by Felix Gilman
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” Marta’s deep voice cut through the panic. “Arjun? What do you think you’re doing?”
The back door opened and Ruth emerged from the house. She carried a heavy wooden water-bucket, and a heap of grey rags. “Arjun?”
“Yes.” For a moment, he wasn’t sure where he was. The men and women in the courtyard were just that: men and women. Scarred and hungry-looking. “Yes? I’m sorry. I …”
“I thought you were gone,” Ruth said. “You came back.”
“Get him out of here,” Marta said. “He’s more trouble than he’s worth.”
“Come inside,” Ruth said. “Come away.”
She left the rags and the bucket on the steps, and retreated into the light of the house. Her beauty as she turned her face away made him dizzy. When Arjun had first stumbled into Carnyx Street the beauty of the Low sisters had somehow not struck him. He’d been lost and confused; he’d been blind.
She led him back over the stairs and into her house. The dusty room was lit by a single candle. She started up the music-machine’s delicate engine.
“You scared Marta’s patients away,” she said. They were paperless men, she explained; criminals, homeless, dissidents, and undesirables. They were prone to fevers. They came at night, once a fortnight, to be treated under cover of darkness and away from the eyes of the Know-Nothings.
“You scared them,” she said.
“Ah. I thought they were …” He let the sentence hang. She looked at him curiously, as if something about him fascinated her.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
“I was lost,” he explained.
She touched his dirty hand; the stumps of his fingers. There were the beginnings of tears in her eyes.
“Poor ghost,” she said.
“I should not have left you.”
“I never thought you’d come back.”
“I shouldn’t have left you with those … those men. Did they hurt you? I shouldn’t have brought those men down on you.”
“What men?”
“From the Mountain, Ruth. My pursuers. The Hollow Men. The unhappy men. Do you not remember?”
“Oh, poor ghost.”
“Do you not remember?”
“Maybe you imagined them. You had a fever.” She was still holding his hand; she squeezed it gently.
“I did. That’s true.” He couldn’t bring himself to argue; her kindness overwhelmed him. He could not understand her kindness to him.
The disc on the music-machine skipped and snarled and wound down. Ruth went to replace the disc, and rewound the handle. Long-dead strings sang in the dusty room. When she came back she brought hot tea, and she held one of her pungent cigarettes in her hand. She passed them from her lips to his; he did not refuse either.
“You came back. I never imagined you’d come back. Ghosts never stay. I thought you’d just … drifted away. I thought you’d maybe found your way back where you came from. I hoped you’d found whatever you were looking for.”
“I found nothing. I lost myself. I should not have left.”
“You won’t be able to help yourself. You’ll remember one day soon and then you’ll walk out of here. Will you tell me when you go? Will you tell me what you’ve seen?”
“Ruth, we vanish because something catches us.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“We don’t belong here.”
“No. You belong somewhere better.”
She was holding his hand again, warm and tight. There were still tears on her cheeks. He brushed them away with his thumb. First one cheek, then when she did not recoil from his dirty and worn and thin hands, but simply smiled at him, the other. Then, laughing—it was like a starved and ragged sob—he kissed her.
… so he was not as tired as he’d thought he was; he surprised himself with his own strength and capacity for pleasure; he’d not have thought he was able even to climb the stairs to the bedroom, which in fact they almost tumbled up, weightlessly, together, the old boards and timbers creaking both urgently and musically under their feet.
He was self-conscious at first, and ashamed; the dirt, the scars, he was unwashed, rake-thin. The clothes she pulled from him were stained and ragged and filthy, the hands he touched her with were cut and blistered, he was no better than one of the wretches in the garden—she didn’t seem to care. She saw something in him. She sat astride him; she bit him. She held him like she was trying to save him from falling. She continued both crying and smiling throughout the act. His greasy hands tangled in her thick hair; her drug-scented fingers ran softly across his raw stubble. The city’s dirt did not dismay her. She reclaimed it and made it beautiful. She saw past his outward deficiencies into … what? What did she hope to reach through this congress with ghosts? But she seemed suddenly very beautiful, and he didn’t let the question trouble him unduly.
The bed sagged, and creaked, and sprung loose wires, and was too small for two, but even so he fell deeply asleep.
When Arjun woke, Ruth was sitting on the side of the bed, still pulling her stockings on, and Marta stood in the open door, her arms folded, watching them sadly. It was early morning, cold and bright.
“Another sister lost to another ghost?”
Ruth shook her head fiercely. “You won’t lose me, Marta.”
“Maybe,” Marta said. “Who knows?”
“I know.”
“No one knows.”
Arjun sat up. “Low sisters, please. I don’t want to bring you any harm. You saved my life, and I stole from you, and ran from you. I want to make amends.”
Ruth said, “You don’t owe us anything.”
“How are you going to repay us?” Marta asked.
“I lost myself out there. I have forgotten my name, my purpose, why I came to this city. The Mountain is barred to me. The Beast is locked away and I cannot reach it. There are terrible memories gathering behind me; I can’t make sense of my own life. I need a purpose. I’ve learned something about myself: I cannot live without a purpose. Let me work for you.”
Ruth had crossed to the dresser. She was clothed again and affixing her earrings. Her back was to him and she watched in the mirror as Marta stepped into the room.
“We have work for ghosts,” Marta said. “If you’re stuck here you can make yourself useful.”
“Anything.”
“Then bring back our sister.”
Arjun, surprised, looked to Ruth’s face in the mirror. Her dark eyes watched him from the glass, pleading and urgent and hopeful.
An Unconventional Understanding
of Time-A Prophecy Confirmed?-
“Come Back One More Time”-
Some Inauspicious Predecessors-
Secret Societies
Arjun would not presume to criticize the Low sisters. All that he would say was that their understanding of time was … unconventional.
They believed, unshakably, that everything in Ararat first started to go sour when Ivy left them. Before that was light, and warmth, and the shops on Carnyx Street were filled with wonders; back when Ivy had sat in her shop at No. 43 and tended her old records and her music-machines. And not just music-machines, Ruth said. Ivy’s place was full of old devices of all kinds, scavenged from dumps, from attics, from the rubble of demolished buildings; half broken, rusting, often of obscure purpose, so that it was hard to tell what was a device in its own right and what was only a long-lost part of some larger apparatus. Ivy used to sit cross-legged on the floor among her machines, her hands full of screws and wires, grease streaking her fingers and her furrowed brow. She got it from the Dad—that fascination with machines, with the secrets in them.
After the Dad left things had been hard for a time, but Ivy was the last straw.
She’d been the most beautiful of the Low sisters by far, Ruth said, there was no question, and when she’d emerged from the world of things and machines she could make men do anything for her, as if they were just more wind-up toy
s, but she rarely bothered. In her own way she was a very innocent creature. Without Ruth and Marta she might have forgotten to eat for days on end. Scattered all around her shop were devices that spun and clattered and counted off numbers, and things that cast light, and things that cast shadows, and things that walked on tiny tottering metal legs. She was the most brilliant of the sisters. After she and the Dad came back from …
“Yes,” Marta said. “That’s enough, Ruth.” And Ruth went to busy her restless hands making tea.
“The machines are gone,” Marta said. When Ivy went away, she left the music and music-makers behind, having never cared for music, having never in fact quite forgiven the Dad for leaving the music shop to her and burdening her life with noise; having always suspected that the man was trying to make some sort of joke at her expense, which Marta allowed was very possible. So Ivy left the music, but she had all those other rusting machines packed up in boxes and sent on. Ruth took on Ivy’s remaining stock. Three sisters became two. And Ararat went bad.
The factories encroached on Carnyx Street. Ezra Street and Capra Street and Ball-and-Chain Lane and Lewis Circle, all of which had been beautiful once, and free, now belonged to Holcroft Municipal Trust, Holcroft Municipal Trust, Patagan Sewer & Piping, and Holcroft again, respectively. The Know-Nothings settled into those places and shut them down. They closed the Museum, and the theaters, and the meeting halls. They closed the last few long-empty temples and dynamited and steam-shoveled them away. Fewer and fewer customers came to Carnyx Street, to what was left of Carnyx Street; the factories worked them too hard, paid them too little, kept them in company stores, running up company debt, buying company stock …
Of course, Arjun observed, the Low sisters were still young, and Ivy couldn’t have been gone for more than a year or two, while the city Arjun had gone wandering in had been sliding into exhaustion and drudgery for decades; those towering factory complexes were not built in a day. By any sensible reckoning the process of city-death was very far advanced when Ivy left Carnyx Street. Nevertheless the sisters remained adamant; the rot began with Ivy’s departure, with the breaking of their circle.
If it were Ruth alone, Arjun might have argued, but Marta was practically minded and did not seem overimaginative or oversensitive, and if both agreed—well, who was he to say how the city appeared to them?
He asked, “Why did she go?”
“She was taken,” Marta said.
“Who took her?”
“A ghost,” Ruth said.
“One of you lot,” Marta said. “We can’t touch him. Maybe you can, who knows? Set a ghost to catch a ghost.”
His name was Mr. Brace-Bel, and he was a very unusual ghost. He’d arrived on Carnyx Street without a penny in his pockets, but in splendid and aristocratic clothing of a bygone age; wig and ruff, velvet and buckle, silk and brocade—somewhat torn and scorched, but still fine. He appeared neither haunted nor hunted; he was not lost and nervous and forgetful like other ghosts. He pronounced himself to be unutterably bored with the ugliness and squalor of the times, and winced with theatrical disgust at the debased men who inhabited them. His voice was loud and hooting. He made enemies in the pubs, in Rawley’s Tearoom; he seemed to relish making enemies. He dared the drinkers to gamble, he put up his golden watch as stake, and he cleared out every man in the room. He declared that he was bored with his good fortune. When hotheaded young Thayer laid hands on him Brace-Bel produced a tiny silver pistol from his pocket, and waved it like a conductor.
He was a strikingly ugly little man, Marta said; wet-lipped and droop-eyed and fat-jowled, a rash of pockmarks on his cheeks, a feverish energy in his beady eyes. In repose his body appeared soft and fat and idle, almost boneless; when he walked, rapidly, urgently, gesturing with his plump hands to illustrate some obscenity or philosophical point, or to call attention to something that particularly disgusted him, or delighted him, or both—then he moved with the jerky confidence of some exotic bird.
“Brace-Bel,” Arjun said. “I know that name.”
Marta nodded as if her suspicions were confirmed.
“But I remember nothing about him,” Arjun said. “He was from another time, another place?”
“He said so,” Marta said. “And he spoke like he was.”
“He kept bragging about the old city,” Ruth said. “His city. About princes and kings and brilliant scholars and playwrights and wits. Gods and miracles. Monsters. He said he was a great man back then. He had … things. He had a silver stick, with a pommel, like a crystal of mercury, and it gave off a kind of light, like no light I’ve ever seen, except sometimes when there’s lightning over the Mountain. Like it was crawling, whispering, like there was something inside it. Something wonderful. It’s hard to describe.”
“Ivy fell for him,” Marta said. “She was so innocent. She couldn’t see how bad he was. She only saw that he was so strange, and so different, and he’d seen such wonderful things. Even if half of it was lies. I tried to tell her he was dangerous and she just screamed at me. Or laughed at me. And then one day she just went away with him.”
“We got a letter,” Ruth said.
“Yes,” Marta said. “A letter, three months later, telling us to send on her things. Her machines. None of her clothes; just the machines. She gave us an address. Nothing else. Not a word asking after us, or the Street. Ivy could be thoughtless—she was so brilliant sometimes she forgot her manners—but no sister of ours could be that cold.”
“You think she did not send the letter herself? Was it in her hand?”
“Yes,” Marta said. “But maybe that man made her write it. Maybe he copied it. Who knows? We wrote back. We said we’d not send on a thing until she came to see us.”
“If she had to go,” Ruth said, “we wouldn’t have stopped her. How could we? We’d have wished her well.”
“Of course,” Marta said. “Of course. But not like that. Not stolen from us.”
“Of course,” Arjun agreed.
“Men came,” Ruth said. “He hired thugs to come take her things. What could we do? They came with guns.”
“We followed them back,” Marta said. “That’s what we could do. He has an estate on Barking Hill. Fuck only knows how he got it.”
“Gambled for it,” Ruth said. “Or stole it.”
“We camped at his gate,” Marta said. “For two days. We shouted across the lawn. We begged him to let her go.”
“He had a lot of women there,” Ruth said. “We could see them through the windows, we could hear their voices. All in strange clothes. He had lights and music and women.”
“He never answered,” Marta said. “He just ignored us. So we went away, and we gathered up our friends, and about a week later we sent some men up there to sort it out. There were a lot of men on the Street who loved Ivy. And people on the Street stick together, anyway.”
“Smith, and Miller, and Sol, Basso, Thayer. Ah, most of those men are gone now,” Ruth said. “Moved away.”
“Sol died in the fire at the Fielding Foundry,” Marta said. “Miller got murdered by the Know-Nothings for talking out of turn.”
“I do know Brace-Bel’s name,” Arjun said. “The Beast in the Museum named him. In return for my blood the Beast spoke prophecy: Brace-Bel, and his beautiful blasphemies. “
There was a confused pause in the conversation.
“What happened?” he asked. “At the estate, I mean.”
“Brace-Bel had prepared his defenses,” Marta said. “His devices.”
“His magic,” Ruth said.
“If you like,” Marta said. “Brace-Bel’s a ghost and he knew ghost tricks. Things he’d brought from his city, or your city, or the Mountain. Sol and Smith came back and they wouldn’t talk about it. Miller came back and he said he didn’t remember anything. Thayer babbled about lights and voices, and kept crying, and he’s never been right in the head since. Basso never came back at all.”
“Brace-Bel’s a monster,” Ruth said. “How could we h
ave known? Poor Thayer.”
“We should have known,” Marta said.
“Every month I write to her,” Ruth said. “I tell her how the Street is.”
“You know he doesn’t let her read those letters,” Marta said. “It’s a waste of ink.”
“I like it. It matters to me.”
“How can I pass his defenses?” Arjun asked. “What if I end up like Thayer, or Basso?”
“You won’t,” said Ruth. “I believe in you. You’re a ghost, same as him. You can match his magic.”
“I have magic of my own? I don’t remember any.”
“You will,” Ruth said. “You’re electric with it.”
“Are you afraid?” Marta asked.
He looked from face to face—Marta scrutinizing him carefully, practically, calculating his weight and worth; Ruth’s face nervous, half elated. He lied, no.
… Brace-Bel. Arjun lay awake that night. The Beast had said that name; surely that was confirmation of the Beast’s prophetic powers. By chasing down Brace-Bel he could set himself back on his proper path … to whatever the absence in him was, whatever he’d gone seeking in the first place.
There was an obsession in him, confused and unfocused. The grinning and menacing faces of the madmen at the mysterious Hotel; the darkness of the Mountain. What had he been looking for there?
“You’re different,” Ruth had said. “You remembered something.”
He’d shaken his head. “Nothing important.”
Ruth was half awake, dreaming or thinking about something. He didn’t know what. He stroked her dark hair as she lay there, and wondered if Ivy still lived, and how Ruth would take it if she were dead; how best to break the news, if it came to it …
The next day it rained, a yellow and acrid downpour that rattled off the roofs and made the streets hazy and dark.
“One more day won’t make any difference,” Marta said. “Gather your strength. No sense catching a fever.”