Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  The alternative to plain bread is no lunch at all. I finish it off and decide a nap is in order. Or more to the point, I’m at a loss for what else to do. Maybe I should leave that up to the princess of Ys.

  Her bodice is laced up again. We stand apart in separate contemplations

  of the vista, as if we’ve retracted into shells. My triple-faced cup still rests on the sill. I retain nothing of whatever’s transpired between dreams.

  Dank, stiff gusts skirl off the bay and through the window. I shrink a little from the cold, but mostly from the fecal stink. No mistaking raw, festering sewage. I’d sniffed well over my quota while inspecting subprime properties. So where else during Dark Ages would an island’s waste go except straight into the sea? And how could dysentery, cholera, et cetera not breed rampant among the islanders, princesses included?

  I covertly scrutinize her with new perspective, half pitying, half squeamish. Undismayed by the odor, she gazes out tenderly, proudly, as if she always has and always will behold a brilliant silver metropolis, stupendously rich, eternally true to its legend.

  She homes in on sneaking gaze and turns, stalwart with civic pride, then adopting more playful mode. Big, wide-set, skyblue

  eyes fix upon me; she pouts coyly and sips her wine. Subtle sexual charge gets under my skin. Without letting me out of her sight, she sets her cup beside mine. She rakes lazy fingers through abundant sable hair, and ignoring vagrant streaks of grey is easy.

  Behind more expansive smile her teeth peek out, and heaven help me, I have to shudder and fight to maintain deadpan appearance. Enamel is stained dirty blue, the crowns are down to a crooked serration, and inflamed, receding gums frame yellow snippets of roots. Should I really be shocked? The water supply’s a virtual Petri dish, and daily flagon of acidic wine is the lesser evil, centuries from the invention of toothpaste. Her bid to cajole, to enmesh me, has miserably backfired. My God, her breath must be atrocious.

  “Can we take a walk along the battlements, now that the fog’s lifted?” I stammer. “To see your beautiful city?”

  She nods brightly, glides over to the couch, sits and reaffixes coquettish look at me. She pats firm cushion right next to her. I can’t move. All I’ve ever said to her was gibberish, wasn’t it?

  Epiphany arrives like a lead sinker in my stomach. No, she wouldn’t be suspicious of a weird foreigner spouting nonsense and wearing flannel shirt and khakis. Nobody here can afford suspicions. Royal chambers have to double as brothels in this guttering pagan economy. And academic, I surmise, whether she’s a princess duty-bound to prostitute herself or a palace courtesan leased out to every visitor.

  This isolated outpost of a relict world, this pariah town on the edge of Christendom, is one tremor, one hurricane shy of final inundation. Please let it be now, to abort this excruciating situation! She bares rotten teeth again and, with faint sigh as if I couldn’t be denser or more bashful, spreads her knees in unmindful imitation of profane soapstone fetish, hiking white gown with both hands above her hips.

  At first I assume she’s partial to Dark Age equivalent of fishnet hose. And then to flinch away is no longer an option, though I hate myself for gaping horrorstruck. From shoeless feet to naked loins, a scabrous disease like none I’ve ever seen mars profuse swaths of creamy skin. Overlapping ranks of brittle, blacktipped flakes recall the scales of water moccasin or salmon, as if she’s undergoing piecemeal transformation into marine species.

  Her womanhood per se isn’t visibly afflicted, and she persists in smiling sweetly, as if intact womanhood is all that matters, and her fingers perform a salacious, kneading dance with bunches of her kilted gown. She’s prepared to wait the whole night for me, isn’t she?

  Already, though, encouraging smile is tightening toward sardonic rigor, and in the blue pools of her eyes, wild insanity begins to surface. Whether staving it off or in submission to it, she croons a nigh inaudible tune, with the maudlin contours of an Irish lullaby.

  I can’t allow that singing to go on. I’m sorry she’s trapped in such untenable straits, which doesn’t imply I’m willing to be trapped with her. My panic rapidly escalates. She’s a prostitute, right? She might desist if I pay her, yeah, but paper money won’t exist for a thousand years. I trawl around left hip pocket for every coin and scoop out pennies, nickels, euros, dimes.

  Now what? I don’t dare venture closer, especially as stifled sobs intrude on whiny melody at ever briefer intervals. With shaky arm I aim a gentle underhand pitch at the upholstery beside her. Jangly cluster lands bursting at her feet instead, and roughly fourteen cents rebound against her midcalf scales. Her shriek could put a banshee to shame, and I’ve scarcely questioned how intercourse could occur amid such sensitivity when she springs at me, still shrilling away, and where the hell had she hidden that silver dagger in upraised fist?

  Instinctively I raise protective arm and steel myself to feel defensive wound through flannel sleeve, and then that arm is straining against the bedsheet I’ve soaked in sweat, and I’m thankful to wake where no one cares if a guest is screaming for his mother at 2 P.M.

  Am I packing to avoid overhauling derelict hotel and kowtowing evermore to obnoxious tourists, or to be shut of dismal Ys and grotesque princess whore? Moot point. Circumspect knocking extends the option of answering the door or not. “Come in!” I holler while stuffing dirty laundry into a plastic bag, and there’s Kervigo. Who else?

  He blinks at open suitcase on the bed. “You’re leaving?” Must I dignify that with an answer? No. Without ado, he clears his throat. “About the defacement of your nightstand . . .” It’s like I’d never brought up buying this shambles of a hotel. Thank God!

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” I jump in. “I’ll pay to have it refinished. Right now, in cash. If you can estimate the cost.” Fact is, I’ll gladly pay extra to vamoose sooner.

  He waves dismissively. No, no, I’ve understood nothing. “I must criticize how amateurishly you dream. Have any of us ever disturbed you? Whatever happens, our bodies sleep tranquilly and cause no damage or noise.” He sighs regretfully, as if compelled to address my halitosis or armpits. “You would be well advised to improve your control.”

  My look must pose the question I’m too flummoxed to verbalize.

  “Yes, we all dream of Ys here, with or without an artifact under the bed. What else could be of importance compared with that?”

  With or without an artifact? My heart is racing with redoubled urge to hit the road. Is Auberge des Falaises a nest of lucid dreamers, adept beyond the need for talismans, for literal touchstones? Or maybe fungal spores taint the soup, the air, and elicit bedtime delirium, shaped by power of suggestion? What will staffers’ brains and lungs be like in ten, twenty years? What of my own health after three days?

  I nod deferentially. “I’ll be down in a minute to settle up the bill.”

  He takes the hint, bows a token inch, and lurches out.

  Kervigo has said his piece and shows himself no more. Reception is manned solely by gaunt clerk with droopy eyelids and the balky joints of early-onset rheumatism. Itemized bill does not refer to nightstand damage. At the door I turn for one last glance at forsaken investment opportunity, and the clerk watches my exit with mute indifference, probably because I’m the lobby’s single moving object.

  Anxious as I am to put miles between the hotel and me, I resolve to enjoy the scenery during headlong quest for saner lodgings. I must have a couple of hours till dusk, and the coast is crawling with accommodations.

  Oh fuck. Penniless fisherman is sitting on the hood of my Renault. He flashes jack-o’-lantern grin. All is ostensibly forgiven? He hops off the car. Better and better. I won’t have to deal with passive resistance before speedy getaway.

  “Please do not presume to judge us,” he greets me. Again, I won’t approach too near his cavernous grin. “We who receive a portion of Ys build of it what we will. Yours was not a happy place?”

 
; “No,” I barely hear myself say.

  He clucks in sympathy or disappointment, I can’t decide which. “None of us would want to go on living if we could never enter the glorious city again.” I suppress impulse to ask, Is that good?

  His grin shines on, but his sentiments kindle overwhelming sadness in me. He adds nothing more, doesn’t lift a finger to detain me as I clump past him into the car, ditch my suitcase on the passenger seat. He can readily see his words have found their mark.

  Survivor’s guilt rebounds as I follow the signs back toward Carnac. What had been wrong with me to envision Ys only at its bitter end, when others routinely navigate the millennia to its golden age? And how unjust of me and my dreary world to grind along when the magnificence of Ys is drowned and forgotten. I brood about Mom and the lifespan of insights and memories forever lost with her, with any person. For a city, a civilization to die, the loss is incomprehensible, unbearable.

  I take a curve along rockbound shore a hair too fast and hear a soft thump as something in back tumbles off the seat. I park to investigate where the shoulder widens just enough to excuse signage about “scenic rest area.” Paranoia whispers I have a stowaway as I exit the vehicle and swing rear door open.

  I anticipate discovering foxy codger’s parting gift of my discarded bluestone. It’s much worse. Soapstone fetish with yawning vulva smiles coyly from the polyester carpet, looking not a day older after 1,600 years. Absurd to think he had a perfect replica of figment from my dream. In any case, the squalid thing must go. I pluck it up and take aim past guardrail at the breakers pounding boulders.

  Spasm between thumb and forefinger locks my grip. Kervigo and crew always seemed to have one foot in dreamland, didn’t they? Toward the horizon an island gleams brazen and silver, except where towering white citadel casts a shadow. Is it, and the figurine too, no more than spores in my brain? I lower my arm. Do I also blame spores for removing the guardrail, my car, the highway? And for sowing snaggly pine witchwood all around? I may never know what hit me if I premise otherwise, set off anywhere rather than wait for hallucination to fade. But suppose spores aren’t the problem?

  Singsong French draws my attention toward a shoreline yards beyond where it just was. The pensioner’s dory is afloat at last, in a high tide of yesteryear. “Come, these waters are calm! Join us, or stand there till you starve.”

  “How do I know you’re for real?” I shout back.

  He laughs, and I laugh much more self-consciously. If there’s a “real” guardrail ahead, I don’t trip over it as I advance, whatever that means. Foxy codger, deliver me where the wine is drinkable and the women aren’t deranged! Have I a better choice? In any event, I refuse to view death as positive outcome.

  Willie the Protector

  Lois H. Gresh

  First the stench of whiskey, then the sourness in his mouth and his eyelashes clumped with dust, and he bolts up, alarmed by sounds he doesn’t know. The Machine clanks as if every bolt and pipe is about to blow. Willie clutches his chest and scrabbles to his feet, empty bottles clatter against steel, and how much did he drink last night?

  He trembles and his teeth chatter. Cold sweat on his back, he slicks hair out of his eyes, which focus through the darkness, the room lit by a single oil lamp, the others died in the night, and there it is, Willie’s Machine gone mad. A behemoth of steel, brass, and iron held together by cables and bolts, lovingly anointed by Willie’s gum sandarac and the fat of dead dogs, Willie’s Machine strains to break free—bolts pop, cables snap, steel chains lash, Medusa snakes against the walls. The Machine heaves up, belches steam and grime, crashes back down, grinds into the cement, writhes into it, and Willie’s mind flashes to what’s behind the Machine, fourteen hundred and twentynine paces between where he sleeps and where they sleep.

  He’s not sure if he’s screaming, and if he is, they won’t hear him over the Machine, but he has to try. “Hattie! You okay, Hattie? Ebediah!”

  Willie stumbles across the floor, the cement cracks and snags his toes, and he limps now, his left toes broken, and ducksbeneath the steam pipes that snarl and beat each other likeboxers in the ring. Even in the dark, he knows every inch ofthe Machine, the floor, the walls. He’s the Protector who makes the city hum and run, and it’s his job to know. He circlesthe snake pit, where valves clang open and shut, and thesteam burns through the pipes and the liquid metal sparks, lightning bugs.

  And Willie hears the screams of his baby, Ebediah, two weeks old and a premature birth. Hattie almost died, still weak and she can hardly eat, not that Willie provides enough to eat, and

  something sizzles overhead

  fire whips

  stars crackle

  and something’s illuminated on the floor.

  Willie trips over the softness, small like a baby, and squints to see a bloody bone. His hands quiver and pluck up the bone, hard-as-steel bone now, almost spherical with numbers and chiseled symbols, ω and σ and Δ. He wipes the blood on his pants, stashes the bone into a hole in the wall—the seventh bone Willie’s found, the rest of them in a hole near where he sleeps.

  “Willie, help!” It’s Hattie, her voice dampened by the Machine. He’s lost count of his paces, and how can he measure them with the floor rupturing and vomiting cement? He swerves, darts to his left, winces as his left foot comes down.

  He tries screaming to his wife, but whiskey and dust clamp his throat. “I’m coming, hang on, Hattie, hold onto the baby, Hattie, I’m coming!”

  The two-thousand-ton steam hydraulic pump clatters up and down, ceiling to floor, morbid growth with hemorrhoid arms, and its lesions and polyps burst in fireworks of pus. Willie slaps his head and shoulders where the molten drops burn and drags his foot over the last rip in the floor to reach his family.

  In the hole in the floor behind Willie’s Machine.

  Hattie huddles down there on the blankets, the infant cradled in her arms, both faces red and drenched in tears.

  Some Protector. He can’t even feed his wife and child. How can he expect to protect an entire city? Deluding himself all these years. Weak, a failure, and Hattie is everything to him, and the baby unexpected, now the baby is everything, too.

  “Hush,” he says, “Daddy’s here, Ebediah, daddy won’t let anything happen to you. Hush, Hattie, come with me.”

  She whimpers and nods, so glad to see him, and such admiration and faith and love on her face. He helps them from the hole, the floor still splintering and Willie’s Machine banging, and together they duck around the hydraulic pump. Hattie cries under a spray of liquid metal, snuggles Ebediah more tightly, and follows Willie past the hole where the eighth bone is, the one he just found.

  He clasps her to him, arm around her waist. “We’re almost there,” he says. The baby twists toward Hattie’s breast, seeking a nipple, and his tiny fingers slip into his mouth. Willie will find a quiet spot in an alley, where Hattie can nurse the baby.

  He’ll steal plums and peaches, and maybe some wine and bread, from the market stalls tomorrow. He needs more whiskey. Willie can’t do without his whiskey.

  Ignoring the pain from his broken toes, not a big deal, he’s suffered much worse injuries over the years from tending the Machine, he leads Hattie and Ebediah around the snake pit and beneath the steam pipes. And there’s his blanket on the shakingfloor, and his gaze shifts up to where he’s stashed the sevenbones from all those other times. He wonders why the Machine erupted tonight, as this has never happened. Sure, the Machine hiccups every now and then, and sure, that’s when Willie always finds the bones. But there’s never been a time in all the years he’s been Protector that the Machine went wild, never a time when bolts popped or cables snapped or steel lashed at him. Never.

  He’ll come back for the bones. But first, he must get Hattie and Ebediah out of here, and then he’ll steer clear until the Machine calms down.

  Willie unchains the vast overhead door, twists the handle, heaves hi
s body against the steel, and lifts it so his family can escape. Hattie ducks under the door, and her legs and feet disappear into the evening gloom. From the distance, must be Hotchingham Street, the trolley lines buzz. Horse hooves clatter on cobblestone, must be a buggy on Church Street. Willie’s Machine feeds the city. All the power comes from the Machine.

  Willie turns slightly, and the Machine quivers, ever so slightly, tranquil and humming now as if asleep. Near the hole with seven bones, the oil lamp casts yellow stains across the floor.

  The city is nothing more than a landfill where the rich toss their garbage. The buildings crouch low as if frightened, and the clouds, clumps of mud, slump over them. Willie and Hattie shuffle over the gravel, and in the murk strangers shift like shadows against the brownstones. When Willie and Hattie reach dumpster alley, they wedge themselves between piles of trash and sink onto newspapers, and a scrawny rat scoots past.

  The last thing Willie smells is rotting meat, and the next thing he knows it’s morning, and the sun weakly probes the soot hanging over the alley. His left toes burn with pain, all swollen like little sausages, and he can’t put any weight on his foot. Already, the trolleys buzz down the roads, suspended from spiderweb wires that the Machine runs.

  “My milk is thin,” Hattie tells him. “I’m taking the baby to steal food on Market Street. The baby’s so weak he can’t cry, just look at him, will you?”

  Willie rests a finger on Ebediah’s cheek, coarse skin on angel silk. The baby gurgles, wakes slightly, and sucks on the dirty swaddling cloth. Ebediah is so small, Willie’s never seen a person this small, not in his whole life. Such tiny grey eyes, and his nose, just a swollen bud really, opening and closing to filter in the air. Willie spits on his finger, then cleans the baby’s nostrils and gently dabs his chin where Hattie’s milk has dried. His wife and baby smell the same to him. Did Hattie always smell like this? Willie doesn’t remember.