Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  It was really all he had ever wanted.

  The tunnel wasn’t far north of the meat-packing houses the pack had used to haunt in the early morning, snatching scraps and suet from the discard bins, till the men armed with long stinging batons came out to chase them away. Since the time one of the pack had been cornered there by men and beaten and stung to death by those sticks, they had avoided the places. But Sweets remembered the tunnel. It was a dark, open mouth closed with barricades; above it, orange lights went on and off in sequence. The city streets swept down to it from several directions between stone bulwarks and then into its maw. Sweets had never speculated about where it led or why, though once he had seen a policeman mounted on a bike go in and not come out again.

  By the time winter had grown old and filthy in the city, Painter had settled on the tunnel, of all the exits Sweets and he had investigated.

  His and Sweets’s breath rose whitely on the pale predawn air. Painter looked down into the tunnel from the shelter of the bulwark’s lip. A broken chain of dim yellow lights went away down its center, but they lit nothing. Painter knew no more than Sweets what was in there, but he supposed it led to the Northern Autonomy; it was anyway the passage west, to the wild lands, and that was all the freedom he needed, just now, to imagine.

  Why were there no guards, as there were at the bridges? Maybe there were, at the other end. Or maybe it was one of those ancient duties that had come to be neglected, left up to signs and fierce threats: DO NOT ENTER. NO THRU TRAFFIC. VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO ARREST DETENTION RELOCATION. PROVISIONAL REGIONAL GOVT. It’s not in a leo’s nature to speculate about threats, dangers, punishment for ventures. He had tried to work out what would happen once they were all inside, but nothing came. So he only waited for the pack to gather.

  They had come downtown through the night in their way, separately, yet never disattached from another’s odors and presence; they stopped to mark their way, stopped to investigate smells, food smells, rat smells, human smells. They circled downtown in a three-block quadrille. Sweets had stayed close to Painter in the vanguard, nervous over the direct, unhurried, unconcealed way he took but unwilling to be far from him. Now as the light grew he paced nervously, marked the place again, and kept his nose high for news of the others. In ones and twos arid threes they assembled, all nervous at being so far from the smells of home as day broke; Duke especially was excited, his one proud ear swiveling for sounds.

  Painter waited till he felt no further reluctance in Sweets to go (he’d never counted the pack or learned them all; only Sweets knew if they were all present) and then went down onto the tunnel approach, walking steadily through the yellow slush. The pack swarmed down behind him, staying close together now, not liking the tunnel but preferring its darkness to the exposed approach. Painter broke a place in the rotted wooden barricades; some of the pack had already slithered under, some clambered over. They were inside, moving quickly along the pale tiled wall. The clicking of the dogs’ nails and the steady sound of Painter’s boots were distinct, loud, intrusive in the silence.

  The tunnel was longer than Painter-had expected. It took wide, sinuous turns, as though they walked through the interior of a vast snake; the yellow lights glinted fitfully on the undersides of its scales. He thought they must be nearing the end when they had only passed the halfway mark, and he didn’t know that at that mark—a dim white line at the river’s center—their passage touched off a sensor connected to a police shack outside the far end of the tunnel.

  Sweets ran on ahead, knowing he should around some turning see the daylight at the other end, wanting to be able to take Painter to it, to hurry him to it; but at the same time he wanted to be next to him. There was the pack also; impossible to keep them from lingering, from sounding when they passed through dark stretches where the light had failed. The best spur he could give them was to run on ahead and force them to follow; and it was when he had raced a distance ahead that he first heard the bike approaching them down the tunnel.

  He stood stock still, fur standing, ears back. By the time the others had caught up with him the sound was loud. No, keep on, Painter said, and went on himself, drawing Sweets after him and the pack after Sweets, Now the noise was filling up the silence. Duke passed by Sweets, trembling, his face set, his odor loud and violent. The racket filled up every ear as they came to a turning; Sweets could hear nothing but it, and Painter’s command to go on.

  Around the turn the noise opened fanwise unbearably, and the black bike and its helmeted rider were bearing down on them. Whatever he had expected to find that had broken his sensor, it wasn’t this; he had come up on them too fast; he backed off, braked, his engine broke into backfiring, and he skidded toward the animals. A black Doberman was flying through the air at him.

  Duke, maddened by the noise, had attacked. He should have fled; he didn’t know how. He only knew how to kill what attacked him. The noise attacked him and he leapt furiously to kill it. He struck with his mouth open as the bike twisted away like an animal in panic. Duke, the bike, and the man went down and spun in whipping circles sidewise violently into the wall. The noise was dead.

  Go on, Painter said, beginning to run. Run now, don’t stop. Sweets ran, blind fury behind his eyes; he didn’t know how many of the others followed him, didn’t care, didn’t remember any longer where he ran, or why. He only knew that as he ran away a part of his being was left, caught, torn away, snared on the wreck of the bike and the broken body of Duke, brave Duke, mad Duke.

  A half circle of light showed far off.

  One after another, they pelted out of the tunnel, panicky; Heidi the poodle and Spike the wolfhound and Randy and the wild ones. All of them at last: leaping out, racing back within, running on away, and returning: all of them but Duke.

  Painter came out, his broad chest heaving, the gun in his hand. His head snapped from side to side, looking for threats. There were none.

  Sweets rushed to him, whimpering, lost now in sudden grief, entangling himself in Painter’s legs, wanting Painter to somehow absorb him, solve his pain and anger. All but Duke, he said. All but Duke. But Painter only shrieked once in impatience and kicked him from underfoot; then he started away down the empty avenue. Get on, he said. Quick, away from here. Follow. And Sweets knew that all he could do was follow, that this was all the answer he would ever have for any fear, any grief: follow. It would do.

  They had gone on for some time before Sweets began to see the place that Painter had led them into.

  Years before, during the wars, this band of city had been cleared, a buffer zone between the fractious island city and the Northern Autonomy. Even then, there had not been many people to evacuate; it had been for a long time a failure as a city. Now it was as deserted and hollowed as if it had been under the sea. The streets ran in the old rectangles around carious buildings, but the only human faces were those smilers, blinded with rust or torn and flapping, pictured in huge ads for products mostly no longer made.

  Sweets could not have read, and Painter didn’t see, the new signs that announced that the Northern Autonomy was now a Federal protectorate, occupied by Federal troops, requiring Federal passports. All they both knew, with increasing certainty, was that they hadn’t escaped the city. It poured on past them as they walked, identical block after block. The sky had grown larger, the buildings lower; but it was still only dead city. When in the silence Painter began to hear, overhead, the quick insistent ticking, which seemed to have been pursuing him for years, he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t look up or run for cover, though Sweets pricked up his ears and looked up at Painter, ready at any moment to run, to hide. Painter walked on. The copter hovered, watching, and retreated.

  From the copter the officer radioed in what he saw: a big man, maybe not a man, walking with some purpose through the streets, heading due north. “A lot of dogs around.”

  “Dogs, over?”

  “Dogs. Lots of them. Over…”

  Painter reached an impassable valley: the empty
cut of a sunken expressway. He turned northwest, walking along the edge of the expressway embankment. Far off as the road ran, but ahead, visible, the horizon could be seen, the true horizon, earth’s, a bristle of leafless trees, soft rise of a brown hill, pale sun staining yellow a cape of winter clouds.

  There, Painter said. The freedom I promised you. Go now.

  Not without you.

  Yes. Without me.

  There were engines coming closer, coming through the maze of stone toward them. It must be toward them: they were the only living things here. The rest of the pack had fled along the intersecting streets. High above, the copter looked down, watching them flee away, watching the big one in the fur coat and the dog who stayed beside him walk on. The copter could see where they would intersect with the cruisers: at the cut there, steep as a chute, that led down onto the expressway. He watched them come together.

  The cruisers climbed the chute toward Painter and Sweets. They stopped, tires shrieking. Men popped out of them, shouting, armed. Painter stopped walking. Go now, he said. Go where I told you.

  Sweets, torn in two, wanting only to die at Painter’s side, yet overwhelmed by Painter’s command to go, stood, riveted. The rest of the pack had fled. His mind, stretched almost to breaking, insisted that to follow his master now he must flee, must do what he could not. Must.

  Painter started down the cut toward the waiting men. Why had he thought there was any escape from them, anywhere to run where they were not? He tossed away, the gun, which clattered on the stone and spun for a moment like a top. He had never escaped; only, for a time, escaped notice.

  Sweets watched Painter raise his arms gently as he walked toward the men. Then, before he could see them touch him, before they slew him with their touch, he turned and ran. He bounded north, fast, forcing his legs to stretch, to betray: betray betray betray his feet said as they struck the hard, endless stone of the city street.

  6

  VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO

  On Mondays Loren came in to meet the packet plane that flew in once a week with supplies and mail to a small town ten miles or so from his cabin. To get into town, he had to canoe from his river-island observation station, where he spent most of the week, downriver to his cabin. From there he went on muleback to town. He rarely got back to the cabin before midnight; the next morning he would start out before dawn, and canoe back upriver to the island. Then, as though the whole of this journey had set him vibrating on a wrong note, he would have to spend most of that day untuning himself so that he could once again turn all his attention to the flock of Canada geese he had under observation. If he brought whiskey back from town to the cabin, he would struggle with himself to leave it in the cabin, having sometimes to go so far as to pour it out, or what was left of it. He kept himself from ever bringing any to the island; but this struggle made his first day’s work at the island that much harder.

  There weren’t, every week, enough reasons for him to make the journey into town, as far as supplies or necessities went. Yet he made it. He tried hard to stock up on things, to deprive himself of logical reasons for the trip; yet when he couldn’t stock up, when some supply was short that week in town and he saw that he would have no choice but to return, he felt a guilty relief. And even when he had utterly subjugated all these tricks, and had no reason to come in that even self-deception would buy, he came in anyway. Always. Because there was one thing he couldn’t stock up on, and that was mail. Each week, that was new; each week it bore the same promise, and like the stupid chickens he had experimented with in school, each time there was no mail, he responded more fiercely the next time.

  “No mail” meant no letter from Sten. He got enough other things. Dross. Newspapers he soon became unable to read with any understanding. Letters from other scientists he corresponded with about technical matters, about the geese. They weren’t what brought him to town. Nor was it the whiskey either, really. The whiskey more or less resulted from the mail or the lack of it; or, what brought him into town for the mail brought him later to the whiskey. It all came to the same impulse. A syndrome, he knew he had to call it; yet it felt more like a small, circumscribed suburb of hell.

  Even Loren Casaubon, who had dissected many animals, from a nematode worm to a macaque monkey—which began to decay loathsomely in the midst of his investigations, insufficiently pickled—even he located the seat of his fiercest and most imperative emotions in his heart. He knew better, but that’s where he felt them. And it seemed, over the last months, that his heart had suffered physical strain from the vast charge of emotion it continuously carried: it felt great, heavy, painful.

  That Monday the packet was late. Loren had a not-quite-necessary reshoeing done on the mule, watching the smith work gracelessly and hastily and wondering if these old skills that had once meant so much to the world, and seemed to be becoming just as necessary again, would ever be done as well as they once had been. He picked up a box of raisins and a dozen pencils. He went down to the muddy end of the street, to the rusting steel pier, and waited. He had been born patient, and his patience had undergone training and a careful fine-tuning in his work. He could remember, as a kid, waiting hours for a dormant snail to put out its head or a hunting fox to grow accustomed to his stationary, downwind presence and reveal himself. And he used those skills now to await, and not attempt to hasten, the guttural far-off sound, the clumsy bird.

  It appeared from the wrong direction, made maneuvers around the skyey surface of the lake. Its ugly voice grew louder, and it settled itself down with a racing of engines and a speeding and slowing of props that reminded him of the careful wing-strategies of his landing geese. It must be, he thought, as its pontoons unsteadily gripped the water’s stirred surface, the oldest plane in the world.

  When the plane had been tied up, a single passenger got out. He hardly needed to stoop, so short he was. Leaning on a stick, he made his way down the gangway to the pier; sun and watertight glinted from his spectacles. When he saw Loren he came toward him in his odd, mincing gait. Loren noticed that he limped now as well; he made the process of walking look effortful and improbable.

  “Mr. Casaubon.” He removed the spectacles and pocketed them. “We’ve met. Briefly.”

  Loren nodded guardedly. His small, week-divided world was shaken by this creature’s appearance. The beaten paths he had walked for months were about to be diverted. He felt unaccountably afraid. “What are you doing here?” He hadn’t intended to sound hostile, but did; Reynard took no notice.

  “In the first place, to deliver this.” He took a travel-creased envelope from within his cape and held it toward Loren. Loren recognized, at once, the angular script; he had after all helped to shape it. Strange, he thought, how terrific is the effect of a fragment of him, outside myself, a genuine thing of his in the real world; how different than I imagine. This sense was the calm, self-observant eye of a storm of feeling. He took the letter from the strange, rufous fingers and put it away.

  “And,” Reynard said, “I’d like to talk to you. Is there a place?”

  “You’ve seen Sten.” The name caught in his throat and for a horrible moment he thought it might not come out. He had no idea how much the fox knew. He felt naked, as though even then telling all; as though his racing pulse were being taken.

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen Sten,” Reynard said. “I don’t know what he’s written you, but I know he wants to see you. He sent me to bring you.”

  Loren hadn’t risen, not certain his legs would hold him; still, within, that calm eye observed, astonished at the power of a letter, a name, that name in another’s mouth, to cause havoc in the very tissues and muscles of him.

  “There’s a bar up the street,” he said. “The Yukon. Not the New Yukon. A back room. Go on up there. I’ll be along.”

  He watched Reynard stick his way up the street. Then he turned away and sat looking out across the water as though he still waited for something.

  After Gregorius had been murdered, the three of t
hem—Sten, Mika, and Loren—began gradually to move into the big house. They took it over by degrees as Gregorius’s spirit seemed to leave it; the kitchen first, where they ate, where the cook stuffed Sten and Mika out of pity for their orphanhood (though what Mika felt was not grief but only the removal of something, something that had been a permanent blockage at the periphery of vision, a hobble on the spirit; she had hardly known Gregorius, and liked him less). Next they moved into the living quarters, spreading out from their own nursery wing like advancing Mongols into the lusher apartments. The movement was noticed and disapproved of by the maids and housekeepers, for as long as they remained; but Nashe, utterly preoccupied with her own preservation and the prevention of anarchy, hardly noticed them at all. Now and then they would see her, hurrying from conference to conference, drawn with overwork; sometimes she stopped to speak.

  The government was finally withdrawn altogether from the house and moved back to the capital. Nashe hadn’t the personal magnetism to rule from seclusion, as Gregorius had done; and she didn’t have Reynard for a go-between. She knew also that she had to dissociate herself from Gregorius; the memory of a martyr—even if most people weren’t sure just what he had been martyred for, there were reasons enough to choose from—could only burden her. And Sten Gregorius must not figure in her story at all. At all. A small number of men in Blue continued to patrol the grounds; the children saw them now and again, looking bored and left over. The house belonged to the three of them.