“Eventually.”
“How?”
“D—” he began, and swallowed down the rest of her name. His eyes slipped up to the whites. “I see you. I see your—face.”
“Whose face?” asked D, but her brother was dead.
By the failing light she picked her way back through the ruins to the burned box of the closet. She felt around in it again: the walls were solid, the floor was gritty. From her pocket she removed the tiny drill bit and dragged it across her palm. D winced, bled. Nothing happened. What if she had only had one chance? She closed her eyes. In the dark of her mind she searched for a face and found no one.
At the edge of the wreckage, she stubbed her toe: a perfect gray egg of stone.
Her lieutenant was waiting for her at the Museum. He had discarded his red uniform and was dressed like the student he used to be: baggy trousers and a ratty sweater. A scab marked the corner of his mouth where he’d been punched. “What happened, Lieutenant?” D asked.
“Long story. But—I’m out. I lost my command,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “We can still pretend, can’t we?”
“Sure.” Robert tried to smile then, like it was nothing, like they were flirting in the library again, daring each other for permission. She pulled his face against her shoulder as he started to weep.
The reverberations from the shelling were close that night, the giant hands of giant potters punching down into mounds of wet clay outside the Museum’s walls. D thought she might have slept through them. The screaming coming from the embassy was the problem, an unholy chorale of wails falling up and down the scale. She climbed from her bunk and went upstairs to the window. Robert was already there. Below, the executioner moved from the back stairs of the embassy to the area by the wall, a bag over each shoulder. He was naked except for his soldier’s boots. There was blood on him, down his back, down his front. The pile of bags was high enough to climb.
“This is . . .” Robert trailed off.
“A bad dream.” D began to tug him away from the window. “Listen, come back to bed. I want to tell you a story about my brother.”
Robert shook her off. “I have to go over there.”
“No,” said D. The idea was so insane, she blurted a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You can tell me about your brother when I come back.” Robert kissed her on the forehead. “You better. I didn’t even know you had a brother.”
He strode away down the hall, down the flight of steps, and out through the empty doorway.
“Lieutenant?” D waited for his dramatic reemergence, his second thought, his shoes clapping against the steps. “Robert?”
Dust snowed from the ceilings with each blast, but the museum would never fall unless it took a direct hit. D removed the head of the shovel man from the engine of the train and put him on the body of the fruit picker with whom she shared her bunk. She lay beside him, comforted by his sly grin. “I see your face,” D said to the waxwork. “Let me see your face, let me see your face, let me see your face,” she prayed again and again, while the building rattled and the dust tinkled, and eventually she did sleep.
Night, a dream monster, the scrape of its claws like shovels dragged across cobblestones, the shameful warmth of her urine, the drunk nurse snoring in the rocking chair. She called, “Mommy!” She called, “Daddy!” They weren’t even home, she remembered, and D’s bladder found more water and let go a second time. Her brother then, slipping so quietly into the room that it was as if he had materialized beside her, placing a cool touch against her cheek: “You’re okay. It’s not real.”
“How do you know?”
“I am real. You are real. Everything else is a dream and dreams are less than nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“How? How? How?”
“A man told me. Now: sleep.”
A fog of smoke tumbled over the wood that half-blocked the door into the Museum, and unraveled across the first floor of the Museum of the Worker in a mustard-colored blanket. D walked through the knee-deep mist to the barrier. She climbed over it, made her way down the steps and into an opaque world. “Robert?” she whispered. “Robert?” D guided herself with a hand pressed against the wall of the Museum building. When it ended, she counted sixty steps—the empty space in front of the Occult Collection—and reached out again, finding her away around the corner to the main thoroughfare where the tram tracks ran. Here the smoke was wispier; D glimpsed shards of reality in the shifting air: the windows of a bakery, smashed out, the shelves empty; out in the middle of the street on the tracks, a dog biting and pulling at a sleeve that belonged to a crumpled body, trying to compel it to rise; a toy boat on the sidewalk, dropped, snapped in two pieces where it had struck the pavers.
“Robert?” she asked the murk.
A gunshot popped, ricocheting off something nearby. She pressed tight to the wall, feeling the report in her palms. A large, bulbous bird, turquoise feathered, hurried by chattering softly, ruffling against D’s ankles, and disappearing into the chalk and dust, its claws typing lightly on the stone.
She tried to backtrack, but soon found herself in an alley. She was about to backtrack a second time when she heard a growling somewhere in the smoke that did not belong to an animal. It was a man and he was also giggling and banging a metal object, a pan, maybe. D thought it wisest to keep moving forward.
The alley abruptly opened. The smell of cordite was strong enough to make her gag. D frantically waved her hands in front of her face to make a breathable pocket for herself, but the air was thickening. Somewhere not far behind her the growler with the pan had switched from giggling to sobbing, and he was closer. A few steps ahead she fell forward onto a bumpy incline. D grabbed at a rounded, textured handhold and began to crawl on all fours up a small hill. A person inside the hill inhaled. D stopped. Between thumb and forefinger she rubbed a piece of the hill: canvas—a small tent-like shape—a nose—a face . . . The hill groaned. D scrambled backwards and the hill shifted, the dozens of bodies rolling and coming loose, and she banged her head on the courtyard pavers, coughing and wheezing and clawing for open air, as the crazy person yelled from inside the vapor that he was he taking a census of everyone who told lies. What was the name of the sneak he heard he wanted to know, and he was clanging his pan as D found her knees again and scrabbled toward the rear wall of the museum building.
For a long while she worked her away around the opposite side of the building. She smelled fire. There were people running. There were more shots. Her palms were scraped and her knees were scraped and her head hurt where she had hit it. The mad man was still banging his pan, but the sound receded as D got closer to the street. She let her hands draw her around the stoop of the museum and up the steps to the crosswise board set across the empty doorway. D threw herself over the side and landed on the floor of the Museum.
In the nearest bathroom there was some water pooled in a basin and D splashed it on her stinging eyes. She spat, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. She told her brother she was afraid. She told him she needed him. The dirt-clouded water slopped around in the bottom of the basin.
D went down to the fruit pickers’ bunkhouse and got into bed beside Robert. “You’re here,” she said, but he didn’t respond. His eyes were closed. He was frowning. “Are you okay?” His eyelids were red-rimmed at the edges. D realized that his body was cold and hard, a waxwork’s body. There was the slightest gap between his lips and—he has no teeth because the executioner has used his tools to chisel them out, D thought, and even as she thought this, she was easing herself from under the wool blanket, never allowing her eyes drift to the place where the severed head had been mounted on the neck pillar.
On the other side of the curtain the hall was quiet. Slicks of ambient light glistened on the hardwo
od lane that ran between exhibits for plowing and scything and husbandry. D, as lightly as she could, walked toward the stairs at the far end.
“You know,” said the executioner. “People look forward to coming here. Simple people such as myself. A place that celebrates the common person. ‘Look,’ they says, ‘here’s what Daddy does. Here’s why Daddy’s so invaluable to our society.’ It’s something special for us, they says. They bring their children. If I had children, I’d want to bring them. And then, someone comes along and makes a joke of it.” On a stool in the husbandry exhibit he perched with the mattock across his knees. Beside him was the bull whose head her lieutenant had, in the course of their game, switched with the bespectacled head of an exchequer from the sixth floor exhibit on money printing.
In his other hand the executioner held the bundle of chisels and mallets and planers and trowels. He was shirtless. There was gore in his chest pelt and gore in his beard and something gunky and glistening at his scalp, so his hair was partially flattened.
D was stuck to the floor of the hall directly across from him.
“Well?” asked the executioner. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’ve defiled a national treasure. What have you got to say for yourself? Anything?”
She cleared her throat. “We were playing.”
He shook his head.
D went on. “You saw them take everything out. There’s barely anything left. And no one was coming any more anyway.”
The executioner rose. His knees cracked. He pointed his mattock at her. “I held off killing you because I thought you were taking care of this place. I made an exception for you.”
“Thank you,” said D. She touched her chest, as if she could feel the gratitude beating there, like a bat in an attic. “Thank you.”
For a few seconds the executioner squinted at her. “You’re fucking welcome.”
She ran. His boots thudded behind her. Six stairs and at the landing she yanked down a tapestry of men threshing wheat and hurled it down without looking backward. She heard the executioner grunt, heavy flapping as he fought with the fabric. D made the first floor and went rightward for the front of the building, lungs hitching, the smoke tearing apart across her body, the whistle of the mattock cutting space somewhere close behind.
A black shadow stood against the slate gray of the smoky hall and in the shadow’s hand was a glittering pistol. “Shoot!” screamed D. “Shoot! Shoot!” D dropped.
The teacher moved forward, emptying the pistol, each successive crack shattering against the last. Miss Clarendon continued to press the trigger, more than a dozen times, even though the gun was small and had been empty after four.
D sat up.
The teacher was standing over the body. Somehow the executioner had ended up on his back atop the threshing tapestry. The smoke oozed over him, the wooly tatters seeming to catch and tangle around his shoes, around the long claw of the mattock that he still clutched in a limp hand. One of the shots had taken away most of his jaw, but his tongue was still there, wet and pink in the bloody cave that remained. There was another neat hole in his chest and a third by his bellybutton. His other tools had scattered as he flopped. The chisels, the trowels, the mallets, and the scrapers, were strewn all over the glossy surface of the hardwood hall amid the smoke, like the leftover pieces of some child’s game.
Breath lifted a long tassel of red spit off of the pink meat of his tongue. The executioner’s eyes blinked at D, focusing.
She crouched down beside him, brought out the smooth, egg-shaped stone from her pocket. “Do you see my face?” she asked.
The executioner blinked: yes.
The first blow cratered the executioner’s left eye socket; the second made the eye itself disappear; bloody gray matter welled up at the third strike. D slammed the stone, raised it, slammed it, raised it, and by the time she stopped, the teacher had moved well away.
D flung away the stone. It clunked against the floor and slid away, eaten by the smoke. “You saved me.” She got to hear feet. The teacher had retreated to a bench. Smoke had gathered around her skirts; it looked like she was sitting on a cloud.
“Was that . . . ?” asked Miss Clarendon.
“Yes,” said D. “He was from next door.”
“Good.” But her voice, nears tears, confessed that it wasn’t.
“Let me help you,” said D. “I know what to do. We need a safe place until the fighting settles down.” D accepted the pistol and some bullets from the teacher. She reloaded it, helped Miss Clarendon to her feet and, hooking an arm around the other woman’s back, they moved together from the museum.
It was reminiscent of the way that D had, as a ten-year-old, led her old nurse away from her brother’s corpse in the sick room. They had been the last two, mother and father having gone to see the funeral director to select the coffin. She fixed the nurse a series of drinks and once the old lady passed out, D pulled on mittens and switched her parents’ pillowcases with her brother’s pillowcases. Although this action had its downside—her father’s wealth had turned out to be figmentary, his death unleashing a landslide of debt that swallowed the fine contents of their apartment and left D a penniless ward—she had been justified by the way her mother carried on, practically screaming her brother out the door of this life, and sending him to the next world with a headache.
Outside, they pressed their faces into each other’s shoulders, and sidled in a huddle toward the wreckage of the Occult Collection building. “Where are we going?” asked Miss Clarendon. “There’s a safe spot in there,” D said. Their shoes crunched on the crumbled brick and stone. D put a hand out, touched a charred timber, and led them into the lean-to of beams. The rectangle of the conjurer’s closet emerged from the smoke. D eased the teacher forward into the closet.
“What’s it go to?” asked the teacher. “A basement?”
A shell whistled through the invisible sky and D fired the pistol into the base of Miss Clarendon’s skull. The teacher fell forward through the black rear wall of the conjurer’s closet. D stepped after her.
The dead woman sprawled a few feet away on the floor of white stone.
Set into the columns of the temple were sconces holding flickering candles. Dozens of penitents sat upon the white stone floor with faces lowered and arms held close. There was a dais at the far end of the room, a plinth, and atop the plinth, a voluminous red bowl that contained a leaping fire. One of the penitents in a rear row wore a familiar gray jacket and a gray cap.
“Brother,” D whispered. “Brother.”
The figure in the gray jacket pushed to his feet. He turned to D. Beneath the gray cap his face was a cat’s face, one side cleaved, at the fissure the shine of bare bone. Her brother raised an arm; his hand was a trembling gray rat.
A hush fell over the assembly. A figure limped from the darkness behind the plinth, made its way past the fire, the light finding a glossy reflection in the purple velvet of his cape, and along the aisle, coming to greet the new arrival, to learn her name.
For Big Pete
The Necromancer of Lynka
Sarah Micklem
From Anticlimactic Folk Tales of Abigomas,
collected and edited by Dr. Marcel Auerle
Ferle was the despair of her mother, who thought the girl daft. Not a lackwit, no—more of a wander-wit, who tangled the thread as she spun, and let the milk curdle and the pot boil over. She never had her mind on her duties, yet no one could say with any assurance where her mind had gone instead. As for Ferle’s stepfather, he’d begotten a child of his own, now a burly boy of three, and he’d rather not have the girl underfoot.
So the mother and stepfather agreed: the girl must go into service. They procured a place for her in the household of Necromancer Rahmik, a wealthy and respectable burgher of Lynka, the foremost town on the Isle of Abigomas. Ferle’s t
erm of indenture was seven years, and the necromancer guaranteed that at the end of those seven years he would give her a dowry handsome enough to waft away the stench of the dead he raised in the course of his business. Seven silver coins, he promised. An enormous sum to Ferle’s mother, though a trifling sum to him. Ferle was sold, and as Ferle would in due time profit from it, her parents believed they had done well by her.
Seven years was an unimaginably long time to Ferle, who was eight years old when she arrived at the necromancer’s house. But time passed, as time will do, and before long she was twelve.
Her duties as under-housemaid kept her busy from an hour before dawn to an hour after dusk. She assisted the housemaid in scrubbing floors after gravediggers with muddy boots had delivered the disinterred; she scoured the marble table upon which the dead rested, laved corpses and brushed their hair, darned the necromancer’s stockings and polished his silver ewers. (I could go on, but her tasks were entirely of this sort, too dull and trivial to enumerate.)
Ferle did her duty passably well, but at least once a week she was discovered adrift with a scrub brush or darning needle in hand, and that air of vacancy which her mother had found so irksome, and which now irked the housemaid in turn. The housemaid tried to cure Ferle of daydreaming by dragging her by the ear to the kitchen and walloping her with a wooden spoon. Such remedies had been tried before. They never took.
Necromancer Rahmik, like many well-to-do persons, lived considerably beyond his means in order to demonstrate how well to do he was. He made a fine show with floors of tile glazed to look like marble and doors of wood painted to look like more expensive kinds of wood. But he practiced a good many economies that he took care should remain invisible, which is why, when his page ran away homesick, he cast his eye on Ferle. She would make a passable page, for now. She was taller than many boys her age—her figure went straight up and down—her nose was decided, not the button nose girls ought to have—and her voice piped like a boy’s not yet broken.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31 Page 10