Darkly Human

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Stepping backwards to view the effect of the dress in the full-length mirror, Annie felt her foot crunch down on something.

  Ow!

  Startled, she looked down to see another small pink-and-green box flip onto its side. This one was smaller and flatter. Like a powder compact, she thought unwillingly.

  You stepped on me! The voice was accusatory, and not a little indignant.

  Backing away slowly, Annie kept her eye on the box on the floor. If it had moved, if the voice had spoken again, she wasn’t sure what she would have done. But it wouldn’t have been pretty.

  “I’m losing it. I’m absolutely, positively losing it.”

  Biting the inside of her lower lip, she raised her right hand to chin level, then made a full body swoop to pick up the abandoned box, holding it in her open palm and rasing it to eye level.

  It sat there, innocuous. She didn’t hear anything.

  And then a pair of blue eyes opened on the edge of the bos and stared directly into her own eyes.

  Take me home? it asked wistfully.

  Annie dropped the box, scuttling backwards until she hit the wall of the dressing room. She didn’t scream, some small semi rational part of her mind realizing that a nervous breakdown was not something you wanted to witnesses to.

  The box landed with a soft thump on the carpeting, and lay there for an endless moment.

  This is a fine time for an acid flashback. Did I ever drop acid? She wasn’t sure if shrooming counted. You weren’t supposed to have flashbacks from mushrooms.

  Her breathing had just gotten back into something approaching normal when the box shuddered, like a horse shaking off flies, and flipped over, eyes blinking reproachfully.

  You dropped me. I could have broken.

  Annie opened her mouth to scream, convinced now that a nervous breakdown would be something she would welcome.

  I could help you. I want to help you. Why won’t you let me?

  Ah, she don’t need us. She’s goof enough on her own. She don’t need any help. Ain’t that right, beautiful?

  Annie turned her head slowly, sure before she’d looked what she would see. The closed door of the dressing room hadn’t stopped the compact—why would she expect it to come alone?

  Mascara leaned against the far corner of the dressing room, exuding gunslinger poise like Sharon Stone on her best day. Little Ms. Tough-it-Out thinks she’s got goddess genes, thinks a little dimestore color’ll get her through the day. Hah.

  Stop it! the compact demanded, shuddering violently. Annie blinked, pretty sure that the comment was directed, not at her, but at the other box. Leave her alone. It’s chemicals like you that always make people hate us. You’re gloppy and sticky and I wouldn’t want you either!

  Blue eyes swiveled back to look up and up and up, until Annie felt like Gulliver confronting the Lilliputians. Crouching, she went to her hands and knees, feeling silly but unable to resist.

  I think it’s that way the wand is shaped, all spiky and sharp, the compact confided in her. I know I’d be irritable if I were like that.

  A rude noise was the mascara’s only reply.

  “I’m not hearing this. I’m not seeing this. I’m not doing this.”

  Ooo, someone’s in a major state of denial… The mascara’s comeback was cut short by a scraping noise, and both Annie and the compact swiveled to see two small boxes shove themselves under the door.

  Omph. Did we miss the party? Oh good, she’s not dressed yet. Dammit, where did that brush go? Always sneaking off somewhere just when you need it…

  She doesn’t want us. That was the compact again, sounding close to tears. So far, it was the only one that manifested features. Annie told her herself to be grateful for small favors.

  “It’s not that,” she said, feeling an odd urge to reassure it. “It’s just that I don’t wear a lot of makeup….”

  We’re not a lot of makeup! the newcomer boxes chorused together. We’re not much makeup at all! They both giggled. You ditched that concealer back by the sweaters. Nice going. It always thinks it knows best, being the first one on all the time. We’ll show it. Let us show you what we can do!

  Weren’t you two shade-heads listening? the mascara asked. She don’t want any of us.

  But, But … The two small boxes formed one eye each—brown, Annie noted—and peered at her. But we’re neutral! We can go with anything, in the office or out on the town.

  You sound like a commercial, the mascara sneered. And quit with the doublemint twins gig already.

  The two eye shadows lapsed into hurt silence, glaring backwards at the mascara box, then rolling their shared eyes forward to look at Annie as she knelt on the floor.

  The powder compact lay inches from her face, blue eyes staring up at her hopefully. She hated to do it, she really did, but enough was enough. She’d been attacked, harassed, hard-sold, importuned, insulted…. all right.

  That was her fault for going shopping during the Christmas season. But she refused to be guilted.

  “I. Don’t. Need. Makeup. Especially not overpriced makeup. And especially especially not overpriced chattering pushy makeup!?

  And with that, she grabbed her own clothes and jammed herself into them, picking up her pocketbook and swung open the dressing room door, sweeping all four boxes out of the way. A muffled jumble of complaints, punctuated by one fluent swearword floated up to her ears. Ignoring the odd look a women standing before the three-way mirror gave her, she fled the hallway, leaving her try-ons in a desolate pile.

  Not looking to the right or the left, she swung around display stands and threaded her way through the crowds, stopping only when she stepped onto the crowded down escalator. Holding on to the railing with both hands until her fingers cramped, she stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the shoppers wanting to push by her. Something in her eye irritated her contact lens. “Damn flaking overpriced mascara,” she muttered

  Please, ma’am?

  The soft voice carried from somewhere off to her left side. She jolted, her right hand reflexively going to the strap of her pocketbook slung over her left shoulder. Her glance remained fixed straight ahead at the floor rising to meet the slow tread of the escalator.

  Please? The voice was definitely coming from her pocketbook. A familiar voice.

  I want to go home with you. I want to make things better for you. I want everything to be perfect for you. I’m only here to help you.

  A pause.

  I don’t have any reason to exist, except you.

  Annie stood in front of the gleaming silver-and-chrome counter, not looking at anything in particular.

  “Can I help you?” The saleswomen oozed charm and a caring condescension

  “I want to take this powder compact.”

  “Of course. An excellent choice. Just that hint of protection, to smooth out the skin tone on days when you’re not at your best. Will there be anything else?”

  A long, strained pause……

  Don’t Toot Your Horn

  Unlike the sax, the trombone blasts its way onto the scene, sliding like a triumphant runner into third base, giving the rest of the band a neener-neener as it brushes itself off and accepts the accolades of the crowd. You needed a certain kind of arrogance to pick up a trombone, and you needed even more to keep playing until you got the hang of it.

  Dax had been playing since he was eleven, his battered second-hand horn squeaking and slipping until it finally bowed to his will. He’d worked so many nightclubs and offsite shows, he’d forgotten more than he’d ever remember, one gig sliding until another until he couldn’t remember sleeping, either.

  He’d done all the classics: booze, sex, pills, then shooting it straight into his veins, but it hadn’t been until he wandered down the wrong alley one night, half out of his mind with exhaustion and speed, that he’d figured it out.

  Mad City.

  Now, it was all he could remember. Him, and the horn, and the bitch-goddess of the tune, walking that r
azor balance.

  Thirteenth hour was coming; the Bazaar was getting too thick, shadow-eyed Wakies crowding in alongside locals, poking into stands and fingering wares, clotted and cloudy and hot to deal. Dax slung his horn over his shoulder and headed for elsewhere.

  “You.”

  Since the figure was standing in front of him, looking at him with dead eyes, Dax didn’t bother trying to ignore or avoid it.

  “Me.”

  “You’re wanted.”

  Suddenly there was space around him, where you’d sworn there wasn’t any to be found. Nobody wanted to be summoned, in Mad City, and nobody wanted to be near anyone who’d been summoned.

  “This official?” He didn’t recognize the golem in front of him; it wasn’t a Clockwork, so he wasn’t being hauled in under warrant, and Dax didn’t have anything the Tacks Man would go after.

  “You resisting?” The golem opened its mouth and showed a dark chasm within, the suggestion of infinite width and depth that could swallow a man whole.

  “Nowhere else to go,” he shrugged, which was truth enough. If he wasn’t chasing down the thin line, he wasn’t doing anything at all.

  They didn’t go to the District, and they didn’t go underground. That should have eased a worry, except the golem led him up.

  Dax looked at the ladder, and balked. “I don’t do roofs.”

  “You do now.”

  The golem lifted a hand as though to indicate ‘you first,’ and thick grey claws curled over the edges of its fingers, wickedly sharp.

  Dax went up. The handrails were wet, not the clean damp of rain, but something slick and sticky.

  Like blood. Or something worse.

  Dax didn’t go to the Bazaar when most other folk did, when things got hectic, after thirteen o’clock. Too crowded then, with all the buyers and the sellers shouting out their deals, no room left in the air for music to breathe. But the before and the after, when folk and not-folk lingered around the edges, waiting and hoping, scraping by… that was the time for someone like him.

  He’d been there that morning, what passed for dawn when you never saw the sun, just looming brick wreathed in gloom. His horn smooth in his hands, the bitter coffee sour in his gut, waiting for the moment to come, tap tapping on his bones.

  “Once more, dear friends…” he muttered, resting his aching shoulders against the wall and limbering up his fingers. The wall seemed to shift and mutter against his bones, but Dax didn’t pay that no mind no more. Things happened here; especially here.

  “Play us a song, Daxman. Play us a song.”

  The usual whisper, opening his session. They had their requests, all the shadows drifting past, the lost souls and the haunted ones. Locals mostly, folk who’d wandered here and gotten stuck, most of the life faded from them. For a while, they’d listen to him play, and something like color would return to their existence.

  Even the paperboys –frantic little bastards that they were – paused when he put music in the air.

  But Dax had his rules, and first and foremost was you pay before he’d play.

  Ready now, he took off his cap, worn and patched, and put it on the ground. No sign, no patter, no need. They knew who he was.

  The first came up out of the drifting crowd, crawling where its knees once had been. Tacks Man had been at this one. Dax blew a low and soulful note, and the local shivered as though in pain.

  “You got nothing to offer me.”

  “I do.”

  Locals, mostly, were useless. But this one held out one hand, unfolded skeletal-thin fingers, and displayed its prize in its palm. Wafer thin, translucent blue, it would disappear if you looked too hard at it. Dax averted his gaze, watching sideways, and blew another note, so low, drawn from deep down in the quiet still sadness of the soul.

  The blue fluttered, wings lifting, the glistening dampness evaporating, scenting the dry, dusty air with the faintest hint of something bitter and clean.

  Dax blew another note, lighter and sweeter, and the blue flexed its wings, lifted off the wretched thing’s palm, and flew towards him, dizzy and darting.

  The first true notes of the song emerged, and the blue scrap – drawn as though by honey, slid into the battered, tarnished bell of the trombone, and disappeared.

  Dax felt it slide into him, and on the next exhale, he heard it, smooth and sweet. First love, ages before, the last scrap of anything the poor wretch had saved. His now.

  And music poured out, filling the alley, drawing the crowd nearer, vendors emerging from heir stalls, halting mid-haggle; even the awful shadow of a nightmare, distracted from its tormenting. Dax didn’t notice any of them.

  That night, he holed up in a café where the lights were low and the coffee black and bitter-strong. He shut out the noise and clatter around him, and polished his horn, as though a cloth and gloss could rid it of the nicks and tarnish of a decade’s hard use.

  Most left him be. Most, but not all.

  “You’re a nightmare yourself.”

  Dax didn’t stop polishing, didn’t look up. “You kiss your momma with that mouth?”

  “No, but I ate yours.”

  Jingleman carried his piece with him, a matte black clarinet, but the reed was splintered, and Dax had never heard him play. It took some folk like that: there was too much here, for them. They listened too hard to the doubts that crawled in, drowned everything they had in the fear, kept their instruments with ’em like they might be the key out of Mad City, out of the mad night, the mad haze, the mad sharp stillness of the streets, back to what was real

  Dax didn’t care about out. Real didn’t matter to him no more. The more they paid, the more he played, the closer he got to The Moment. The note in the music that said “you here, boy. You arrived.”

  “You got a point?” he asked now.

  “I been watching you. Everyone has.”

  Everyone could mean no one. Or it could mean everyone. There were always eyes on you, in Mad City. Some were even still human.

  “You take the last things they got left,” Jingleman said, hugging his coat around him like it was cold. “You take the only things as hold ’em together.”

  “I don’t take nothing. They give. They pay me to play the music, and they go away no worse off than before.”

  “Pay.” Jingleman snorted. “Feed, more like.”

  Dax held his horn out to Jingleman. “You wanna try it?”

  The other turned ashy-pale and scampered back, clutching his clarinet.

  “Yeah. Thought not.”

  “Nightmare,” Jingleman muttered, and fled into the shadows.

  The café sometimes let him doss down, off-hours. Most nights, he walked the street. The need for sleep was an ever-lingering hunger, but starvation got familiar, else you wouldn’t have gotten to the City anyway. That’s what they all were, sleeplesswalkers, only some eyes were sleep-stuck closed, and others stuck open.

  “Watch yourself! Comin’ through!” A pack of newsboys, elbows tucked, heads down, skating through the streets like the hounds of hell on little boys’ feet. Dax moved, same as everyone else, knocking into a washerwoman with eyes empty as burnt-out coal who hissed like a cat, pulling away.

  “Little bastards” he muttered, but kept it in his mouth. Dax had no friends here, and newsboys were quick to take offense. He tugged his jacket closer, hitched his pants, and walked on.

  Not every day brought him closer. Sometimes there wasn’t nobody in the Bazaar needed to escape, even for a bit, or the things they offered didn’t interest him none. Then he played for free, letting the notes screech and scamper like those newsboys on a tear, hot flash fading to slow cool, coaxing sounds he hadn’t known existed out of the battered metal, setting them free and returning for more.

  His own memories were a melancholy wail, shiver-quick and tattered, stutter-stop and jagged.

  His first day here, the wax almost got him. Disorientated and not sure where’n hell he was, he’d bunked down in the tunnels, thinking they’d be
safer, and woke with his left leg smothered. He didn’t know about the King Underneath, then. Hadn’t known to be wary of anything too smooth. He scraped most off, but the leg was never the same. He’d gotten street-side somehow, memory blurred, knees shaking. He’d drawn breath and looked around, looked hard then, and seen what was what.

  This place didn’t just eat its young, it ate everyone. It took whatever you got. The locals here, they were scraps, tattered remnants of whatever they’d been, all of them. Nightmares ruled, insanity made sense. Mad City ate you up, bite by bite.

  Not him. He bit back.

  The same thing that’d driven him here, saved him. Jazz lived in these streets, in the alleys and the weird-slicked rooftops, the swagger-sweet smell of the air like a thousand nightclubs , the guilt and the horror and the despair improvising around the single core of hope. Survive another day, find the way home, keep the fires burning. He ate that up, one dream, one memory at a time, wallowing in it, his e-ticket riding the heated edge of insomnia between madness and genius.

  Bite back. Eat up. Never sleep. Every night, every note, might be the one.