by Jeffrey Ford
“Hold fire,” said the bartender, who stood to the left of us, sipping from a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Schrimley’s. “Wait up until we can all hit him,” he said.
The creature methodically advanced as if it had no idea we were there. I heard the sound of his hidden machinery before I saw his face. Calloo had followed me. With a sick recollection of the favor he had once done Bataldo, I aimed for his forehead. The bartender raised his arm in the air and yelled, “Ready.”
He was no more than ten yards from us when we fired. The volley hit him straight on and forced him backward three steps, but he did not fall. We heard him grunt, as if the volley had merely awakened him suddenly from a nap, and then he began advancing again. The bartender yelled, “Reload,” and that is when I stood and told everyone to hold their fire.
“This is not the demon,” I told them.
“What is it?” one of them yelled.
“Just another man in search of paradise,” I said. At that, they put down their weapons and Calloo came to stand next to me. He had about twenty holes in his city-issue overalls, and there were definite wounds, though bloodless, in his chest and arms. His face was untouched.
The patrons of the bar came over and shook his limp hand. “We’re sorry,” they said, and Calloo stumbled in place and grunted. Before we headed back toward the center of the city, I gave the bartender the demon horn that Below had given me.
“Powder it and give each person here tonight a snort,” I said.
He passed me his bottle as I handed him the horn. I took a drink and passed it to Calloo. The bartender said, “You don’t snort this shit, you shoot it.” I wasn’t sure if he was speaking literally or figuratively, but we had no time to ponder it. Calloo moved slowly, and it was a race against the sun to get him back to my apartment before the streets filled with workers.
It was entirely bizarre, but the only person we passed on the way happened to be the cleaning woman from the Top of the City. She smiled and waved, and I waved back. “Up early, your honor,” she said, and then gave me a sign with her left hand, an O formed by the thumb and middle finger. I returned the sign and Calloo tried.
After that encounter, I prodded him to move a little faster. We made it to my apartment just before the streets filled with workers. I led him to my bedroom and had him lie on the bed.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
He said nothing but blinked his eyes.
“I have to go out to work,” I said. “Do you understand?”
He blinked again.
“If anyone comes to the door, hide in the closet. If they discover you, kill them. Do you understand?” I asked.
He blinked.
As I made out the new day’s appointment cards, I noticed that he was blinking quite a lot and began to question whether he had actually understood my instructions. I got dressed and armed myself with the derringer. I was just putting on my topcoat when someone knocked at my door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“The Master requests your presence,” said a voice. “There is a coach waiting.”
I looked into the bedroom and saw that Calloo had not moved off the bed. “Get in the closet,” I said.
“Paradise,” he mumbled but remained still.
I left with the coachman, and it seemed only minutes before I was across town in an elevator on the way up to the Master’s offices. As I walked down the hall of hardened heroes, my mind was ablaze with fabulations and excuses for Below, but when I pushed through the door of his office, they twisted together and strangled each other. I stood, empty-headed before him. He sat with his elbow resting on the desk and a hand clutching his forehead. The expression he wore was grimmer than Calloo’s.
“Sit down, Cley,” he said, waving me into the chair.
There was a long pause, in which he closed his eyes.
“Did you hear about the demon?” he finally asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He started to laugh. “That’s right,” he said. “I sent that note to you.”
“Have you captured it?” I asked.
“Captured it,” he said, “I was the one who let it go. I realized that change requires access to random possibility, so I released the demon into the city. He is your competition. As you methodically gather the unworthy for expungement, he kills them as he sees them. I’m thinking big, Cley, very big.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “By the way, I much appreciated your gifts.”
He waved his hand at me and shook his head. “What I’ve called you here for is to discuss these headaches I’ve been getting ever since I ate that white shit of the wilderness. My, was that a mistake. Stomach pains and these blasted headaches.”
“I have some familiarity with chemistry,” I said. “What were the ingredients your researchers found in it?”
“Who knows,” he said.
“Can you describe the pains?” I asked.
“Like a fist squeezing my brain,” he said. “I can feel that it is projecting energy from my head. Never before has the Well-Built City of my imagination seemed so inextricably tied to the physical City we now inhabit. These attacks make it hard to distinguish between the two.”
“I can’t think of what that might be,” I told him.
“How is your special assignment coming?” he asked.
“I read a group yesterday afternoon and already have some participants for the Memorial Park affair,” I said.
“Excellent work,” he said, clutching at his head again. When he didn’t speak for quite some time, I started to get up to leave. As I made for the door, he stopped me.
“Cley,” he said, not looking up, “keep that leather glove of yours clean.” He began to laugh, but soon it quieted into a wince.
By the time I got to the office, the morning was gone. I had just enough time to send out some appointment cards by messenger. I gave instructions that they should be distributed to the Minister of the Treasury and all the members of his family.
I longed for the beauty, but I did not take it. Instead, I smoked and stared out the window, trying to wrap my mind around the Master’s gibberish about random possibility and the demon being my competition. He did not appear well at all, which was a blessing for me. I knew I would have to take bolder and bolder steps to get where I wanted to be, and to have Below distracted could only be beneficial. Then the Minister of the Treasury and his family arrived.
The minister was heavy and sweating profusely as I put him through his paces. Calipers, cranial radius—every tool I had in my bag. As I worked away, I praised his features and told him he was remarkable. He spoke of his accomplishments and his importance to the realm. I duly noted in my book the elegance of his third chin. I offhandedly questioned him about the treasures brought back from the territory.
“I am not at liberty to divulge that information,” he said.
“Good,” I told him. “You have passed the test. The Master will be pleased with your reliability concerning the subject.”
He left smiling.
With his three daughters and their mother, it hardly took any praise at all to get them to talk. I barely even scratched the surface and they each separately told me how much they despised the minister. “I can see what you mean,” I told them. His wife got so carried away that she spat on the floor. I gave her a tissue which she used twice more. Even his youngest daughter, little more than a baby, gave the thumbs-down when I asked her about Daddy. I wondered where, inside all that flesh, he was hiding. When they left my office, they went quietly, calmly, with the minister in the lead.
Now it was time for the beauty. I went to my desk and prepared a full dose. Later, when I came out of it, I could hardly remember anything from the experience. Moissac had made a brief appearance, and Silencio had perched on the windowsill, picking ticks from his fur and crunching them in his teeth. The sun was going down, and I had to leave immediately. I had plans for Calloo and me to go on an expedition.
25
Even under cover of darkness, trying to be inconspicuous with Calloo was an effort. I had dressed him in a rather large topcoat of mine, the sleeves of which came nearly to his elbows and the bottom hem to mid-thigh. In addition to this, I shoved an old broad-brimmed hat onto his head and folded the front down to cover his face. He lumbered along behind me as I navigated a path through the alleys to the western side of town. It was clear to me that somewhere in his scrambled gear-work head, he understood most of what I had told him, because when I arrived home from the office, I found him huddled in my bedroom closet. “We’re going for a stroll,” I said to him.
I spoke quietly as we walked along through the shadows, but I could not stop from telling him everything that had happened to me since I had last seen him. I was not sure how much of an asset he would be to my plans, but it didn’t matter. He was to me what I needed most, a co-conspirator, a friend to plot with. I had the courtesy not to mention his ghoulish condition, and I got the feeling he was thankful for this. Occasionally, he would mutter some words in his deep mechanical voice, and though I could not always pick up what he was saying, I tried to respond with a likely comment. He said my name once or twice, and when he did, I turned and smiled and patted him on the shoulder.
I could see that the duration of my companion’s strange life was in some question, considering that there were times when his inner workings screeched and whined so badly I thought he was going to explode. Then he stopped walking and began to sway back and forth. Sparks were visible in his eyes and puffs of smoke drifted from his open mouth. A minute or two later, these episodes passed and we continued. Calloo was, for the most part, no different than the Minister of Treasury and the Minister of Security, his true self trapped somewhere deep within. The one thing that set him apart from them is that even in the condition he was in, the voice that moved him was the one in search of paradise.
It took a good hour or so to traverse half the distance to the sewage treatment plant, and I realized after walking so far, that I had not eaten anything all day. My head was light, and I began to feel weak. I knew I should get some food, since I might be required to run or fight before the night was over.
“Hungry?” I asked Calloo.
He grunted and I took that to mean yes.
“We’ll go up onto the main street, but whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone, don’t look at them,” I said.
He put his hand up to scratch his beard, and a clump of hair sloughed off his face and came away on the ends of his fingers. I wasn’t sure if that was a sign that he understood or not. We made our way out of the alley and up onto Quigley Boulevard, one of the less traveled thoroughfares of the city. I knew there were a few restaurants there.
I chose a small place that had dough-gummels to take out. The man behind the counter was extremely talkative, extremely inquisitive. It was just my bad luck that he, like the bartender the other evening, knew who I was. He welcomed me back and asked a lot of questions about the territory as he waited for a rack of the pastries to come out of the oven.
Calloo stood behind me, weaving in place, now and then sounding like an automatic water pump with a stone caught in it. The man behind the counter turned away from me to check the oven, and when he did, I turned to check Calloo. The big miner was having one of his seizures right there in the restaurant. There were few patrons in the place, probably because of the demon scare, but those who sat at tables eating were now staring over at us. I smiled and waved to them. When the smoke started issuing from Calloo’s mouth, I reached into my coat, brought out a cigarette, lit it, and stuck it in the corner of his lips.
“Is your friend all right?” asked the man behind the counter when he turned his attention back to us.
“A few too many Rose Ear Sweets,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ve been there.”
Not a moment too soon, the pastries were done and he had bagged them for us. Then a strange thing happened. When I tried to pay him, he refused the belows I held out. He simply waved his hand in the air, as if to say there was no charge, and gave me that signal the cleaning woman had—the middle finger and thumb forming an O. When I gave him a surprised look, he leaned across the counter and whispered, “See you in Wenau.”
I was stunned. I backed away from the counter and quickly made for the door. Once outside, I leaned against the wall as I tried to understand how this man could have known anything about Wenau. My first thought, of course, was that the Master was on to me, toying with me, as I made and carried out my less than cunning plans. Then I wondered if there was some conspiracy at work in the city. Below had told me that there were grumblings among the populace. Perhaps that is why the soldiers now carried flamethrowers. I ran through this dizzying list of possibilities in moments, and then realized that I had left Calloo back in the restaurant.
When I turned to go fetch him, I found him standing behind me, chewing on the lit cigarette. Fearing for the safety of my fingers, I plucked most of it from his mouth, exchanging it for one of the dough-gummels. He simply continued chewing, but it couldn’t really be said that he was eating. The pastry was soon turned to crumbs in his mouth, and eventually just fell out onto my old topcoat. Seeing this almost made me lose my appetite, but I forced one of the gummels down for the sake of the expedition.
For the rest of the journey, I spoke to Calloo. I told him about a possible conspiracy against the Master. He made a sound like someone passing wind, and I took this to mean that he was as excited as I was by the prospect. After that, I boldly admitted my love for Arla Beaton. I knew I had talked too much, though, when I had slipped and mentioned the mayor. Calloo was walking behind me, and I heard him stop moving for a second. I thought I heard a muffled cry, and I wanted to believe that if I turned around, I would find tears in his eyes, but I merely slowed and waited for him to catch up.
The sewage treatment plant and the waterworks were separated by a wide avenue. One of the buildings was white marble with columns and a dome, the other was gray, crudely resembling a beehive. Entering the hive was like stepping back into the mines of Doralice. The stench was poignant and the lighting dim. There were no guards, but this was not unusual, considering what they would have been guarding. We passed through the lobby and then down a set of concrete steps. The first level we came to underground was comprised of a vast lake of human waste with a catwalk spanning the middle of it.
Calloo actually held his nose against the rippling air as we crossed to the other side of the tarn. Passing beneath the walk were giant yellow-white spheres of grease that rolled as they floated by. Things were moving below the surface, stirring the brown sea, and occasionally a bubble or two would rise through the muck and pop.
“Paradise,” Calloo called to me.
We descended level after level of concrete steps, following the waters from above as they became waterfalls that dove into large pools and then became a swiftly downward-moving river. It took us some time to manage the stairs because of Calloo’s stiffness of gait, but he forged ahead as I gave him constant encouragement. By the time we reached level ground, it must have been a half-mile under the street. I noticed that the water appeared to have turned clear. It rushed along madly beside us and we followed its path.
After walking for another few minutes we came to a place where the river tunnel opened up into an enormous concrete cavern. A hundred yards away from us, in the middle of the structure, was a clear crystal bubble of a size my imagination could not readily accept. It sat there like a giant’s holiday paperweight, and I could see inside, a forest growing. Somehow there were clouds floating in the blue sky beneath a miniature sun. Exotic birds flew from tree to tree, and off around the southern rim of it I thought I saw a herd of green deer moving through the tall amber grass that bent to and fro in a subtle breeze.
It struck me more forcefully than it ever had before that Below was playing God. Those physiognomical features of his that had concerned me with their indication of pride beyond all bounds, though a fault in men, we
re perfect for the deity he perceived himself to be. That is why he had no problem utilizing the Physiognomy as his golden mean. When he looked in the mirror there had never been a discrepancy.
I quickly pulled my wonder in check when I noticed that there were soldiers standing around the base of the bubble, sporting flamethrowers. We were too far off for them to clearly see us, as we still stood within the shadows of the tunnel. I grabbed Calloo and moved him up against the wall with me. We stood there as I tried to think of what to do next. I considered simply walking up to the guards and letting them know I was on official business, but then the Master would hear of that. For a second, I considered rushing them, derringer in hand, but I already knew that Calloo wasn’t rushing anywhere. Then, I didn’t have to worry about it, because I could hear someone approaching down the tunnel.
I took out the derringer and the scalpel and whispered to Calloo to get ready. Peering through the dim light, I tried to see how many of them there were. That is when Calloo took a step in front of me, blocking my vision.
“Pardon me,” I whispered to the miner as the demon slammed into his chest with both horns.
The suddenness of it stunned me, and I dropped both scalpel and gun. I couldn’t move as I watched the miner grapple with the creature. Its wings beat furiously as Calloo grabbed it around the throat and pulled its horns out of his chest. Then he reached up, took one of the vicious points in his huge fist, and snapped it off as though it were an icicle. The demon screamed and raked Calloo’s jugular, or where it should have been, with his fierce claws. The big man responded with a hammer blow across the beast’s face, sending it crashing into the wall.
Behind me in the concrete cavern I could hear the soldiers rushing toward the tunnel. I bent over and picked up my derringer and aimed it at the demon’s head. It whipped its tail around Calloo’s legs and spun him into the path of the shot as I fired. The bullet struck him in the forehead and a shower of diminutive brass gears flew from his open mouth as he fell back against the wall. Then the demon came toward me. I waited to feel its claws rip through my face, but before it could reach me, Calloo lunged onto its back, landing between its wings and taking a stranglehold around its neck. The demon spun to throw Calloo off, and its tail caught my ankles and lifted me off my feet. I fell backward and, as I did, I fired the second shot from the pistol into the monster’s face.