Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “It's all getting more and more complicated, Rathven. Hard to keep it all clear in my head.”

  “More complicated than Duncan Shriek?”

  “Much more complicated.” Doors that were more than doors. Wyte become something greater and lesser than human. Suddenly, the city was several cities. Time was several times. As if he'd been looking at his map and the overlay, and suddenly realized more overlays were needed to really see Ambergris.

  The confusion must have shown because she gave him a half-smile. A kind of peace offering. “I'll be finished soon. Then you should get some sleep.”

  In the apartment Bliss can visit anytime he wants to?

  He tried to smile back. “But why did you call? Really?” Teetering now. Two towers. Heretic's skery. Wyte's improbable charge. Dapple sprawled in the dirt. Dead.

  She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. As if trying to convey something to him that could not be said aloud.

  “Sintra came by the hotel this morning.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “Did she tell you she came down to see me?”

  Finch, suddenly alert: “No ...”

  “Did she tell you she asked about your case?”

  “It was a short phone call.” Already marshaling stones, sandbags, the wreckage of tanks as a barricade.

  “Well, she did, Finch,” Rathven said. “She asked me about the case. We talked about it.”

  “And you told her about Shriek?” Incredulous.

  Flat, dead tone. Not a glimmer of humor in her eyes.

  “No. She already knew.”

  Feral came to the door scratching about ten minutes after Rathven had left. Frantic as Finch undid the locks on his apartment door. Complaining about the tragedy of not having been fed. That there should be such injustice in the world. Despite himself, Finch smiled.

  Finch locked the door behind Feral. Once again shoved a chair up against the doorknob. Put down twice the normal amount of food for the cat. Then lay down on his couch, forcing himself to eat a packet of gray cap rations. The packet was porous. The contents a swelling purple. In his mouth, it tasted like onions and salt and chicken. Knew it was not.

  Welcomed the utter fatigue. It emptied his head. Made it hard to think about unthinkable things. He'd go back to the station in the morning. Sort it out. Somehow. The apartment still looked like shit, but not as much like someone had trashed it. Actually found himself hoping it had been Bliss, come back to finish the job. Otherwise, Stark was already upping the pressure. Or, there was an unknown element out there.

  Too tired to sleep. Poured himself another whisky. Sat down with Shriek: An Afterword and Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. He was facing the apartment door, with his Lewden Special wedged in beside his left leg. So he could reach across his body to draw it. Sitting upright eased the pain in his shoulder.

  Cinsorium looked like a kind of abridgment of Duncan Shriek's theories. He started to read it, then put it down. Needed something first that gave him more of a sense of Duncan's character.

  He picked up Shriek, began to skim it. Saw at once the conceit: Duncan's voice in parentheses, commenting on Janice's history of a broken family and the first war between the Houses. Skipped to the end, read the editor's afterword. Duncan's disappearance. His sister's disappearance and possible death. The manuscript found in a pub Finch figured must've gone under or been destroyed years ago. With notes scrawled on the pages by Duncan. Which meant he'd still been alive when Janice went missing.

  Finch turned back to the beginning. Charted Duncan's rise and fall as an historian, a believer in fringe theories about the gray caps. Almost all of them now proven true. Obsessed with a student at the academy where he'd taught history. A long, unhappy love affair. Duncan turned into a stalker. Discredited. Become unbelievable. Skipped Janice's own rise in the art world. Beside the point to Finch. He found Janice an exasperating narrator. She hid things, lied, delayed the truth. To undermine and slant. Like a particularly crafty interrogation subject.

  Gradually, he got a sense of the tragedy of Duncan's life. How close Shriek had been to success. To being a kind of prophet. An injustice, his fate working at Finch's sense of fairness. A staggering sense of an opportunity lost. A path not taken. An Ambergris where Duncan Shriek was lauded and the Rising had never happened. Or been defeated. A horror at the idea of nothing really changing in a century. The Houses had gone from war to war. The city was more fractured than ever. Would still be fractured even if the gray caps disappeared tomorrow.

  All depressingly similar, and yet he remembered the brief years of peace more vividly than the war. No matter how hard he tried to forget. A better life. A better way.

  Kept searching Duncan's asides for anything that might point to why the man would wind up dead a hundred years later in an apartment he'd once lived in. Found a reference to switching apartments to evade the gray caps. Another reference to working as a tour guide while living in an apartment in Trillian Square. The place had been destroyed long before the Rising. Finch wondered if the few children growing up now even knew who Trillian was anymore.

  Then there was Shriek's obsession with Manzikert. With the Silence. And with Samuel Tonsure, the monk who accompanied Manzikert underground and who never returned, although his journal-half evidence of an ill-fated expedition, half the ravings of a madmanreappeared sixty years later.

  I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.

  A quote from a book Duncan had found helpful called A Refraction of Light in a Prison had an uneasy resonance with the desert fortifications from Shriek's memory bulb:

  Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif's empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress . . . Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure's famous journal.

  Could Zamilon be the place he had seen in the memory bulb vision?

  He read, too, about Duncan's own explorations underground, following in Tonsure's footsteps:

  I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants-the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me-I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image.

  Like Wyte. A few pages later, a section Janice had taken from Duncan's journal. About doors. About a door. A kind of recognition from deep within that stirred him to read carefully.

  A machine. A glass. A mirror ... But it hasn't worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance-something they don't quite understand ... Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes ... Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever ... After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door ... The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it.

  Skipped a few pages. Found a section where Janice related a conversation with her brother.

  Duncan: The door in the machine never fully opens.

  Janice: What would happen if it did?

  Duncan: They would be free.

  Janice: Who?

  Duncan: The gray caps.

  Janice: Free of what?

  Duncan: They are trying to get somewhere else-but they

  can't. It doesn't work. With all they can do, with all they are,

  they still cannot make
their mirror, their glass, work properly. And, then, on the Silence:

  You learned it wrong. That's not what happened. It didn't happen like that ... They disappeared without a drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren't killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment. A flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children-they didn't die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn't expect, couldn't expect, and all those people-they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly-but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.

  Also, mentions of the symbol from the back of the scrap of paper: “Manzikert had triggered the Silence, I felt certain, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow catalogued and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground.”

  Throughout, Finch caught a refrain by Janice. Didn't know if it was Duncan's refrain echoed by Janice: No one makes it out. And near the end, with Duncan apparently lost underground again, this sentence: “There may be a way.” What the woman had said to him when he'd blurted out bellum omnium contra omnes.

  No one makes it out. Yet There may be a way. Janice had thought Duncan meant metaphorically. Spiritually. Maybe it was literal.

  Couldn't help thinking of the words on the scrap of paper in Shriek's hand: Never lost. Like a call and response. There is a way. Never lost. Was that what he should have said to the woman?

  Absently, he petted Feral, who'd leapt onto his lap, nudging his head up against Finch's chest. Tossed back another shot of whisky. The alcohol had begun to numb his shoulder. It also helped push worry for Wyte into the back of his mind.

  Returned relentlessly to the facts.

  A man last seen alive a hundred years before turns up dead in an apartment he once lived in. There's a dead gray cap with him. The gray cap has been cut in half as neatly as if he'd been killed in a slaughterhouse.

  The dead man is Duncan Shriek, former discredited historian and explorer of the underground. The Stockton spymaster Stark believes the apartment holds a rebel weapon, but the only thing left in the apartment is the body of Shriek.

  Stark kills all of Bliss's men, but leaves Bliss alive. Bliss travels through the city using doors that aren't doors-doors that when you come out the other side, it is the future.

  And Shriek, the center of it all, believed the gray caps had built a door to another place, and the Silence was a result of that door malfunctioning.

  Finch took out the photo of Shriek the Partial had given him. Stared at the photo on the dust jacket of Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. Hadn't looked at either that closely before. Not like he was looking now. Shadows of light and dark in both. Framing a man with eyes shut, eyes open.

  Who is he? Who was he?

  Eyes Shut had a beard made of fungus. A hard face. A well-preserved quality to it. Weathered in the way of someone who has lowered his head into the wind too many times. Eyes Open had a close-cropped normal beard. A kind of naive quality to the face. The smile perhaps too self-satisfied. The look of a martyr-in-waiting.

  Eyes Shut's smile was that of someone with a secret.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  6

  oken by a sudden shifting of shadows. A vague awareness of a figure. A sound like a thousand soft gunshots. Dreamed he'd gone down the hole behind the station's curtain. Into the underground. Found the gray caps there. Sleeping on their sides. Heads down like resting silverfish. Heretic and the skery lying peacefully on a mattress made of curling ferns. Finch went to join them and immediately exploded into spores. Was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  Finch had a headache. Mouth felt thick. The sound: a thunderous rain. A woman knelt in the gloom beside his bed.

  “Sintra.”

  The sharp smell of grass and water on her skin. Wanted to fall into her. Hold her like he was holding onto Bliss as they fell into darkness. Not caring in that moment what Rathven had told him.

  But couldn't decipher the look on her face. Somewhere between watchful and sad. Made him hold back.

  “I could've been anyone,” she said. “You're too trusting.”

  Teasing: “But you're not anyone.”

  Sintra rose and dropped something onto the bed. He picked it up. The extra key to his apartment.

  “Keep it.” Offered it back to her.

  “No,” she said.

  Frowned, kept holding it out to her. “It's yours. Not mine.” Disturbed by her now. Calm disrupted. There are doors and there are doors.

  “Someone broke into your apartment,” she said. “I don't want you to think it was me. Keep the key. Maybe I'll take it back later.”

  Finch turned on the lamp next to the bed. Could see her clearly. A white blouse that revealed the curve of her breasts. Black pants that ended in stylish boots she must have bought long ago. Over that, a deep green trench coat ending at the knee. And still that expression on her face. Almost grim. Almost frowning.

  Lowered his arm. The key felt cold and small in his palm. Made him weak to think of her without it.

  “Are you sure?” Couldn't risk more than that.

  “Yes,” she said. Folded her arms.

  He got up. Reached out to touch her hair. She pulled back.

  “What's wrong?”

  “I don't want to stay here,” she said. “I want to go out.” Not looking at him.

  So this was how it would go down. What could he do but let her.

  “Okay, so we'll go out, then.”

  “You don't have to,” she said. As if suddenly undecided. Thought he understood. But he felt reckless. They'd only gone out twice before.

  “I want to.” And he did. Wanted to be out in the world. Even if that world was completely fucked up.

  “I can go out by myself.”

  Touched her face with one finger, to brush aside a strand of hair. To feel the softness of her cheek. Brought her close. Kissed her on the forehead.

  “Let me get some clothes on. We'll go. Wherever you want to go.” No matter how far.

  Wouldn't burden her with the details of his day. Wyte erupting from ruins of his own dissolution to save them both. The mad charge to safety. The “snow” falling on them both. A whole world of torment he wanted to leave behind.

  “We'll go wherever you want to go,” he said again, from the bedroom as he dressed. Savagely. Like he didn't care. Putting it on her. Apartment wasn't safe anyway. A solid wall could become a portal. A man could die and keep dying for a hundred years.

  Came back out and made a show of sticking his Lewden in its holster. Put his arm around her, despite the pain in his shoulder. Opened the door. Feral shot out through the gap and was gone.

  Made a show, too, of locking the door behind them with Sintra's key.

  “You look rested,” she said as they went down the stairs. “That's good.”

  Didn't feel rested. Not anymore.

  Sintra: “There's a blackmarket party tonight. We'll go to that. I know the way. There will be signs.”

  An urgency to the night. A dangerous pace to it. In the sky at some distance: the green towers, lit up like a glistening festival display. They rose impossibly high. In another city, at another time, that stained, blurry light might have seemed romantic.

  The rain made it difficult to look for signs that didn't look like signs. A line of white paint in the gutter. A sudden fracture of light from a door. A muttered phrase from a drunk collapsed on a corner. At night, only about half the streetlamps worked. But all across the skyline phosphorescence draped and bled and hazed in and hazed out again. Ragged groups of camp refugees were gray smudges. A smoke smell, and a strong whiff of acidic perfume that came from a blossoming fungus like a light blue wineglass. No umbrellas. They looked too much like mushroom caps.

  They huddled in awnings. Ran across open co
urtyards. Hugged the sides of buildings. Splashed through puddles. Loosened up enough to laugh about it. Like kids. Like the Rising had never happened. Like she'd never returned the key.

  They crossed a bridge over a canal. Lights from both sides careened and cascaded through the water rippling below. Stood there for a few minutes. The rain had let up. Came in waves now, with calm between. The night had turned cooler.

  He took her hand. Took in her bedraggled hair, the way the rain had moistened her cheeks. Wanted her. Badly. While another part of him wanted to ask, “How did you know about Duncan Shriek?”

  “It's almost a normal night,” he said.

  “What's a normal night?” she asked. But she was smiling. A little.

  “A night when my apartment isn't trashed twice,” he said.

  “What do you think they wanted?”

  “Money, probably,” he said. Unable to look at her while he was lying.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I had a day like any other.” She smiled at him. Revealed near perfect teeth. Wondered again if the dogghe skill with herbs helped.

  Couldn't take it anymore. “Sintra, what do you do?” Such a naked question. It split the air like a thunderclap.

  She studied him. The light from the canal reflected in her eyes. Anything from rotted leaves to dead bodies could lie at the bottom.

  “I could be anyone, John,” she said. “I could be someone you wouldn't like very much.”

  “I might have a better idea than you think.”

  “No. You don't. What if I have three children? What if I'm a trained assassin? What if I'm a prostitute?” In one swift motion: she had his gun and was pointing it at him. “What if I'm somebody who wants you dead?”

  Took a step back, had his hands out in front of him. Too surprised to do more.

  But a flick of her wrist and she was offering the Lewden back to him, grip-first. While his heart dealt with it.

  “Point made,” he said. Taking it. Swallowing. Hard.

  “Maybe I should tell you I'm a spy for the rebels. I think that's what you'd like me to say, isn't it? But why does it matter. Why now?”