She reached out and pushed on the light switch. The outside faded to black as the room glowed. Thalia shut the door behind her, looking up to the ceiling, brushing her hand over her hair. Except for the pictures she’d hung, the walls were bare; the corners, clean. She forced herself to turn left, walk to the bedroom door, and open it.
Across the inky darkness, the bathroom glowed. From the top of the door frame to the floor, every single inch of the opening was covered in thick white webbing, picking up the light from behind and reflecting it into the room like ripples of a wind-ruffled pond. In its middle, a single colossal X sat as unmoving and hard as a metal breaker on Normandy sand.
“Don’t touch them, and they’ll leave you alone,” she blurted out, stepping back. Her sneakers grew hot and squishy with urine.
Behind the X, something large and shapeless moved. Thalia caught the curve of limbs. A saucer eye appeared, staring out at her through the gaps in the webbing, unblinking and curious. Behind the shape, no wall, no cabinet, no plastic shower curtain. Nothing remained that looked human-made at all.
Thalia grabbed the bedroom door with both shaking hands, closing it as quickly and quietly as possible. She ran to the couch, dumping her purse on the cushions, scattering the contents with her trembling fingers. The cell phone slid to the rug in a muffled thump. She scooped it up and stabbed at the keyboard. It took forever. Behind the ragged gasp of each breath, she waited for the inevitable scratch of something breaking free.
“Hello?” A man’s voice—the building’s super.
“Back, they’re back, the spiders are back.” Her jaws felt so tight, she could barely spit out the words.
“Lots of them?”
“A web over my bathroom door, covering the whole thing. Something’s behind it—it’s fucking huge. Bigger than me.”
“Okay, hold on. I’m gonna transfer you to the other super.” A steady mechanical tick washed into the line before she could protest. Thalia stared at the bedroom door, straining to hear any kind of movement or sound. Nothing.
“Yes,” someone finally answered, in a thin and static-scratched buzz of a voice from a trillion miles away. “Hello?”
“This is three-seven-oh-seven,” Thalia finally spoke. “I’m—”
“Three hundred seventy, apartment seven, right?”
“What? No, the thirty-seventh floor.”
“My switchboard says you’re calling from the three hundred and seventieth floor. Where are you now?”
Thalia squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m supposed to be on thirty-seven.”
Silence. Then: “Ah. Are you alone?”
“Where the bathroom used to be. Behind the webbing—something large.”
“The tenant. From apartment three hundred and seventy.”
“Oh.” Thalia dug her fingernails into her thigh, clenching until pain broke through the fear in clarifying waves. “So. We’ve both come—undone.”
“Hold on.” Another moment of silence, then: “I’ve put a call in to my team. The situation will be resolved. We’ve handled this problem before.”
Thalia opened her mouth, tears streaming down her face. Her words broke apart into soft sobs. “Am I safe? What do you want me to do?
“Sit tight, don’t touch any webbing you see, and we’ll get you back down.”
“Okay.”
The voice softened. “You’ll be fine. Look out the windows, if you can.”
“Why? What’s out the windows?”
Faint strands of laughter floated across the line, scratchy and thin. “I don’t know. I’ve never been down that far. But you should look—so I’ve been told.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever’s outside, you may never see it again.”
Thalia inched toward the living room window, and pulled on the curtain cord. Bands of bright light washed over her, and she squinted, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Gradually, beyond the cold glass, the thinning mists, out of the starry morning air they appeared…
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. Against her ear, the voice hummed and buzzed, fading to silence as the phone slipped from her hand to the floor.
***
Wind whistled through a hidden crack in the apartment, a melancholy siren song from beyond. Thalia sat on her bed, nursing large glass of wine. She had stood at the living room window for hours, hands and forehead pressed against the glass, legs cramped and trembling, eyes unblinking until tears ran down her face. Even then she didn’t move, not until all those vast configurations, all the creatures that crept and floated and flew, finally began to slide up and out of view, until disappearing altogether in a wash of rain-heavy grey. And then vertigo had taken over once more, every fiber in her body shifting in the elevator creep of her slow descending floor.
Thalia emptied her wine glass, then slithered off the comforter and walked to the window. She had never been sure what or where she had been looking out at, in those few incredible hours, but it had been more vast and shining and wondrous than a thousand Manhattans under the glow of a thousand rising suns. Now, before her: sickly lemon squares of light glowing in the heavy rain of an early evening along the Hudson River. Behind her, under pristine ceilings and hundred-watt lights: familiarity, empty and small. And the apartment that she deserved, that she had always been meant to have: some three hundred stories beyond her reach.
Thalia pressed a hand flat and firm against her chest, fingers splayed wide and pressing into the bones. Fingers, delicate lines of flesh, holding everything back that wanted to burst forth. She stood in the gloomy dark before the window, mouth pursed, concentrating on the ebb and flow of the city she’d never escape, of the erratic beat of her trapped heart. Only when it slowed back into dull, predictable rhythm, a beat so feeble she couldn’t feel it at all, did she take her hand away.
Wasp & Snake
Wasp is given two choices by her client, each procured by the night market merchant. From where he bought these items, he will not, or cannot, say. The biomechanical finger sleeves are beautiful: bright copper filigree, each tip sharpened to points invisible, the better with which to dispense luminous poison hiding in the hollows, poison which will be secreted from her alchemically transformed flesh. Wasp raises her thin black hands to the candle light, admiring how the metal elongates her fingers into gleaming claws. With great reluctance, she slips them off. Beautiful, but finger sleeves will be seen—and, once welded to her flesh, never to be removed. Her life will revolve around her hands, around this irreversible decision. Hasn’t life revolved enough already around things outside her own desires, the desires of others and the price they pay her to fulfill them? The merchant lifts up the other choice from its bed of wet velvet. It takes both hands, and Wasp’s client, who is paying, has to help. They stand before her, the two men and their terrible cargo. Wasp lets out a slow breath, then nods. If all goes well, her life will forever change, for the better. Then someday, with another commission, she’ll return for the sleeves—if only to use them to rip her own life from her throat.
***
Her screams cram up all unused cracks of the night. Many hear them. No one cares. The stone labyrinth of the underground market is constantly filled with such sounds, with human shrieks and screeches floating above the constant grinding, pounding, stitching of obscene machines. Bent forward over a rough wood table, the naked Wasp shudders. Her face presses down against a shallow groove, where so many others have worn the grain fine and smooth. If she looks up, her watering eyes sees fine sprays of her blood mist through the air, speckling walls already blackened with the blood of others who came before. Behind her, the merchant presses the electric hammer against her lower spine, and pulls the trigger again. Wasp dreams of slamming through the ground, her bones melding with saurian predators trapped miles below the surface of dead dried seas. Somewhere in the real world, the merchant bolts the second choice to her flesh, using living metals that flicker as they vibrate between one dimension and the next. The pain lightning-strikes its
way up her torso, and the roots of the metal object follow like rivers of mercury, burrowing into her brain. He is welding her to a darker universe. When he is finished, he says, her body will be a pipeline to hell.
He’s not opening a gate, Wasp thinks as she grimaces and howls. He’s just widening the road.
***
Five weeks later, Wasp walks painlessly past colossal doors into the cathedral hall of the bank where she first met her client, a distant season ago. In her gloved hand is the badge that allowed her to spend the past four days here, filling ledgers with rows of neat numbers, stuffing memos into pneumatic tubes and shooting them deep into the ground. Today is the day. She stops with her back to the doors, staring over her shoulder in the high noon light at the blurred reflection behind her. Under the sweep of a slim linen jacket and a pleated silk dress, the biomechanical tail erupts from her spine and coils round her waist, a heavy belt waiting for a single thought, sharp clicks filling the air as chromium vertebrae unfurl to reveal the flickering shadow of a stinger, sharper than anger, longer than pain. Or so she imagines. You will never see the stinger, the merchant had said. It resides in another universe, only revealing itself fully when you insert it in the target—and then, of course, you will not see it at all. Of course, Wasp had replied, as she poured coins onto his table. They clattered in the shallows where her body had laid, the gold so pretty against the warm brown stains. Her client had come to her with that money, and the promise of much more if she succeeded, if she gave his unfaithful snake of a lover precisely what she deserved. You know what that means, he said. Wasp stared into smoke-stained skies as she gave her emotionless reply.
Only a killing blow will do.
***
The sun shifts, slips down iron and glass walls, and the hum of customers and office machines fills the space in an endless ambient drone. Wasp sees her target, a mid-level manager she only knows as Snake, near the end of the day. Snake is light-skinned, with short bobbed hair of glossy brown. She is pregnant—the product of her infidelity. She walks hand in hand with her husband as they make their way across the glossy marble to the edge of the office pen. The husband gives his wife a chaste kiss, and winds his way back across the floor, his shadow growing until it momentarily covers the room. Wasp rubs her ink-stained fingertips on a small cloth, and crouches over the ledger. She doesn’t need to look. Snake steps behind the gated counter into the pen, heading to the opposite side of the floor. On her desk are neat stacks of paper that have accumulated during her absence, a two-week vacation spent with the man who approached Wasp last spring.
The day winds down. Wasp writes, and waits.
Bells chime overhead, announcing closing time. Wasp takes her purse and casually makes her way through the pen to a wood door marked EMPLOYEES. Just like the last four days, she walks down the hall to the women’s powder room, where she refreshes her face and makes small talk with the other clerks. The room empties out while she lingers in the stall, then Wasp slips into the small utility closet. In the dark space, Wasp sits, the tail warm at her waist, the stinger vibrating in a pocket of some unseen cosmos between her legs as she runs over the plans in her mind again, again, again, each end to her assignment the gruesome same.
Pity about the child.
***
Naked, Wasp stands at the edge of the pen, holding her breath. Before her, the empty bank floor stretches into quiet dark like an abandoned church—at the far end, a single green-shaded banker’s lamp glows. She moves like liquid, letting the tail unfurl and sway, navigate her body through the shadows with barely any effort of her own. Snake raises her head only at the last minute, when Wasp lets out a small sound, just enough to make her swivel the chair around. Wasp stares at Snake’s face, her widening eyes. She feels the tail rise up, the stinger shiver: does the woman see it? And Wasp’s tail plunges the stinger into the woman’s chest. In the silent hall, there are no screams, only the crash of wood to the floor, the hard breathing of the two women, the soft gush of blood. They lie together like lovers, Wasp mounted on the woman with the chromium prosthesis burrowing deep into red.
Snake’s lips move.
Wasp leans in.
Snake speaks again, words Wasp barely hears above the laughter.
My husband thanks you.
And the road widens, and Wasp feels the stinger open, and her mind grows small. She would draw back, pull out, but her flesh is nothing now, her body is not her own, there is only the tail and the stinger, sucking whatever gestates inside Snake into Wasp’s swelling flesh. There won’t be enough room. Even with the two of them, conjoined by the expanding tail, there won’t be enough room for whatever is about to be born.
A pipeline to hell, the night market merchant had said. He never did tell her which way the darkness would flow.
Cinereous
Paris
October, 1799
The nails on the heels of Olympe Léon’s boots are the only sounds in the silence of night’s chilly end. Click click click through indigo air, like the metallic beat of a metronome’s righteous heart. As always, when she sees her destination at the end of rue St. Martin, rising black and monolithic against the encroaching country and graying sky, her heart and feet skip beats. She thinks of each single drop of blood, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of the necks, and her small calloused hands and wide bowls to catch them all. Olympe, like all the assistants, is very proud of her training, and very afraid of losing her place, very afraid of sinking back into the city’s bowels, never to return. She never misses a drop.
The building has no name. It never has. Inside the courtyard, men in effluvia-stained coats scurry back and forth to one of the three large guillotines sitting on the worn packed earth. Scientists and doctors and handlers, each carrying out their part of the Forbidden Experiment. Olympe and the young assistants are forbidden to venture beyond the warren of labs and rooms on the ground floor. The rules of their mysterious, tight-knit society haven’t stopped her, but after two years, she has still only seen glimpses of the eight labyrinthine stories that loom in a perfect square around the courtyard, occasionally flashes of people moving up and down the wide staircases, and the constant winking of the stairwell candle flames high above her like trapped stars in the artificial night. Most floors are reserved for research. The top two floors, merged long ago into a single high-walled prison, is where the Forbidden Experiment has taken place for over twenty years now, and only handlers are allowed inside. Thick-limbed men swathed in heavy layers of leather and chain mail, with animal-faced masks and gloves of unyielding steel, unlock the doors to the top floor once every week, and venture into a metal bar-ceilinged warren of broken rooms and passages, untamed flora and small creeping fauna, a facsimile and perversion of the natural world, open to the elements yet contained and confined. And after a time, each handler emerges with a young boy or girl who howls and shits and pisses and bites like a wolf, a child who has had no interaction with the civilized world since birth. Les enfants sauvages. Some are sent to labs on the middle floors for dissection and vivisection and resurrection, some are taken to the basement levels for electrical and mechanical experiments beyond even Olympe’s delicious imagination. And those tagged for the living head experiments are sent to the courtyard, to the guillotines and to her.
Olympe hangs her coat up in one holding room, and slips on her laboratory overcoat in another. She cannot describe how proud she feels when she buttons up the faded, fraying fabric. Out there in the world there are women who read books, who study, who are scientists and doctors as much as they can be, considering women are nothing more than failed men, walking fœtuses who never developed into their full male potential. Olympe, the brothel-raised daughter of a long-dead revolutionary and a long-dead whore, is very aware she will never be one of those women, those forward-thinking academic lights of France’s glorious new future, but at least she is more than what awaits her outside the double steel courtyard gates, and it never fails to thrill her. True, th
e great men who conduct these incredible experiments tend to recruit uneducated yet comely young women and men like herself, who don’t protest when a suck or two is requested of them, but Olympe is pretty and clean and always willing to comply. And she’s smart. As she grabs her copper bowls and heads into the courtyard, she thinks of the top floor, that mysterious jungle of rooms and wilderness, of the cleverly concealed panopticons inserted throughout the rotting passages and hallways from which the scientists can fully observe the enfants sauvages without interaction or detection. Thanks to her strong fingers and nimble tongue, she’s been in those rooms. She’s seen what goes on in the artificial wild, she’s heard what the scientists say. None of the other assistants have. None of them have ambitions quite like Olympe.
Each slender wood guillotine has a name, and something of its own personality, or so Olympe would like to believe. She’s worked at the bases of La Bécane and Le Massicot, both nimble and effective apparatuses, but her heart and hand belong to the swift and silent blade that descends through the center of Mirabelle. There’s just something about the sharp low whomp of Mirabelle’s heavy mouton and blade rushing through meat and bone that satisfies Olympe in a way nothing else does. Already Le Massicot has been at work—Nana is at the neck of a sauvage, her copper bowl catching the blood which will later be sent rushing through tubes and vials in some candlelit room upstairs. Étienne stands slightly behind her, one large hand on each side of the head as he holds it still and upright for display. Blood trickles and pools around his shoes. Before him three doctors crouch, touching the head lightly with calipers and other devices, taking notes as they speak in low tones. They are measuring the lingering signs of a life taken so swiftly by the blade that the head often fails to acknowledge the body’s demise. Olympe has seen the eyes of severed heads blink, seen lips twitch and heard gasps and sighs. The doctors hold vials up to the mouth to catch escaping vapors, peer through pieces of glass into the gaping neck, slide lances and needles into the jelly eyes. The assistants know better than to ask what knowledge they seek, or what use they intend with it. Later, the living heads, as they are called, will be placed in large glass containers filled with viscous liquids, and join other similar containers on the fourth floor. Olympe has seen that secret, many-shelved room as well, seen the hundreds of surprised faces peering out from their amber-colored shells. She knows a good scientist must have a strong stomach and heart, but she has no real desire to return any time soon.
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