by Jordan Reece
“Was there a queen?”
“You err just as we did. You are trying to attribute the shape of hierarchy. There was no queen, or loyalty to some royal figurehead of olden days. There was no mob, not if mob is defined as a gang organized by its crimes. It was everything from half-witted boys to ex-convicts to schoolteachers to priests in their confessionals. It was housewives with baskets of eggs and bent pee-paws on their porch rockers; it was the shambling homeless on the streets to governors in their estates. And to be everything is to be nothing, so you see how so many of our attempts to capture, to infiltrate, to quash were thwarted. Every step we took forward was matched in two steps back and ten to the side.”
“Frustrating.”
“That word does not begin to touch what it was like to deal with this insurrection of derangement. Then a day came when we received intelligence that an arm or foot or gallstone of the Queen’s Mob was stowing a large cache of hexes in an abandoned warehouse not fifty miles from where we are now. A fire had gutted part of the building long ago and the company fell apart, leaving the structure to rot. Eager were we to reach that cache and deal a blow to this infernal Hydra of an enemy! There was a hex team of six, myself included, and our personal contingent of soldiers to dispatch any guards at the warehouse and keep it secure as we investigated the contents. Among them was Vincenzo.”
“Your man.”
“My man. All of us set out in a line of black rumble buggies, jouncing about this way and that and cursing the advance of technology. We’d rather have had the grace of steady horses to bear us. Our mood was jubilant, because the end of the Skirmish was in sight. To home, to home . . . We were so close as to taste it. I could not wait to be done, to come to New York City and be in peace.”
“Not Charleston?”
“Oh, no, it was here I wished to be. This is where Vincenzo grew up, and I loved it, too. On that fateful drive we damned the rumble buggies and praised the future almost upon us. Then we arrived at the warehouse to find even more good news: the Queen’s Mob had left it in the care of two petty thugs, one asleep and one drunk, and both of them were immediately taken into custody. I stepped in and surveyed the warehouse. Trunk upon trunk was packed with hexes in straw, the trucks three-deep, four-deep, even seven- and eight-deep along the walls. The trunks were slick with rain to have come through a burned gap in the ceiling, and our boots sloshed through an inch of water to reach them. How much do you think that was worth?”
“So many hexes as that? I cannot say.”
“Millions, I guessed at the time. This was a treasure trove, and it would be a hard blow if not a mortal one to the Queen’s Mob to lose it.”
“But why so little security?”
“I suspect because too much security would draw attention. From the outside, it looked like nothing. The warehouse could exist, forgotten and falling into ruin, without anyone ever believing something nefarious was going on inside. We got our things and the work began in dismantling it. The hexes were no more organized than the Queen’s Mob itself, nothing labeled, no clues as to what some of the odder pieces were, and a goodly amount of them turned out not even to be hexes. Perhaps intended to be sold as faux-hexes to fools, or stolen and put there for later, only Christ could tell you. I sifted through an entire trunk of polished seashells, no magic, no explanation of why they were there or what they were for, and was just closing the lid when I spied a candlestick also in the straw. That I lifted, found it was also without enchantment, and was reaching to put it back when there was an explosion across the warehouse.
“To this day, I do not know who set it off by accident while cataloguing, or if it was a booby trap. I whirled around to a mammoth creature of fire and eyes and wings, its scream bringing down the remainder of the roof and buckling the floor like a great serpent passed beneath it. I was paralyzed from fear, water sloshing over my boots and that candlestick without charm in my hand.”
“What hex was this creature?”
“It was not a hex. It was many hexes released all at once, knotting themselves together so that each was just a piece of its horror yet greater than the sum of these parts. A mouth opened and engulfed a member of my team in flames, and then sparks fell to the floor, the mouth folded in, and no more fire came. A wing of blades unfurled to grasping, half-rotted hands, and they seized a soldier only to throw him into a mirror full of menacing, misshapen silhouettes. An eyelid fell over the mirror and opened to nothing; the hands and wing came apart to ash. Snakes and spiders enveloped a hex man to wrap him in a cocoon of coils and web, and then all disintegrated to a wind of pox that flew to infest another poor soul in the warehouse that day.
“It happened in a handful of seconds, this grotesque composite falling apart almost as swiftly as it slaughtered. As if the strongest wind blew at its back, it closed the distance between us shedding horrors all the while. I could not move. I could not move. This was Death come at last to claim me . . . and Vincenzo stepped between us.”
Silence.
“He was brave,” Nicoli said, yet this was inadequate.
“Brave. Yes. I cannot speak of what it did. But it took him. It took him, that sweet spring rain soul.”
Bruno fell silent. Nicoli thought if he extended a hand, he might touch the shape of pain between their beds.
For just a moment, the hospital stood still. And in the stillness, Bruno spoke. “It took him. And then it came to me, the last challenger alive.”
“Christ be merciful!” Nicoli exclaimed.
“It came to me, that twisting, devouring and devoured thing. Yet what was at the core of it was now exposed, and such a snarl of quarter-incantations and pounding drums, shredded ribbons and cracked stones, melted candles and chunks of flesh, broken pins and splintered teeth, light and darkness, pasts and futures . . . It was like looking into the very face of insanity itself. I closed my eyes lest I be driven mad just as it was mad. I felt it strike me . . . and awoke in a hospital many weeks later.”
“What had it done to you?”
“It entered me, this uninvited guest, and now calls me host. I live in a fractious peace as the last of those hexes mumble and spar within me. They are but jigsaw pieces from many different puzzles, occasionally finding an uneasy alliance between them that lands me in the hospital with a racing heart, dead limbs, a fever of fire or a chill of ice, twice a sleep from which I cannot emerge for weeks. The alliances do not last, cannot last, and in time they break apart to attempt some other constellation of vengeance. I can go months at a time with only mild trouble from them, fits of weakness that drop out my legs from under me, an arm that loses its bones and thuds with a spoon to mess the tablecloth, and so on. But inevitably they rise in strength to some new shatter of spells and back I come to eat the hospital’s pudding, or have it spoon-fed to me. This time I stayed cognizant, but my arms and legs buzzed like swarms of bees were encased within them, and I could do nothing for myself. It has passed now, which is good. At its worst I suggested we might amputate everything and give me prosthetics, but only Christ knows if the hexes will affect those, too, and have me beat myself half to death with my own metal fist.”
“But you are better for now?” Nicoli said. “Even with the seizure?”
“Much better. Soon the doctor will release me.”
“What will you do?”
“I will return to the beautiful brownstone that Vincenzo and I bought, but never had the chance to live within together. I will read, and watch the neighborhood children cluster along the sidewalk to school. At times I venture to universities to lecture of hexes though I am without degree. They call me Professor anyway, and I admit that pleases me, perhaps too much. I write a book of my time with the hex men. These are the things I do when I am not here.”
“You are young.”
“Yes, I am young, thirty-one as of last month. Forgive me my fancies, but my reality is tiresome to me. I would rather be the old and ugly man I told you about than young and straining against chains. At times d
octors advise me to board in an infirm home, since I have money and many of them are quite hospitable. But I resist. To surrender any further to these confounded hexes is a bitter taste in my mouth. I have my cook and maid check on me every day, to confirm my health or have me shuttled here if health, that winged rogue, has once again fled me.”
In shame, Nicoli said, “You have been kind to listen to me complain endlessly about my eyes when your troubles are of equal weight, and may be greater, than mine.”
“I did not begrudge you those complaints, Nicoli. We have both lost our light.”
“Will it always be this way for you?”
“Yes, the doctors believe. I will stand upon this precipice until death. It may be that I live to ninety in this way, or the hexes could recombine to some dastardly poison that slays me before my next birthday. Every day could be my last.”
“How do you stand such a precipice?” Nicoli asked in astonishment.
“Because of what it gives me,” Bruno said. “An incomparable view.”
Chapter Six
The nurses guided Nicoli to the bath in the evening, and let him scrub his hidden flesh. Then he was wrapped in a fresh hospital gown, his hair combed, his feet shod in socks with treads. Back he was led to his room, where he took position upon a bed of clean sheets.
Tomorrow.
He felt like he was being dressed for burial, and set within his coffin. Tomorrow he would die in part, when the bandages came down and the doctor declared his sight departed, the marbles of his eyes now clicking together in the hand of Christ. To the infirm home he would go.
Or he would see.
He would see and go home to spin in a whirlwind, his belongings soaring in the drafts across the room to his trunk. Then he would slink away in fear from the tenement and never return. Away from the trinket shop, the night market, Clant’s and everywhere he had ever gone with Dallen, in terror that Dallen would spy him there and exact a greater toll than two weeks spent in darkness. Then again, Dallen was most likely on the run from the police and far from this place. But there was no way to be sure.
This was what the red ribbons had done. This was what Nicoli had done. Had he not stolen those ribbons and twined them round his ankles, had he not allowed his unease at pairing lust with love to drive him from Clant’s to the night market, he never would have landed in this hospital bed. Listening. Forever listening.
Bruno was sleeping, the threads of hexes breaking apart within him to wind about their individual spools. His breath rose and fell like waves at the shore, steady, soothing. Nicoli rested in his pillow, his hair damp and the bandages also damp upon his neck where he had lowered them just a little to wash underneath.
He could yank off the bandages and look at this room, if he could. The desire flared and died in a second. It was just like Bruno’s broken hexes, the sight in Nicoli’s eyes shattered to pieces and seeking reconnection. To tax them prematurely would be to shatter them further, and should there have been a chance of vision returning in full, Nicoli would reduce it through his curiosity to only telling light from dark. Should light from dark be all of which these hexed eyes were capable, then Nicoli would have relegated himself to darkness until eternity.
They had laughed in his bed, Nicoli and Dallen, and in the trinket shop. They had laughed in the night market, traveling in hidden corridors of curtains that only a vendor like Dallen knew. Everywhere that Nicoli walked, he had done so once in joy with Dallen at his side. And when Dallen threw the hex, he had done it laughing upon Nicoli’s cherished Fifth Avenue with its Christmas stores.
He could not walk in those places anymore.
He should have left those ribbons alone upon the ring, and remained in lust. That was not such a bad thing. Then it would not have come to this.
It was night now, gauged by the reduction in noise. But all of the world lost its definition, his fingers going blind upon the blanket and bars, the bed dropping out beneath him. He scrabbled in the air for some limit to space, yet found none. Then he woke, and the hospital was quieter still.
“I loved him,” he said quietly, though Bruno had not and did not stir. “I loved him, but I did not know him. I loved him, yet I did not see him. I did not want to see him. Perhaps I did not know how to see what stood right before me. Love was new ground.”
Machines beeped. A nurse snapped.
“He was a man, a very beautiful man, and he changed with the light. People thought he was Italian. People thought he was Greek, Indian, whispered gypsy as he passed. A woman even asked once if he hailed from Mexico one night as we dined. And Dallen could not answer her, because he did not know. He was a foundling child not meant to be found, left beneath a dock as if his mother or father hoped their naked infant son would be swept away by the water. Not even a blanket was he wrapped in.”
Such a sour welcome had this child received, and Nicoli had once wept for that poor, wailing scrap. The abandoned baby and his story were delivered to an orphanage upon discovery, and though the matron could have told this growing boy that his parents loved him but sickened and died, though she could have told him that his parents loved him but were trampled by life and could not afford him, she received some sick pleasure from telling him the truth. And she reminded him of it often.
It was not just that he had been abandoned, but that his parents wanted him to die. He wasn’t even worth a rag to wrap him in. Had he been washed away, his body would have fed the fish that people ate in turn, and perhaps his own parents would have consumed him in this way. At least then Dallen would have served a purpose in filling their bellies rather than just being a burden on their shoulders.
Why tell a child this? Though the Godly were not the kindest people, it would never have occurred to Nicoli’s parents to torment him so. They corrected him often, and at times harshly, but he had never known the sheer hatred that Dallen had. All he was in the orphanage was a pair of hands for chores, a face to slap without reason, an innocent soul to mar.
Every night, Nicoli wrapped him snugly in blankets to make up for what he had lost. But they were not enough. Dallen was a man without definition of any kind: a child from nowhere, a name from nowhere, and a visage that could be anything. It saddened him; it maddened him; it made him resentful of the lines of love. The harder that Nicoli tried to draw around him, the more blankets that Nicoli wrapped him in, the harder that Dallen took an eraser to the lines and shucked the blankets like crackling leaves of corn. No! No! He needed nothing! Leave him alone!
But then, when he stood cold and naked and shivering, he came back with the hurt eyes of a tender boy, wanting exactly what he had rejected only days before. Don’t leave me, Nicoli, don’t leave me, don’t leave me. I did not mean to act that way. Don’t leave me when you are all I have.
Around and around they went upon the carousel of Dallen’s heart, at times going so fast that Nicoli could only hold on for dear life. The ribbons had brought them together, yet their power faded and love replaced it. But Nicoli had not thought love would be this seesaw thing, stars glittering in his palms as the fires of hell charred his feet.
In a manner of months the peaks and valleys of Dallen had exhausted Nicoli to brittleness, and he quit their little family to outrage and castigations. The ribbons were gone; the love was smashed. Nicoli could not bear the heavy trinity of the infant left to die beneath the dock, the lonely, tortured child, the reeling, damaged man. To hold onto Dallen was to always be staggering through a storm when all Nicoli had wanted from love was shelter and friendship and a home in another’s heart.
So they were done.
It was done.
But it was not.
Weeks had passed since Nicoli’s retreat from this painful dance. He did not go to the night market, lest he run into his former lover. Nor did he go to Clant’s, although he thought of it in his many lonely nights. Love still tantalized him. Love still sung to him. He wanted to try again, and now he knew how to open his eyes and see the man standing there before him.
But upon the sidewalk he heard his name being called, and his heart rose and sank at once to recognize Dallen’s voice. No, Nicoli could not go back to this and yet when things were good with Dallen they were so very good . . .
He turned. And the same hand to stroke him in the night, the same hand tucked in his on summer walks, the same hand once cherished, once wished for with such might . . . the same hand clutched a vial of eggshell green glass and threw it. The glass broke, the contents splashed, and the last Nicoli saw was Dallen’s laughing face.
He did not wish that to be the last impression upon his eyes. Anything but that.
He had never thought Dallen could do such a thing, that there was such a monster concealed inside him along with that baby intended to die. Too late he learned that one did not quit a monster. One had to pray the monster quit him.
Someone laughed wildly in the night, and frightened Nicoli straight out of his bed with his fists raised. As he stood there, dropping his fists and feeling foolish, Bruno said kindly, “I’m here.”
Nicoli stepped into space, his hands in front of him, and found in his fumbles Bruno’s bed. He had to be reassured that Bruno was real.
“Rest here, if you will.”
Yes. Nicoli wanted that. A blanket lifted, and carefully Nicoli fit himself into a narrow but warm space. The blanket closed over him, and an arm settled over his back. Tucking himself close to Bruno’s chest, he said, “I live to wake you. It must be vexing.”
“To be woken from a bad dream is no inconvenience.”
“What were you dreaming?”
“Of opening my mouth to speak, and nothing but hexes spouting forth.”