CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  The Girl shouted, “Like you know my parents! How could you?”

  Cop Carla’s mouth hung open in silence for a moment. The children never knew what she would have said next because, right then, her head burst into flame. The Boy had never heard such a terrible shriek in all his life. But even more frightening was the deep, guffawing laughter that was just as loud as Cop Carla’s screams. Who or what was laughing like that? It was a laugh, the Boy was sure, that would scare even the Kid, were his friend to hear it.

  “D-do something!” He shouted at the Girl, “Eat the fire! You c-c-can s-save her!”

  “It’s too late,” the Girl answered. “Like I would anyway. I hate her.”

  A voice erupted from the darkness: “Are you here, wayward daughter? We have your friend. That confused child who doesn’t know whether to be a boy or a girl. Would you like to see what we’ve done to your friend?”

  The Girl dug her fingers into the Boy’s arm, hurting him. She ran, dragging the stammering Boy behind her, leading them both deeper and deeper into the dark greyness of Greytown.

  The Girl spoke again. “I’m getting you out of here. It’s too dangerous for you. Too dangerous for me, too, to have you with me. The only way I’ll be able to save the Kid is alone.”

  “The Kid is my friend, too. I’m n-n-n-ot going to ab-aba-abandon you. Either of you. I’m not a c-coward.”

  The Girl leaned forward and pressed her lips against the Boy’s.

  “I never said you were. But . . . this is where I come from. I escaped when I was five years old. I’m invisible to them. But you, you’re a stranger. They can sense you, find you. I can hide you a little when we’re touching, but that won’t save you forever. I can find the Kid—or at least I can try—but if you stay I might lose both of you.”

  “What about m-m-me? What if I l-lose the two of you? We’re all three of us friends together.”

  “I’m sorry, Boy.” She kissed him again, and he shivered when her tongue touched his. Then he felt smoke pour out of her mouth and into his throat. He tried to break free, but her grip was much stronger than he expected. He lost consciousness.

  Part 2

  Home Is Where the Friends Are

  The Boy woke up coughing. Milo held his hand and said, “Welcome back, Boy.” Milo wore red overalls and a pink shirt. Then Venus, dressed as elegantly as ever, walked into the room, holding a tray with a tea set and a glass of water. “Three-berry blend?”

  The Boy’s throat was too raw, and he almost choked when he tried to speak, so he nodded instead.

  Venus poured the tea for all three of them. He said, “The Girl brought you here, carrying you in her scrawny arms. Who would have thought that little thing could be so strong?”

  Milo added, “She said to tell you that she was going back, and that you shouldn’t follow. But she didn’t say where. And then she ran off.”

  The Boy drank some water and found his voice again. “We have to go to Greytown. To save the Kid. Please.” The Boy jumped out of bed.

  Venus and Milo exchanged a glance. Venus said, “Greytown?” The two men clasped hands. Milo asked, “Is that where your friends are, Boy?”

  The Boy nodded.

  “Are they in danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  En route, the Boy filled them in on what had happened. Venus and Milo listened solemnly to the Boy’s story. But when the trio reached the edge of Greytown . . . the suburb was nowhere in sight. Where Greytown used to be, they found a big empty parking lot—the size of several city blocks—with sickly weeds growing out of the cracked asphalt.

  None of the nearby walls could tell the Boy what had happened or how to find his friends again.

  * * *

  The next morning, the Boy Who Speaks with Walls left his parents’ house at dawn, before his mom woke up, before she could fill up his tote bag with lollipops, give him a kiss, and tell him that he was her brave little man. Stepping outside without the comforting weight of his tote bag was an unusual experience, but he found that he liked the sensation. He felt both lighter and taller . . . and perhaps a little naked.

  The previous evening he had fallen asleep overwhelmed by despair, but the night had given him an idea.

  He crossed the street and stepped onto the porch of the Girl’s house, that house that looked so much like something out of Greytown. He stood there for a few seconds and breathed in the cool morning air. Summer was almost over. His eyes were moist with memories of his friends, the Girl Who Eats Fire and the Kid Whose Laughter Makes Adults Run Away.

  He didn’t knock. He turned the doorknob and pushed open the unlocked door.

  He stepped inside and touched the walls. The Girl’s house spoke to him and revealed its secrets.

  * * *

  Years ago, when she first emerged from Greytown, the Girl Who Eats Fire barricaded one door of the house across the street from the Boy’s. The door was in the basement, under the staircase. The slanted wall there remembered the hammering and the nails.

  She had emerged from that door, five years old, and dirty with blood and soot.

  The Boy tried to pull off the planks with his bare hands, but he wasn’t strong enough. He looked around and found a hammer. It wasn’t much of a tool, but it was probably the same hammer the Girl had used. If it had been good enough to put up these planks, it would have to be enough to take them down.

  * * *

  Crossing the threshold of the long-condemned door, the Boy felt suspended in nothingness, a sensation not unlike what he’d experienced when he first penetrated the smog of Greytown, but then he emerged into a narrow passageway. Nails stuck out from the walls. They kept ripping his clothes and scratching his skin. The passageway smelled like a laundry hamper stuffed with old socks drenched in sour milk and rotten eggs.

  To his right, there was a thumb-sized hole in the wall. When he looked through it, he saw an old man and an old woman sitting at a kitchen table. They looked almost the same, except the man was bearded and their clothes were different. They were very thin, much like the Girl, but their backs were crooked, their chins hanging halfway down their chests; their long grey hair was thin and wispy. Their clothes, also, were grey: the man wore a rumpled suit and tie badly in need of mending; the woman, a shapeless dress riddled with holes. Their skin was sickly grey.

  The woman stood up and opened a cupboard door. She took a small box from the shelf, closed the door, and sat next to the man.

  Together, they opened the box and took out its contents, one object at a time. The Boy thought it looked like a ceremony of some sort.

  The first thing they took out was a candle, and then a candleholder, and then a matchbox. The woman placed the candle in the candleholder, and the man struck a match and lighted the candle.

  Next, the woman took out baby pyjamas. The man reached in the box and brought out a pacifier. And then the Boy noticed that the old couple was crying quietly, tears slowly travelling down their grey cheeks. They continued to pull objects from the box: a rattle, baby shoes, a small frayed blanket. They laid these objects in a tidy arc around the candleholder’s base. Suddenly, the woman let out a deep sob. The man reached over, put an arm across her back, and tenderly kissed her cheek. His hand stroked her neck and his fingers rubbed her scalp. He held their heads against each other’s, and they cried together.

  A lump formed in the Boy’s throat. He wanted to cry along with them. It felt wrong and dirty to be spying on these people, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop watching.

  And then they took out a photograph of a little girl. The Boy gasped when he recognized the younger face of his lost friend.

  The old man said, “Who’s there?”

  The Boy answered, “I’m a friend of the Girl. I’ve come to rescue her.” The wall told him how to get out of the secret passageway. He stepped down nine steps in the darkness, ripping his clothes and flesh on yet more nails. Then he crouched down and found the hidden panel. He slid it op
en and, being so plump, was barely able to squeeze through it.

  He emerged in the pantry, with the old couple staring at him.

  The woman said, “Where did you come from?”

  * * *

  The old couple served the Boy tea while they listened to his story. He sipped at the tea as politely as he could, but it smelled—and tasted—like garbage sprayed with cat urine.

  There was a lot of commotion outside. Hoofbeats. Banging doors. Crashes. Shouts. Screams.

  The old couple shushed away all the Boy’s questions. They wanted to know everything about the Girl, who was their granddaughter. But the Boy grew impatient with them and their curiosity. His friends’ lives might be in danger, and he needed this old couple to answer his questions, to give him a clue as to how to go about finding the Girl and the Kid in this forbidding place.

  “What’s going on out there? Answer me! Is it always like this?”

  “No . . . they must know the Girl is back. They don’t like it when people leave. They’re going to punish her, make an example of her.” The old woman cried as she said this, and the old man, pacing around the room, balled up his fists so tightly that his long, cracked nails drew blood from his palms.

  “Who’s they?”

  “The mayor and her husband, the prime alderman,” said the woman, hiding her eyes. “Our daughter and her husband. The Girl’s parents.”

  * * *

  The Boy gathered his courage and wandered deeper and deeper into the darkness of Greytown, doing his best to steer clear of the mayoral forces roaming the streets. He kept his hands firmly on the walls of the closely packed houses, so he could remember his way back to the house of the Girl’s grandparents. He could always tell one wall from another, even when he couldn’t see anything.

  But the walls of Greytown were only too eager to share with the Boy all they’d witnessed: the years of brutality; of houses being broken into by semi-ethereal smog creatures in black uniforms; of broken, gnarled old people dragged away by smoke-spewing, coal-powered mechanical soldiers; of a laughing man with a mouth of fire riding on horseback, cracking his whip, and running down burning, screaming children. Occasionally, the walls gave him brief, shadowy glimpses of the Girl’s face, but he couldn’t tell if they were of her younger self or more recent memories. Also he was shown a grown woman, riding in a chauffeur-driven red convertible, whose face strongly resembled the Girl’s. With a handgun, she aimed at the heads of fleeing passersby. Too often, her aim was true.

  And then, within this barrage of unwelcome images and sounds, the Kid appeared, tied up and bloodied, being dragged on the cobblestoned street at the end of a rope. The image flashed by so quickly that he couldn’t figure out in which direction his friend was being dragged, or any other detail that might, however improbably, help him accomplish his mission. The Boy sharpened his focus, asking the wall of this abandoned printing press to tell him more.

  But then . . . “Boy! How did you get back here?”

  The Girl!

  The Boy couldn’t see a thing, but the wall shared what it perceived: in her arms, the Girl held the wounded Kid, naked and covered with bloody gashes.

  * * *

  The Boy led the Girl to the house of her grandparents.

  When the three children burst into their house, the old couple yelled out in alarm, but then they gasped when, as one, their gaze fell on the Girl. Before anyone had time to say anything, the Girl spoke: “No time to lose. They’re on my trail, and they’re bound to figure out where I went. They closed the city off from the outside world. This is our only way out, and we all have to leave right now!”

  The Girl’s grandparents crowded around her, but the Girl shooed them away. “There’s no time for that. Granma, Granpa, I missed you so much. I thought you were dead after what happened, but—”

  The old man said, “Your parents tortured us, but they finally let us go.”

  The Girl was speechless for a second, and her face scrunched up like she was about to cry, but then she turned to the Boy. “Get into the pantry and make the hole larger, or we’ll never get the Kid through there.”

  The Boy ran to the pantry, bent down, slid open the secret panel, and gripped the wall. He quickly apologized to the wall, then set about his task. The wall was old and thin, and it came apart as he tore at it barehanded with all his strength.

  The noise outside was growing louder.

  “That’ll have to be enough. Let’s go.”

  The old couple sat down at the table.

  “Granma! Granpa! You too!”

  The old woman said, “No, Girl. Our old lungs are used to Greytown. We wouldn’t survive in the outside world. Besides, this way, we can stall them, steer them in the wrong direction. We’re proud of you. That you’re so brave. That you have such good friends.”

  The Girl looked like she wanted to protest; instead, a tear slid down her cheek. She gently laid the Kid on the floor and rushed to hug her grandparents. But she quickly disentangled herself.

  Without another word, the Girl and the Boy carried the Kid up the nine steps hidden behind the kitchen wall, wincing every time they noticed a nail tearing into the Kid’s already lacerated flesh.

  * * *

  Venus and Milo, both of whom were licensed Aquarian therapists, nursed the Kid back to health. It turned out that the Kid’s father had thrown his child out of the house the day before the three friends’ adventure in Greytown, so the Kid moved in with Venus and Milo. They had plenty of space for one more.

  After the Kid recovered, Venus, Milo, and the Kid invited the Boy and the Girl to dinner every Thursday night. The Girl didn’t show up every week, but the Boy was there every time. The Boy had never seen the Kid so relaxed, as if all that rage had finally stopped piling up.

  Greytown never did reappear. So the city started construction on a shopping mall to go next to that huge, empty parking lot. The Girl and the Boy tried to use the doorway to visit the Girl’s grandparents again, to make sure the old couple was safe, but the door under the steps now opened onto a concrete wall. The Boy tried talking to it. The wall stayed resolutely mute.

  For months, the Girl cried herself to sleep. Often, the Boy would be there to hold her. Once her breathing had calmed and she was finally asleep, his shirt wet with her tears, he’d cross the street and go back to his house. When spring came along, her mood finally lightened.

  The next summer, the afternoon school let out, while the Boy, the Girl, and the Kid were hanging out and sipping smoothies at Max the Guru’s Hip-Hop Diner & Secondhand Nautical Gear Emporium, the Boy asked, “Do you miss making adults afraid?” The Kid—who still bore, and would always bear, scars that would forever remind the three friends of Greytown—hadn’t laughed that way since the previous summer. Whether the laugh was gone or whether the Kid had chosen not to use it anymore, the Kid wouldn’t say.

  “No. Not really. I think I was making myself afraid, too. Afraid of adults, I mean.” The Kid paused, scrutinizing the Boy. “Hey! I just realized something! You don’t stutter anymore!”

  “No, not since I had to go and rescue you guys.”

  The Girl let out a big whoop. “Rescue us? I did all the rescuing, buster!”

  Staring at the clock behind the cash counter, the Kid shushed the other two and whispered. “Wait for it.”

  The Boy said, “It . . . ? What’s going to happen? What did you—?”

  The Kid’s smile grew just a tad menacing, and the Girl’s eyes widened in anticipation.

  SIX

  Leah Bobet

  Six and Joe bunk together nights in the smallest north-side billet on the twentieth floor. “Take care of your brother,” Mama said when she gave them the key to the rooms. They shut the door behind them on their brand new domain: polished parquet floors and a fresh-netted balcony, a mattress in the corner and walls white as white, ready to be decorated with scribbles or artwork or sun, moon, and stars. And Joe pulled a face.

  “She meant it to me,” he said, with
a flip of his curly girl’s hair, and strutted into the tiled bathroom to wash.

  That’s not when Six started hating him, but it’s when he knew it to the bone.

  Six’s name is really Charlie, but he’s the devil’s boy right through, and they’ve been calling him by the devil’s number since he was old enough to walk. Sixth son of a seventh son; “You’re bad news,” the brothers’ wives tell him afternoons between rows of peas trained up to the ceiling on the seventeenth floor. A couple of them ruffle his hair after they say it, fix him with a crooked, between-you-and-me smile. A couple of ’em don’t.

  Nobody ever tells Joe he’s bad news.

  Six locked him out twice when he pulled faces behind Six’s back, and he wailed in the halls ’til Mama gave him his own key at seven, and no Higgins ever got their own key at seven. Six hid Joe’s stuffy toy next and Mama strapped him for the first time ever over that, and now Six is Bad News. Six won’t punch Joe in the nose for that insult ’cause Joe’s still the baby, and it’s his job to take care of the baby no matter what Joe thinks Mama said to who.

  But Joe gets away with murder, gets the steals of pastry and half-days off that Six never got even before he was Bad News. Joe’s seventh, Sunday-born seventh, and he’s had a destiny since he was yea high.

  It drives Six clean nuts.

  “I’ll die,” Six whispers, late at night, curled up in his bedroll on the edge of the fat mattress that the littlest Higgins boys share. “I’ll throw myself off the tall pasture and then you won’t be seventh no more.”

  This used to freeze Joe mid-breath. He’s nine years old now and got himself wise to it. “You’re fulla shit,” he says proudly—nobody ever boxed his ears none for saying shit like a street-picker’s boy—and puts a pillow over his ear.

  “I will,” Six breathes. Imagines leaping, the tug of wind, falling, falling. “I will and you’ll go to the devil.”