by Felix Gilman
He scowled.
“That ghost said you speak. That woman, Ivy, says you speak. Why won’t you speak to me?”
It stayed silent. After a while, he laughed again. “Just a dumb animal. Speak; it’s your last chance. No? Just a thing. I knew it. I’m sick of looking at you.”
He watched it awhile longer.
Ivy—there was another problem.
At first Maury’s lads had locked her up in one of the Chapterhouse’s cells, but that hadn’t worked out; they’d needed all the cells to separately interrogate the local League boys. Acting on their own initiative, they’d moved her across the Square, into the Museum. They’d locked her in one of the storage rooms on the upper floor, among cracked and dusty paintings, shrouded statues, gold and marble relics—horrible stuff, Maury hated it. She seemed quite at home there—like a queen from one of those old stories, in a chamber of treasures.
He visited her in the evening. The room was half dark and felt haunted; she stood by the narrow window in the light from the streetlamps.
She said, “Can I help you, Inspector Maury?”
“If I want your help I’ll fucking tell you.”
She turned back to the window, ignoring his bluster.
Her beauty confused him. He wasn’t even sure she was so beautiful, really; maybe it was only the light.
Young enough to be your bloody daughter, Maury.
Well, so what? He wasn’t fucking courting her. She was his prisoner. She was a whore for fuck-knows-what sort of alien powers, that dreadful ghost Brace-Bel, she knew things about that monster …
He said, “Are you all right in here?”
“Yes, thank you, Inspector.”
“It won’t talk to me.”
“Take me to it,” she said. “It’ll talk to me.”
“Oh no. Oh no. You stay where you are. I’m not having you two plotting. Tell me what to say to it.”
After a long silence, she said, “Maybe you bore it, Inspector Maury You can’t threaten it. Try making a deal.”
That was all she’d say. No point roughing her up—Maury had learned that. As he turned to go, without meaning to, he said, “Thank you,” and he felt another little bit of his authority slip.
A whole new storm of shit in the mo mine !
It turned out that the local Holcroft Rep—the officer whose job it was to liaise between League Local 141C and the Holcroft Municipal Trust that sponsored them—had sent off a telegram of his own, complaining about the Local’s ill treatment at Maury’s hands. And so now suddenly there were men from Holcroft poking around, smooth men in suits and ties, junior executives, a class of men who always made Maury uncomfortable.
They wanted to know what the hell was going on.
Who ran the League? Who was in charge here? It was hard to say. The city was a big place, and the League was notoriously, obsessively secretive about its operations, and the Combines were even worse. Need to know. Asking questions not encouraged, not at all. Paranoia was the order of the day, not only a survival instinct but the organizing principle of the polity. Sometimes it seemed like the League answered to the various Combines and Trusts, who paid all wages, sponsored all operations; and it seemed that the League’s men were only there to keep the city’s business running smoothly, to maintain a very profitable status quo. Then again, there were times when it seemed the League was a power unto itself, the city was the League’s to mold and shape, and the Combines existed only to fund it. There were people who said the League and the Combines both served the Mountain, come to think of it—who knows?—Maury wasn’t a philosopher.
The executives from Holcroft wanted to know what Maury thought he was doing—charges against half the Local? Was he mad? Disruptive. Embarrassing. Bad for business.
Who was in charge, when things got complex, was usually a matter of who shouted loudest and who drew first. Maury saw the young executives off. They had the money, but he had the guns, and the fear.
And all day, at the back of his mind: the monster. Its eyes. The secrets it withheld from him. In the evening, when the executives were gone, he went back down to its cell. Impossible. Fascinating. Tormenting.
“This is your fucking fault, you know.”
It ignored him.
“You stink.”
He checked that there was no one at the door. Whispering, self-conscious, he said, “Why won’t you talk to me? If you talk to me maybe I’ll let you live.”
It hissed and scraped its dull head against the bars. It fixed him with a contemptuous yellow eye, as if to say that it knew he was lying, and despised him. Magnificent eyes—something complex and mysterious worked in their depths, like golden gears.
When he went to see Ivy, she laughed at him. “You’re so literal-minded, Inspector. Life? Try offering it something it wants.”
He stopped in the hallway outside for a cigarette. The Museum’s halls were full of statues of forgotten Gods—horrible things, too many limbs, awful expressions. This is what it’s like to be corrupted, Maury thought. He’d thought the fall would be harder, somehow.
The junior Holcroft executives brought reinforcements, and over the next couple of weeks the situation got—complex.
Mr. Wantyard himself made a personal visit to the Chapterhouse. Wantyard—Holcroft Municipal Trust’s Chief of Operations for the Fosdyke, Fleet Wark, and North Bara Districts. A big man in the Combine. Grizzled, gouty, red-faced, and quick to anger, bullying, expensively tailored in pinstripes and scarlet silk ties. What’s going on? Inspector Maury, what is the meaning of this?
So Maury took Wantyard down into the bowels of the Museum, into the monster’s stinking cell, and let him see for himself.
Wantyard peered into the shadows, caught his breath as if about to retch, and recoiled in horror. “Kill it,” he snarled. “Kill it at once.”
Maury felt obscurely disappointed—in Wantyard? In himself?
“Wait,” Wantyard said. “Leave it for a while. Let’s get the bloody hell out of this place, Inspector.”
After that Wantyard seemed to settle into the Chapterhouse, and the Museum. He was around twice daily. He brought his own staff with him. He took on the Chapterhouse and the Museum as a new project, and devoted himself to it with red-faced intensity.
And Maury found himself cut out of the loop. The situation had been wrenched from his control.
Suddenly there were questions about the deaths of his men back at Barking Hill, Lewis and Waley. Suddenly there were questions about Maury’s character.
Bureaucratic warfare—it gave him a fucking headache. Vicious as knives in an alley—knives at least were quick.
He went and visited the prisoner—Ivy—and she sat by him and listened to his grumbling. (He’d had furniture moved up into her room—he’d found himself worrying about her comfort.) She nodded and said, yes, I see. It wasn’t exactly sympathy, she wasn’t sympathetic, but it was at least a kind of cool and scientific curiosity, which was better than nothing. A kind of closeness. Once his strained emotions got the better of him and he smiled and put a questioning hand on her thigh. The look on her face—that cold mocking smile! Never again. He’d never do that again. He wanked himself to sleep that night like he was a fucking teenager. He toyed with the possibility of raping her. He didn’t quite dare. People would hear. People would talk.
They were already talking. They noticed his nightly visits to the prisoner, and how, whenever he could get a minute away from meetings and hostile telegrams, he slipped across the windblown Square and down into the Museum’s bowels to commune with the monster.
“What are you?” he asked it.
It stared blankly at him.
“What do you eat? How do you work?”
It shifted—its rough scales made a noise like a sigh.
“Are you a God? Like all those statues upstairs? Is that what you are?”
It appeared to fall asleep.
“Why won’t you talk to me? If you think I won’t understand you you’re wro
ng. I do a stupid job but I’m not a stupid man. Talk to me.”
It ignored him.
“Well, fuck you then.”
Back and forth across the windblown Square, Maury went, from Chapterhouse to Museum and back again.
There was usually a twice-weekly market at the far end of the Square, but it had been canceled. Who gave that order? Maybe Wantyard. Maybe Maury did it himself; he’d signed enough papers that he might have forgotten.
So who were these people who hung around the corners of the Square, looking dismal, worried, frightened? Who watched him from the shadows, as if they were screwing up their courage to ask him: What’s going on? What are you doing to our Museum?
One of them was a dead ringer for Ivy. He tried to grab her but she outran him.
Wantyard summoned Maury into his temporary office, in the dusty former curator’s office of the Museum.
“I’ve had my doubts about you, Inspector.”
“Mr. Wantyard …”
“But you did well to expose this … unpleasantness. This place, the Museum, don’t know how it lasted so long. Under my nose.” He scowled. “Makes me look bad. Should have come to me first, Inspector.”
“Mr. Wantyard, the investigation …”
“Shut up, Maury. I’m handling this now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you seen the people outside, Inspector? Watching us? Like they don’t have jobs to go to. Makes me sick. They know, Inspector.” Maury started to speak, but Wantyard cut him off with a wave of his hand. “The people have long memories. They dream, Inspector. They sense something unnatural here. It’s all gone too far to be resolved quietly. Make a public announcement, Inspector. Let them know. A show of force. Starting tomorrow we destroy this place, bit by bit, those awful statues, those mirrors, the paintings, the machines, all that machinery and witchcraft, Inspector, that monster.”
He dabbed at his sweating forehead and jowls with a silk handkerchief. “Bit by bit, Maury. Drag it out into the daylight, into the Square, and smash it. Burn it. The monster last. We want people to see. Go on, get to work.”
The posters went up. Eager young Know-Nothings went running through the streets nailing them up on trees and doors: By Order of Inspector John Maury of the Civic League and Holcroft Municipal Trust, the Building Popularly Known as the “Museum of History and Natural Wonders” Is to Be Purged of Its Contents …
And now the situation slipped further out of Maury’s grasp. Someone else was visiting the monster—once, when he crept down at night, unable to sleep, he found a fresh lamp by the edge of the cage, a fresh smell of cigarette smoke. Who was it? “Are you talking to them, monster? Why won’t you talk to me?” No answer. Still no answer. “Fuck you, then—tomorrow you get the fire.”
He went to visit Ivy, and found Wantyard there—questioning her, so he said, but in fact from the look of it paying court to her like a love-struck schoolboy. “Get away, Maury,” Wantyard said. “Get back to work. Are we ready to begin the destruction yet?”
They weren’t, yet. First they had to order hammers, kindling, pallets, and crates to move the Museum’s contents out into the street. More paperwork, which somehow fell to Maury. And late that evening—as he sat alone in his makeshift office, and looked across the Square at the one lit window in the Museum, where Wantyard was still talking to Ivy, his Ivy—Maury made a decision: he misaddressed the requisition forms.
“That buys you a few days,” he told the monster. “Maybe I can tell them it was just a mistake. A few days, no more. I won’t do it again. If you want to talk, now’s your time.”
It moved its head from side to side—so slow.
“What would happen if I let you loose? Would you run? You look so fucking fat and lazy.”
It stayed silent.
“You know, I just realized there’s no lock on this cage. There’s no door. How did they ever get you in here? Who locked you away?”
Its tongue flickered across its scarred jaw.
“I think you can fucking move when you want to. I think you’d charge up those stairs like a bull. I think you’d kill anything in your way. I think you’d make the streets shake. Broken windows. Screaming children. I bet you’d roar. You snuffle like an old man in that cage, but I bet in the open air you’d roar. Yellow eyes like the moon. Shattered cobbles and bloody claw-prints there in the morning. Nightmares all over the city. They’d never forget you. They’d never find you. I bet we’d never find you.”
It hissed.
“Fuck I’d like to see that.”
It bared its irregular teeth. He fought back an urge to place his hand within the bars, to experience the bloody thrill of its teeth …
“Fuck, I need more sleep.” He felt suddenly almost sick with exhaustion. “I wouldn’t let you loose if I could. You’ll never go free. I have a job to do. People are starting to talk. Soon we’ll burn you.”
Ruth
Ruth sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Marta sat across from her, drinking her aniseed tea. The Know-Nothings’ poster was stretched out on the table between them. Ruth read it over and over as if hoping to find a loophole. By order of Inspector John Maury of the Civic League …
The poster spoke of the “contents” of the Museum—contemptuously, as if it was only a warehouse full of old food cans or oil drums or something. There was no mention of the Beast. Was it possible that they hadn’t found it?
Of course not. Of course not. They planned to kill it.
There was nothing like it left in the city, and they planned to kill it.
Her eyes watered—she felt so angry, so helpless.
She wished Arjun had come back. Not particularly because she thought he could do anything to stop the Know-Nothings or save the Beast, but only because it was so depressing. She’d given up hope of him returning. Another ghost, vanished—the city worked the way it worked, and there was no point hoping otherwise.
She blinked back tears. She said, “Fuck that,” out loud, and Marta started. “We have to stop them,” she said.
“How?” Marta said. “There’s no way. Those kind of men get their way. That’s just how the city works.”
“We can’t just let it die. It’s the last … It knows things.” Marta sighed. She swirled the thick leaves in her tea. “We have to do something,” Ruth said.
Marta looked into her tea leaves for a long time, and said nothing.
The Swallows of Quinet Green-
Spoliation-The Carnyx Street Action
Committee-Faster-Masks and Games
Arjun
Arjun lay on the soft grass and watched the sky. Clouds drifted in the warm blue heavens. The light had the clarity of high places, and it seemed that he could see every precise black or white feather of the swallows that drifted on the breeze. He smelled flowers for which he had no names. Apart from the fluting of the birds there was a huge and echoing silence.
Birds! Flowers! The earth rotated beneath him, its vast weight tumbling through infinity. The Metacontext was open to him again! The City Beyond was all around him!
Brace-Bel lunged, looming, filling the sky with his round sweating face. “You know Shay’s secret! Where have you brought us? Bring me home at once!” And he grabbed at Arjun’s lapels and bore down on him with all his weight.
Arjun struck Brace-Bel smartly in the throat and he rolled off, gasping. When dealing with Brace-Bel, he’d decided, it was all a question of who was to be master.
Arjun stood.
They appeared to be in a park, on beautifully manicured lawns, at the edge of a steep grassy bank. They’d come through the open door of an unmanned information booth. A handful of brightly colored tourist brochures had spilled through after them—according to which they were in some place called Quinet Green. He’d never heard of it.
On the far horizon there were barely visible kites. Behind them were the hazy phantoms of a city skyline. Otherwise they were alone.
They were far from the Mountain.
He helped Brace-Bel to his feet. The fat man regarded him warily. “I propose a truce, Mr. Brace-B—”
Brace-Bel swung his stick for Arjun’s knees, and Arjun, who’d seen the spark of cunning in Brace-Bel’s bloodshot eyes, and was ready, stepped in to wrestle the stick away. They fell together and rolled down the grassy bank, to land in the sand trap of an empty golf course.
“A truce!” Brace-Bel said. “Let me stand! A truce!”
Arjun held the stick. He examined the crystal on its tip. “How does it work, Brace-Bel?”
“I paid dearly for that knowledge, Arjun—why should I give it to you for free? Take me home.”
“No, Brace-Bel. For one thing, I don’t think I remember the way back. It’s been so long.”
“Then leave me alone. This time is good enough for me. There are flowers; there is beauty.”
“You have to come back with me, Brace-Bel.”
“To that ugly Age? To that fear, that darkness? Don’t be absurd. You go face your death on the Mountain, if you must—I shall remain here. This time will do well enough for Brace-Bel.”
Arjun tossed the stick back to Brace-Bel. “What else do you carry, Brace-Bel? What other weapons have you got in your pockets? Your rings, that necklace—too vulgar to be jewelry. Did Shay give them to you? Are they devices}”
Brace-Bel’s hand went involuntarily to his necklace.
“Brace-Bel, I must free the Beast. It’s well guarded. Ivy, too, wherever she is. I need your weapons. I think the Beast sent me to you so that we could save it. And you—I thought you loved Ivy. Don’t you want to save her?”
“She needs no saving, Arjun.”
“Come back with me, and I promise when we’re done, before I go up the Mountain, I shall take you home.”
Brace-Bel sighed. “Very well.” He reached out, shook Arjun’s hand, and, grunting with sudden effort, pushed him over; then he ran panting and sliding up the bank.
Arjun got up, gave chase. Ahead, Brace-Bel clambered up over the edge of the bank and was framed for a moment against the blue sky. The swallows of the Green swooped and fluttered by in the warm breeze. There were no birds so beautiful in the city of the Low sisters, in the shadow of the Mountain. They reminded Arjun of something; they gave him an idea. They scattered as he ran after Brace-Bel.