Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  Velvet shuddered at the thought and then jumped, ridiculously, as the wedge jolted over the hump into the station proper, a thin stretch of tunnel that ran for at least a mile upward toward the center of the massive structure.

  A few feet into the tunnel, the dense mist loosened its grasp and dissipated from the door hinges and the ropes that hung from the ceiling for passengers to steady themselves. It fell away as though the inky tendrils themselves were traveling to the station, though Velvet knew the idea was insane. Mist didn’t think. Neither did shadow.

  Ridiculous.

  The shadowquake was the strongest yet, and while it shook the Latin Quarter of purgatory like a rag doll, its influence could not penetrate the stoic power of the station. The railcar began to travel smoothly. Gone were the bumps and shimmies, and soon the aura from the globes of gaslight in the tunnel wall broke through the gloom.

  Velvet nodded toward the elderly woman in the seat in front of them and smiled at the baby she was holding. “So bright, that one,” Velvet said, leaning over the bench.

  “Yes,” the woman responded, her voice crackling like a wood fire. She dropped her chin toward the glowing bundle and smiled. “This soul is so strong. I won’t have him but a moment. He’ll be movin’ on faster than you can jump a live one, I suspect.”

  Velvet made a forced attempt to chuckle. The woman had certainly been around long enough to know the cycle. Babies always moved on the quickest. They’d had a few infants in the Retrieval dorms, and they’d passed them around between people for a couple of days before they’d start to fade.

  Dimming, they called it.

  Their light goes out, flickers and dies, and all that’s left is a dusty husk that crumbles and blows away like the powder in a packet of Sweet’N Low. Of course, it’s much weirder with adults, Velvet thought. And there was way more Sweet’N Low.

  Way more.

  Chapter 5

  The amber glow of gaslight trickled into the train from the tunnel’s mouth, not in steady streams but jagged rivulets, mixing with the dust until the air around the passengers was streaked a muddy sepia. The gruff railmen bolted from the lead car and tossed off the heavy chains that bound the railcar to the giant wedge beneath them. The metal screamed back with a loud echoing clatter. Then the car was lurching forward, rattling across the connecting tracks into the station itself.

  The left side of the railcar opened to a vast platform filled with huddled groups of people, haggard and wrapped in blankets or quivering under propped parasols as tiny bits of debris showered from the ceiling. When she was alive, Velvet had done a paper on the immigration of the Irish into New York, and the image of these souls, these refugees, looked almost exactly like those encyclopedia pictures of Ellis Island, downtrodden people exhausted from their travels and gathering together to hold themselves up. Among them, station guides roamed with handheld signs indicating a stall in departures.

  “No departures for the duration of the incident!” they shouted.

  The passengers spilled from the railcar doors and onto a gently rumbling cobblestone floor, the clops of their shoes echoing in the hushed space. Then a quiet fell over them. The disembarked stood, faces stunned and staring into the crowd, as though waiting for someone to tell them what to do, where to stand.

  Velvet wasn’t that person.

  I guess you should have taken my efforts to calm the situation seriously, huh? she thought smugly.

  She, Quentin, and the twins darted past them, weaving through the throng of people, through clouds of dust and ash wafting from their soiled clothing. There was something else in the air, too, a thin striation of the gas that fed the lanterns and globes. Velvet’s eyes darted toward Logan and caught him inhaling deep mouthfuls before noticing her gaze and then shrugging dismissively.

  Once an addict, always an addict, she thought, shaking her head.

  “There!” she shouted, pointing toward a towering arch topped with a stained-glass transom—in its beveled shards were the silhouettes of four heroes, a Salvage team from some long ago and certainly harrowing event. She wasn’t aware of the story, and just then, with her nerves firing like a machine gun, she didn’t really care. Her team had their own story to carve out.

  Beyond the arch, a stair led up into the vast hub of the station. Single file, they took the risers two at a time, barreling through souls making use of the stairs for seating. They shouted warnings of “Salvage team passing! Make way!” And stepped on only a few hands.

  At the top they were met with a daunting vista. Fresh un-ashed souls poured into the station from the primary crack. Their memories burned as though God had dropped a star into the station. Station guides pummeled them with fistfuls of ash and pointed them toward long meandering lines that led to a bank of a hundred or so lecterns. Intake officers bellowed orders and sorted souls as fast as they could, despite the continued quaking beneath them.

  A glass dome towered above them all, though the panels themselves seemed made of a shiny boiling tar. The mist of the shadowquake blocked out everything even at that height.

  Velvet wondered how far the quake had spread.

  Had it passed into Little Cairo? Into Kerouac? Certainly not as far as Vermillion. That would mean the magic they’d be facing was monstrous. Were there at this very moment other Salvage teams speeding to their stations, crossing into the daylight to converge on the source?

  It was hard for her to imagine a disturbance so vast.

  The last shadowquake hadn’t been nearly this large, and as they had traveled to get to the station, they’d broken free from its clutches about halfway up the mountain. They had been piled on top of each other in the rear seat of the railcar, and looking behind them, they could make out the shape of the thing, round, or roundish, with flares of darkness exploding from it. The shadowquake was like a reverse image of the sun, and stripping away the heat from everything it touched.

  Velvet remembered looking upon the shape, terrified … and that had been at a distance.

  It squicked her out to think they were still inside the center of the dark blob, like being in the belly of some gigantic ink-fueled octopus monster or something equally disturbing—Velvet wasn’t really into descriptive metaphor at the moment. She had much more pressing matters to tend to.

  Luisa nudged her. “This is a big one. Something really terrible must be happening out there.”

  “Thoughts on what it is?” Velvet shouted to her team.

  “A sacrifice!” Logan’s hands curled into the claws of some imaginary monster. “A witch or something. Warlock!”

  “Knock it off, dork!” Luisa swatted him in the back of his head, and a puff of ashen powder exploded from his dark hair. “It’s not a sacrifice.”

  “It could be.” Logan’s mouth scrunched up hatefully. “You don’t know.”

  “I do know,” she said. “This isn’t the Dark Ages. There aren’t any magicians performing weird rituals out there. Don’t you remember last time?”

  He shrugged. When it came to his sister, Logan did a lot of shrugging.

  Everyone remembered the last one. Dr. Hazel Perkins.

  A self-described medium and the host of her own moderately successful cable-access TV talk show, Hazel had chanced upon a cell—an orb filled with a stolen soul. They still didn’t know how that had happened. She’d planned to use it to conjure up images of people’s loved ones and “give their tortured minds some relief.” Unfortunately for them, on the night her show featured the act, their relief was purgatory’s torture. They lost three whole buildings that day, disintegrated down to rubble and spirals of twisted metal—not that the buildings in the City of the Dead were all that well constructed. After all, the people that threw them up weren’t necessarily builders or carpenters. They were more likely accountants, prostitutes, and children, which was probably why some of the buildings looked more like patchwork quilts than actual domiciles.

  “Over here!” a breathy voice called.

  Manny, their station
agent, broke through a ragged group of refugees, waving cheerily. Platinum-haired and busty, Manny had been a film actress before a tragic car accident had left her with an even more tragic severed head to deal with. Though none of the Salvagers could remember her from the movies, the boys were nonetheless mesmerized by her every movement.

  Like that was a surprise.

  She was slick and graceful, with slender fingers and a shrewd strength flickering in her eyes that belied her bombshell exterior.

  The group followed as Manny turned and stalked off toward a tall gate, her heels clicking as she widened the gap between them. Beyond the black wrought iron lay a darkened cavern.

  The Shattered Hall.

  “Your crew has its work cut out for it on this one,” Manny said.

  “Looks like it!” Velvet jogged to keep up.

  “I’ve isolated the epicenter of the disturbance to a fortune-teller’s shop in Philadelphia. The details I’ve conjured will place each of you within a few blocks. Though this insertion will be a little different, you’ll be scattered where you need to be. The cemetery is not reasonably close, so I’m opting for a morgue.”

  “Tricky.” Velvet glanced behind her to find the twins straggling and Quentin walking backward, still gawking at the mass of souls in the hub.

  Manny and Velvet came up to the tall gates, and the rest of the group crowded in behind them. Velvet cringed. She hated this part. Manny waved her hands in front of a huge spiral locking mechanism embedded in a solid block of metal, and then stepped away. The coil retracted like a screw pulling out of cork, scraping against the insides of the block. The sound was nails dragging across a chalkboard, or rather, a big metal lawn rake dragging across a chalkboard.

  Screeeeeeeeeeeeee!

  The crowds of people behind them in the hub turned en masse toward the squelch, clapping their hands over their ears and grimacing, a wail of general complaint issuing from their gaping mouths. Velvet was right there with them, keeping out as much of the sound as she could before it got a chance to crawl up under her skin and start a different kind of quaking up her spine.

  The sharp end of the coil slid from the block, and Velvet watched with amazement as the metal sealed itself, healing, as though it had never been pierced to begin with.

  “No matter how many times I see that, I think the same thing. Genius, doll!” Logan’s mouth lolled, and his tongue protruded from his lips. He always tried to figure out the process, to see if it were a trick of light or some magical illusion the station agent was pulling. It was as if he were convinced it was an earthly sort of magic, one he could learn. He was determined to dissect her movements. But after the process was complete and there was nothing else to examine other than the gates swinging into the darkened passage, he exhaled heavily and shrugged it off.

  Velvet admired perseverance and recognized it immediately in the kid. He’d never give up. Never stop wondering about the mechanism, and never veer from completing his poltergeisting. They were alike, the two of them, though she hoped her face never twisted up the way his did while he was concentrating.

  Super crazy-looking.

  They followed the click of Manny’s high heels into the darkness, and stopped before a barely visible stone wall, itself the color of coal.

  Manny drew a matchstick from her sleeve and struck it against the wall. It spit to life and cast a living glow on the facade, revealing the appropriateness of the hall’s name. Fissures lined the wall; some split into the rock from floor to ceiling while others were mere scratches. The largest crack ran straight up the center, a foot wide and so deep that Velvet imagined it running straight through to the center of the planet—if purgatory was even on the planet. A library ladder clung to a rail that ran the full length of the hall, however long that was. Velvet couldn’t remember ever seeing where it ended.

  “And so it begins,” the station agent said.

  She ran her slender finger along the sharp edges of the crack. It reacted to her flame, shimmering deep inside as though some treasure were sheltered in its depths, a thread of mother-of-pearl, opal. Something. No one was sure exactly how long ago the station’s foundation had been poured or how it had been done. Some speculated that the foundation was here before the first soul arrived, but that the station itself was constructed over time, as souls with the skills to construct it passed through. The final phase appeared to be turn-of-the-century work, but these halls, these walls and fractures, were old.

  Ancient, even.

  Not likely the work of human souls.

  “Now,” Manny said, and gestured for Quentin to stand beside her. “One at a time. Like I said, this isn’t a routine extraction. And the location is not exactly conducive to plopping you down all in the same place.” She nodded in Velvet’s direction. “You’ll also have the late hour to deal with. It’s past two in the morning.”

  Velvet sank. That would make things much more difficult.

  “Remember,” Manny said in a stern voice. “Follow protocol, and everyone makes it back. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Velvet barked, and glanced around at her team.

  “Yes, ma’am!” the other Salvagers shouted in unison.

  Manny narrowed in on Velvet, a hint of playfulness in her eye. “I’ve been waiting to tick off your fifty-seventh soul for some time now, Velvet. I hope you won’t disappoint me.”

  “No, ma’am.” Velvet suspected Manny had a bet going with some of the other station agents—nothing she could prove, but the thought kind of lingered like a bad headache. Regardless, the woman reminded her that she was staring down the elusive number fifty-seven.

  A benchmark moment … like a centennial or a sweet sixteen.

  “Did you get a clear view of the involved?” Velvet asked.

  The station agent’s mouth tightened with distaste. “A medium. Madame Despot is her name.”

  Velvet nodded.

  With that, Manny leaned into Quentin and whispered. The boy nodded and moved to stand by the crack. She moved on to Logan and then Luisa and finally clutched Velvet around the shoulders and spoke softly into her ear.

  “Where you’re going, there’s a blue car with a flat tire. The police have labeled it for towing with bright orange wax lettering, an L and a seven. A cat with one blue eye and one brown scratches itself beneath a lamppost; a tiny bell jingles around its neck from a red necklace of yarn. A stack of newspaper has turned into a mound of rotting pulp, but still visible in its center is the image of a fireman carrying a crying baby wrapped in a tartan.”

  The pull-focus. Three details worked best.

  The car. The cat. The newspaper.

  Manny shook the flame off the long match, thrusting them into dusky shadows. Then she stomped back toward the hub without another word.

  Velvet spun around to inspect the faces of her Salvagers, which was much more difficult now in the absence of a flame. Logan’s lip curled in a sneer. He gnashed his teeth and pumped his fist in the air. Ready. Luisa had the steely eyes of a hawk that was prepared to hunt. Quentin … well, he was busy scraping a pebble from the sole of his shoe with a thin rod of metal. On the upside, he was very focused on it, and Velvet figured that was a good thing.

  “Nice focus, Q,” she said.

  “Tha-thanks, Velvet,” he stuttered.

  She gave him a nod, and he mirrored her and gave her a thumbs-up, as though they shared some secret she wasn’t aware of. Velvet returned the gesture furtively.

  “You’re welcome.” She turned toward the crack and began to strip off her clothes. “Pass me a box, will ya?”

  One skittered across the floor and crashed into her leg.

  “Ow!” she yelped.

  “Sorry,” Quentin responded quickly. “Can’t see all that well in here, since there’s no light and all.”

  She was sure he meant that he couldn’t see her, though she knew for a fact he could, but she merely turned her back, stripped out of her clothes, and stuffed them into the box. She pressed herself close to
the wall so the others could have their privacy.

  “Ready for number fifty-seven, Salvagers?” she asked, her voice echoing down the hall.

  “Yeah!”

  “Totally!”

  Velvet led the charge, pressing the tips of her fingers against the crack’s sharp edges, digging her nails in as far as she could. She felt for the energy there, the familiar suction, and was off.

  Chapter 6

  Moonlight flooded the deserted street in an eerie purple glow, casting bruised shadows on the rows of buildings. In the distance, Velvet could hear the low rumble of car engines but nearby, quiet had settled in for the night, until the sound of a tiny bell jingled and Manny’s tabby sprang up and pranced across the hood of the abandoned car—blue, of course. The cat stared at her, one blue eye and one brown, and hissed. Velvet backed away, sidestepping a soppy mound of newspapers, and darted down the street.

  She peered in darkened windows as she hurried from shadow to shadow, frantically searching for a body to possess. Her mind reeled, recounting the events of her day. It seemed she’d been running from the minute she’d left Bonesaw’s shed. If one more thing went wrong, she swore she’d have an aneurysm or whatever the ghost equivalent was.

  At the very least she’d scream.

  The poltergeists would already be scouting out the source of the shadowquake, or hunkering down in the walls, or making ghost chains, or whatever it was they did to prep for their part in a mission. She kind of left it up to them. Logan and Luisa were damn good at their jobs, and if Velvet were the one to hold up the show, they’d never let her hear the end of it. She’d be witness to a near constant floor show of ridicule, and that was not something she was about to let happen.

  Man, she thought, searching frantically for a host body. At this rate I’ll be lucky to beat Quentin to the perp.

  Fog crossed the next intersection looking exactly like a big fluffy semitrailer, but Velvet trudged through barely noticing, a rarity for her, as she loved nothing more than afternoon cloud identification … except for finding a body that worked well.