by Rachel Caine
Euterpe, quickly, began walking away. Other passers-by paused, and the nearest merchants in their stalls turned to look, some with weary resignation, others with annoyance or accusation because he’d finally quieted and she’d stirred him up again.
He scrabbled after her on hands and scabby knees, clutching at her chiton’s draped folds. “Already the strixoi come! They have sampled us, sampled the sweet nectar of our hubris! They have tasted of the young and the old, and deemed it good!”
She twitched the cloth from his grasp and walked faster. Not running, not quite, but very much at a hurry.
“Now they come for the rest of us!” The madman sprang to his feet. “Humble yourself before the gods! Wash that whore’s mask from your face and repent!”
He lunged toward her, and only then did Euterpe throw dignity to the winds. She ran, his crazed laugh close on her heels. Hairpins went astray, spilling her henna-tinted locks. The soles of her sandals slapped the—
Follow me, she thought, and flinched, wondering for the first time if the sandals had been such a clever idea after all.
Even if she outpaced or eluded him, she was leaving a trail. What if the madman could read? Her every stride stamped its message into the dirt, the message with her name and street. What if he continued his persistent pursuit? What if he did follow her? Follow her home to her rooms?
Had the laces been looser, she could have kicked them off while running and barely missed a step. But, she’d done as Gaius recommended and tightened them before leaving her rooms again, so they were nicely snug.
She ran on, dodging through late-day marketplace crowds. The hazy bronze afternoon had given way to a smoky, coppery glow. The sun, a bloated ball of red fire, roiled and fumed. The sea stretched glassy and vermillion.
A shrill and terrible wail tore from the old madman’s throat. “The sun! The sun bleeds! The sky blackens!”
Euterpe risked a glance back to see how far away he was, and witnessed him hurl himself full-length on the ground. He thrashed there, still wailing, amid a dust storm of his own making. People moved back from him, clearing a wide space where he rolled and writhed.
She stopped, bent double to catch her breath, disarrayed hair tumbling around her face.
Then the day dimmed strangely, not the dimming of dusk or of clouds but something else, some sudden and rising wave of shadow. A faint but growing sound filled the air, a distant whisper that became a rustle that became a thunderous whirr.
A woman gasped and pointed. Others joined her, women and men alike.
Lifting her head, looking westward again, Euterpe gasped as well.
The bleeding sun had vanished behind a blackened sky, as a turbulent cresting darkness loomed over the port-city. The whirr it made was that of wings, a multitude of wings beating.
Birds.
Not a flock but a swarm, a hundred swarms, a plague of birds so as to blot out the sun and cast Piraeus into premature night. Thousands of them. Millions. Like locusts. Like flies.
People stared in wonder and amazement. A few cried out in alarm, or fear.
Then panic engulfed the marketplace as the birds descended with ear-splitting cries, the whirring thunder of wind-whipping wings deafening.
They swept down, scattering, diving, darting amid the columns and buildings. Wet brown-streaked white droppings pattered in a messy rain. The acrid stink mixed with the sour, musty odor of feathers… and then with the hot tang of terror and blood.
Long, thin, needle-sharp beaks plunged and pierced. They hooked onto skin or clothing with tiny, thorny talons and clung like burrs no matter how their victims flailed and battered at them.
“Strixoi,” Euterpe heard herself say, hardly believing it.
But there could be no denying, not when the proof was all around her. The birds, small and black-plumed, with reddish breasts and bright crimson oil-drop eyes, seemed to not be so much spilling the blood as… as drinking it… swelling fat the way ticks did when they fed.
The madman’s ranting… Zetis and her dreams… the cradle-deaths and Mud Street sickness…
It was true.
A man staggered blindly past, his screams were muffled by feathers, his hands trying to pry out the beaks embedded deep in his eyes. A woman ran, hunched over a howling child she held in one arm while she waved her other arm wildly over her head. Two youths stood back-to-back, trying to fend off the attacks with hay-rakes. A little girl dumped cabbages from a large basket, upended it, crawled under, and hid inside.
Braziers got tipped over, spilling coals that ignited hangings and straw. Fires began spreading, adding to the panic. Euterpe rushed with a jostling crowd along the colonnade, almost more carried along than running on her own.
She recognized Melanthia’s voice in the screaming cacophony, and saw her friend swatting at a strix tangled in her hair. Its beak jabbed again and again at Melanthia’s head, digging gashes in her scalp that sent blood trickling down her powdered brow. Euterpe fought against the tide to reach her.
A body—male or female, Euterpe couldn’t discern, it was so covered in flapping, feasting strixoi—sprawled in her path, a red puddle leaking around it. Her sandals slid and squelched, then left her message stamped in a gruesome trail.
The strix, when she grabbed it, ripping its talons from Melanthia’s hair, snapped its head around and struck. Sharp pain stung Euterpe’s wrist. Far worse was the immediate draining sensation, both burning and hideously cold. She squeezed the feathery body, tried to twist it, to wring its neck or crush its bones, but the hand attached to the impaled wrist already felt weak, going numb. It was all she could do to hold on.
Melanthia, more resembling a theatrical harridan than a prostitute, with her hair in gorgon’s snarls and cosmetics smeared, snatched up an urn from an abandoned potter’s stall and swung it at the strix. The urn smashed to pieces, nearly breaking Euterpe’s fingers and sending pottery shards flying, but the strix burst like an overripe fig.
Its needle-beak remained lodged in Euterpe’s wrist, a hollow tube from which her blood dribbled. Revolted, she pinched it and pulled. It slid out, leaving a puncture in her flesh. She pressed her other hand over the hole, shuddering.
True night was falling over Piraeus now, lit by many more fires burning out of control. The city rang with screams, and the ravenous screeching of the strixoi. All around them, people fled and fell and died. There was no escape.
They sank together to their knees, arms around each other, sobs of hopeless horror wracking them both as they waited for their deaths to find them.
Euterpe thought of their sister prostitutes, their customers, their other friends like Gaius. Was this it? Had the old madman been right? Were these the end times, the doom of them all?
She could only be glad she had no family to worry about, that she’d never married, had no children, that neither her mother nor well-meaning, eccentric father had lived to see this…
Her father… her well-meaning, eccentric father who’d joked that she might one day follow in his footsteps…
Who’d taught her to read, taught her about history and architecture… who’d taken her exploring… in the catacombs and secret tunnels below the city…
She rose from her knees. Melanthia looked up, bewildered, as Euterpe drew her to her feet.
“What are you doing—?”
“Hush,” said Euterpe. “Follow me.”
ONLY DARKNESS
By Paul Witcover
One hot Friday night in late July, with the streets of Greenwich Village simmering around her in a stew of rock, hip-hop, and salsa spiced with the sweetness of pot smoke, the wailing of car horns and sirens, and strings of leftover firecrackers going off like popcorn as people laughed and shouted and argued about everything and nothing, Fay looked up from her sketchpad to see a sleek young man standing before the drawings she’d put on display to drum up business. He was fastidiously dressed despite the heat and grime in an expensive-looking dark suit, an unwrinkled shirt of palest mauvette
buttoned up to the collar, and a rakish black fedora. Her own twinned reflection gazed at her in miniature from the ovals of mirrored sunglasses. The rest of his delicately boned face was white as Warhol’s. A small ruby glittered in his left earlobe like a pinprick of blood. What have we here? she thought. Another vampire wannabe? The Village was crawling with them. Or even worse, a mime.
“May I?”
His voice went well with his shirt. But he’d spoken, at least. Not a mime, thank God. Nothing drove away customers like mimes, the natural enemies of sidewalk artists everywhere. He could, Fay supposed, be an off-duty mime… though she found it difficult to imagine mimes were ever off-duty. She stubbed out the cigarette she’d been smoking and inclined her head toward the camp stool she provided for customers. The young man seated himself and crossed his legs with a casual scissoring motion that made her want to draw him as all sharp blades and angles.
She clicked on the lamp affixed to the top of her easel, left off between jobs to save batteries. In the sudden splash of light, the young man’s features leapt into stark relief as though chiseled in stone. Fay gasped despite herself, only to realize in the next second that he was wearing theatrical makeup, his face as pale and unlined as the top page of her sketchpad. She felt like the victim of an obscure joke.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said, which didn’t exactly set her mind at ease, either. He spoke in a normal tone of voice; they might have been in a quiet studio somewhere, just the two of them. His thin lips barely moved, as if the makeup he was wearing had baked into an inflexible ceramic mask, its smoothness concealing… what?
Suddenly she knew. Her perceptions shifted, realigning as in the instant when a trompe l’oeil is pierced, the illusion still present but no longer substantial, floating translucent upon the surface of the real. Why, he’s old. There was nothing obvious even now, but she knew it nonetheless.
“Your drawings are different from these others,” he continued, one eyebrow rising marginally above the mirror shades to both indicate and dismiss her fellow sidewalk artists. “For one thing, you don’t use any color, just charcoal and pencil. Why is that?”
Fay shrugged. The question seemed anything but idle. She wondered if he was a wealthy gallery owner or private collector on the prowl. She’d heard of such things. Legendary sidewalk encounters that brought some lucky stiff enough to live on for months or, as with Mapplethorpe, sparked a successful career… albeit with certain strings attached. But Fay was a big girl and could take care of herself. “I don’t want to be one of those painters who can’t draw, you know?”
“Go on.”
“Color can be a crutch. It’s easy to rely on it too much, hide behind it.”
“I thought that kind of approach had gone out of style with Van Gogh.” A name the man pronounced, to her vast annoyance, as Van Gock. “Actually, it was out of style even then, but poor Vincent was too passé de mode himself to notice.”
Passé de merde, Fay thought. “Look, mister, this is a sidewalk, okay? Not the fucking Met. I’m just trying to earn a living. If you want me to draw you, fine. If not, make room for a paying customer.” Not that there were exactly crowds of that elusive breed clamoring for her attention.
To her surprise, the man smiled. Or, rather, she thought, “smiled”—all that makeup had the peculiar effect of placing quotation marks around his facial expressions.
“You misunderstand,” he said. “I admire your work. It’s why I’ve chosen you.” His words, like his expressions, seemed charged with a secret irony. He removed his hat as he spoke, carefully placing it upside down on his lap, then took off his glasses and dropped them inside as though about to perform some feat of prestidigitation guaranteed to astonish and amuse. “I have no intention of wasting your time.”
Jesus Fucking Christ, Fay thought, scarcely listening. Well, that explains a lot. Like his skin, the man’s hair was Warhol white. He wore it slicked back, each perfect furrow so sharply engraved it looked almost too real, like a high-res image. His eyes had the pale, pink translucence characteristic of albinism, a condition Fay had seen in rabbits but never before in a human being.
“I’ve been looking for you, or someone like you, for a long time,” the man said. “An artist immune to the seductions of color. Perhaps you can succeed in capturing my likeness where so many others have failed. If that’s so, I may have a commission for you, one that will pay very well indeed.”
“A sketch is twenty bucks… in advance.” She normally charged fifteen but had heard enough to gamble on the extra five. Sure enough, he dipped his hand without hesitation into the bowl of his upturned hat and brought it out with a folded bill tucked between two well-manicured fingers. “Nice trick.” She half-expected his skin to be like ice, or stone, but apart from a certain dryness, she felt nothing unusual as her fingers brushed his in taking the bill. She pushed it into the front pocket of her cut-offs. “Say, I hope you’re not keeping all your money up there. Someone’ll steal it. The hat, I mean.”
“It’s quite safe, I assure you,” he said with a “smile.” “Shall we begin?”
“Sure. That’s not a bad pose right now. Do you think you can hold that?”
His answer was to become as still as a statue.
“Jesus, mister,” she said. “You don’t have to stop breathing, you know.”
“I have all the air I require,” he said, and this time she couldn’t see his lips move at all, as if he were a ventriloquist. Or a ventriloquist’s dummy, she thought.
“Doesn’t the heat bother you at all? I mean, you’re not even sweating.”
“I don’t, I’m afraid. A peculiarity of my condition.”
Fay blushed. Put my foot in it again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry. None of my fucking business anyway.”
“That’s quite all right, my dear. One gets used to it.”
Fay selected a piece of charcoal and began to study his face, searching for an entry point into his soul. Usually, it was the eyes. But his weak, pink eyes reminded her too much of rabbits, and whatever else this man was, he was no rabbit. A hunter of rabbits, more like. The chill, fey beauty of his features enthralled her. Their hyper-real perfection like some porcelain figure by Koons. Just as, moments ago, she’d seen past the cosmetic mask of youth to the truth of age it concealed, so now did her senses pierce the underlying flesh as though it, too, were but a mask. What lay beneath was something neither old nor young, a timeless, ageless purity at the very heart of him, a dense, dark egg that glowed with the absence of light like a black hole. It was then that Fay became afraid, for never in all the hundreds of men and women she’d sketched had she seen anything remotely similar.
“You’re…” she began, flustered. “You’re not…”
“Calm yourself,” he said. “And draw.”
Fay knew at once that she lacked the skill to do justice to what her talent was showing her. Still, her heart beat with excitement at the challenge. She picked up a stick of charcoal and began to draw. And in the mere attempt to copy what she saw, she felt a power stir to wakefulness in her unlike anything she’d experienced before. She’d believed for as long as she could remember that there was a potential greatness in her, had nursed the belief amid the mundane surroundings of North Carolina like some fairy-tale secret whose magic could harm as well as help her, but not until now had she realized just how rich her gift truly was… or, rather, could be. Like a breath of air expanding endlessly inside her, for the first time she had a sense of all she might accomplish. All she was capable of. She felt as if her whole life had been a prelude to this moment, a moment that would change her in ways she couldn’t begin to predict. Was already changing her. Afraid it would never come to her in North Carolina, she’d gone to New York in search of it. And now, by some miracle, she’d found it… in the last place she ever would have thought to look. Or it had found her. It was exhilarating, dizzying, and frightening at once, a lover as likely to ravage as embrace.
Fay lost track of time, of place. Sh
e no longer felt the heat, no longer registered the perpetual Village Mardi Gras going on around her. All that existed in the world was she herself, the man sitting across from her in frozen silence, and the image being born on the rough page between them.
At last she was finished. Exhausted, she looked dumbly at what she’d drawn. It was by no means the most technically accomplished sketch she’d ever produced. Far from it. Yet imperfect though the likeness was, it had something of perfection in it. Something missing until now from even the best of her work. She felt proud, even a little awed. She presented the sketch to the man as if daring his criticism.
He studied the portrait for a moment. Then he began to cry. It was the first thing he’d done so far that hadn’t struck Fay as entirely artificial.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Your tears…”
They were pink, tinged with blood. They left trails down his cheeks like the marks of claws. The man drew a silky burgundy-colored handkerchief from the sleeve of his jacket and dabbed at his face. “Please don’t be alarmed.” His voice matter-of-fact as a doctor’s. “A peculiarity of my condition, nothing more.”
In New York, one learns quickly not to pry into the peculiarities of other people’s conditions. Still, even in the North Carolina hill country the days when blood meant simply blood were long past. Fay drew back, putting a buffer of extra space between them.
The man tucked the handkerchief back into his sleeve, looking into her eyes all the while. “I wasn’t sure this man existed anymore. Or, if he did, whether anyone could find him. But now you’ve given me a glimpse of him. Thank you for that.”
Fay nodded speechlessly. There was something almost unbearably sad in the regard of his rabbity eyes. She found herself pitying him terribly without knowing exactly why. But she did know it was more than just the obvious fact of his “condition,” whatever that might be.