy beard that he was unable to grow into fully, and which he shaved with a straight razor every fourth or fifth day. The cold impassiveness that was in his face was not only contained there, but spread through his entire body, as if the black tattoos that ran across his arms and chest had been burned into his skin as a brand by his parents when he was a child. Certainly it was how the first had been done.
“What do you want, William?” Without waiting for my answer, he turned his back on me and walked down the dark hall and into the pale blue light of the main room. “It’s been three months. I wasn’t expecting to see you again. If you’ve come to buy—”
“No.” I closed the door, followed. “I have not. I did not expect to return.”
He sat down carefully on one of the two old, brown cloth chairs that were in the spartan room. It smelled of antiseptic and dried flowers. The door leading into his workroom was closed. Next to the chair was a small pile of books—his readi
ng for the evening, for Jonas was not a man who slept much. “So,” he said, “we agree. You weren’t meant to return.”
“You are a violent man, Jonas. My mistake was that I did not see it earlier.” I sat on a chair opposite. “But I am not here because of you and I.”
“No?”
“My sister has died.”
Jonas did not react with sympathy or disinterest. Instead, he waited, his green eyes still in patient knowledge that there was more to come. Beneath that gaze, I told him what had happened. At the end, I said, “I will not see her used by Surgeons, Jonas. I will not have her turned into the clothing for someone too rich to know when to die.”
“That’s always been a strange belief for you,” he said. “You’re too rich and too clean to hate it, but yet, like your kind, you are an atheist.”
“I have no desire to live in a body of bronze organs.”
“So you have always said.”
“So I have,” I replied evenly. “Will you find her body?”
“It’s easier to find a body that I have tattooed, or a body that has returned.”
“Is it beyond you?”
His dark eyes disappeared in a slow, thoughtful blink, and then he said, “No.”
“I want you to find her.” I tried to keep the desperation from my voice. “Please, Jonas. I can’t let her be used. She feared it more than death. Name your price.”
“No.”
I continued, “The things that were done—”
“Stop.” The coldness of Jonas’ gaze fractured with thin cracks of an emotion I had not thought to see; but it was mixed with resentment and anger, emotions that were more expected. “I will find her, William. I am not a cruel man, no matter what you’ve thought. I know I treated you badly. I know that I hurt you—hurt you physically. I am not proud of it. But, at the same time, it gives me no pleasure to know that you would use it against me.”
“She was my sister,” I explained. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”
3.
But before long, he called us inside, where he revealed veins of silver and hearts and lungs of bronze and blades that pierced skin in shapes and sizes that we had never seen before.
I returned to Mother’s house shortly after. There was nothing for me to do, Jonas said, though I suspected that he did not want me around. He talked of regret, but neither of us had touched, and though we had passed close enough to smell each other (he in that blend of oil and chemicals and sharp after shave) the distance between us was indefinable. We stood at opposite ends of the world. We stood as strangers. We stood behind walls. When Mother’s dark house appeared before me, I had listed more than a hundred ways in which we were apart, but it was the barren gardens and barred windows and smooth, soot stained brown stone that sat beneath the red-brown sky that gave my thoughts form. One of us was that house. With a faint sigh, I entered and walked through darkness to my bedroom, but stopped at the bottom of the stairs as Ellie, Mother’s maid, approached. A slim girl, dark haired, olive skinned. She had thin, delicate black words tattooed up her left arm, which disappeared beneath her black shirt. Her bare feet skimmed across the tiles, clean beneath the cuffs of brown pants.
“It’s late,” I said. In her hand she held a glass of water with a faint orange tint to it. “Is Mother fine?”
“She does not sleep well,” Ellie replied. “This will help her.”
We began walking up the stairs. “I want her to have every comfort. She’s—I cannot lose more of my family.” I paused, the emotion embarrassing me. Ellie did not appear to notice. I said, “What is that?”
“A sleeping draught of sorts,” she replied. “A herbalist brought it over yesterday.”
Mother’s room was stuffy and dark. Leaving the pale light of the hall, it took me a moment to find her, lying on her side with a thin blanket over her. I could hear her heavy breathing and her whispered words—a thank you, I believe—to Ellie. The young maid nodded and beckoned me over before leaving with the now empty glass. I sat down next to the bed and gazed at Mother’s old, wrinkled face, slightly slack from fatigue and, perhaps, the beginning of the drugs in her drink.
“Out late,” Mother whispered.
“Yes. Sorry.”
Her tiny fingers fluttered in dismissal. “I cannot judge you.”
“Mother?”
“I cannot.” A sharp intake of breath. “I cannot judge any of my children. No more. I have. I have judged too much.”
I could not reply. Her breathing settled into the pattern of sleep, but I continued to sit in the shadows. If Mother had said that earlier to Fiona . . . but no, it did not pay to think that way. I had to deal with realities. With what had happened. Slowly, I rose and left the room, my own fatigue crashing in on me. By the time I arrived in my room, I could only barely remove my clothes. I slept quickly, but it was a fitful, restless sleep. In the morning, I remembered only that I had dreamed of Fiona’s stiff fingers being massaged in oil by warm hands and, later, painted an old sky blue by brushes made from bone.
4.
The Surgeon was white-skinned and white-haired; and he had eyes such a pale blue that they were ice; and his clothes, a black suit, top hat and shoes, with a white shirt beneath, looked as if they had once belonged to a mortician and not a surgeon.
Fiona was born ten years after me, my father’s last child, his only daughter: a dark-haired girl that took after him in looks and personality in the ways that his sons had never done. Partly due to his inability to understand Henry and me, and partly because she was so much like him, he had loved Fiona the most; and it was for her, and her alone, that he enlisted the skills of a Surgeon when he fell ill.
She had not understood that at the time, but in the years after Mother made sure that the knowledge was used in the cruellest way. Neither Henry nor I could stop her, for she hoarded her pain as proof that she had wasted her youth on a man who had not returned for her. In addition, she had been as horrified as all her children when her husband had returned to the house wearing the body of another man—his birth body so ravaged by cancers that nothing new could be made from it—and his chest humming the faint machine growl defiance to mortality. Mother could see nothing but betrayal in his pale skin and veins of silver, and worse, it was Fiona whom he first approached, Fiona whom he first scooped up and held close to his chest . . . and Fiona who had, of course, responded by screaming, horrified by the sound, the coldness of his touch, and the perversity of her father’s words emerging in a new voice.
On the Wednesday two weeks after his return, the servants found Father’s body lying in the entrance of the house, his mechanical heart ripped out.
Not for the first time, I let my thoughts drift in circles about the symbolic nature that the position of his suicide occupied, as I sat outside The Baroque Moon waiting for Jonas. It was a small café, made from red brick and with wide, open glass windows, and a series of small bronze and glass tables out front. Above me, the sky was a dull, flat red, and the wind still, just as it had been for the entire season. It was uncomfortable, but that meant that no ash had been blown into the city, and that the sky was not covered in fumes. I would tolerate the heat to breathe an air that did not clog in my throat, as I had with Fiona before the wasting had forced her to her room. Even then, she had kept a set of bent postcards that showed the old sky, and which she pasted to the walls of her room to show a world that didn’t exist, but a world that even if it did, she could not have walked out into. Beneath that sky of this old world, the seasons had been on show. Browns and yellows and greens: each card held a different combination, a mix of colour that signalled an entirely different world to the one that any of us had been born into. At the time she placed them up, Mother had told Fiona that the cards were a silly fancy, a child’s thing, but she kept them at her side as her diseases slowly murdered her.
Her death was a lot more difficult on Mother than Henry and I had ima
gined. Fiona’s withering was the physical manifestation of what Mother had done mentally and, as Henry had said afterwards, but quietly and only once, Fiona’s death was more a kindness than cruelty. But the death had caused in Mother a sudden realization of her own mortality coupled with the responsibility of what she had done, and it had sent her into a black depression. It had altered all of us, I guess. I had changed, certainly, a sudden awareness of my responsibility—responsibility that Henry had, perhaps, always been aware.
Before he left in the morning, Henry had informed me that Mother wished to visit Fiona’s grave today and that it was all she wished to do; but he had managed to convince her otherwise, telling her that she needed her rest, and that she should wait a day at least. The truth of it, however, was that we had left the grave ripped open, and he planned to return to fill the hole before she did. He had briefly asked about my night, and I had told him that the investigation had begun, though when he pressed for more details, I only shrugged.
Jonas arrived at the café shortly after I did. He was wearing scuffed red and black boots, old, patchwork brown pants, and a dark red shirt, the cuffs of which had frayed and were open; they revealed the black tattoos that ran down his arms and traced around the back of his hands in circling patterns. With one of those hands he pulled back a bronze chair and sat, smoothly, across from me. Without waiting, I poured him a glass of water. Then I asked him how the night had been.