Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Skinner permitted herself a truly enigmatic smile, one that she ordinarily reserved for the most outrageous of circumstances. These were certainly circumstances that might qualify, even if the wine and good company hadn’t managed to coax her humor to the surface. “I have found an opportunity, Mrs. Crewell. I imagine that you’ll hear about it, soon enough. Let me thank you for your good nature and excellent hospitality. I surely cannot imagine a better host than you have been. Do not!” She suddenly raised her voice to speak to the movers. “Do not even think about moving that instrument without wrapping it in cloth, first. Have you any idea what the cold weather will do to the strings?”

  She traveled by coach from Chapel Height, skirting the lower edge of New Bank, and into Lanternbridge. The neighborhood was near one of the sinuous curves of the Stark, built near one of the first bridges across its length. Centuries earlier, when Trowth the city had really been a half a dozen loosely-connected little villages, an enterprising family member-probably an Ennering, but historical documents differ-had put three long lines of bright yellow lanterns along the bridge, and ensured that they burned at every hour of the night. Travelers, merchants, tinkers, and anyone else that might bring a coin or two of commerce to one of the competing districts were, once the sun went down, quite naturally drawn to the brightly-lit bridge, and the neighborhood found its inns and taverns always full come evening.

  The good trade made Lanternbridge one of the wealthiest districts in the area, a characteristic which persisted for many years, until the sprawling mass of Trowth finally, by virtue of dozens more bridges across the river, spread out to the far side of the Stark, and pushed its travelers’ lodgings with it. Lanternbridge fell into disrepair for nearly a century then, gradually sliding down the inevitable decline into slumhood, until the Great Forfeiture. Once the wealthy families abandoned Old Bank for Lanternbridge’s neighbor, New Bank, the place underwent a kind of cultural renaissance. All of the decently-paid servants, craftsmen, cobblers, haberdashers, tailors, and restauranteurs relocated to be nearer to the wealth, and Lanternbridge was where they found themselves.

  By Skinner’s time, it was known as a clean, quiet, safe neighborhood, with an exciting mixture of solidly middle-class, cheap journeyman shops and startlingly luxurious fashion houses and dining rooms. It was a common place of residence for moderately wealthy, not-quite-Esteemed merchant families, for up-and-coming and ambitious young people, and for certain relatively famous and popular actors and theater managers.

  The house in Lanternbridge was a cozy three-storey building, not a mansion by any means, but by far more comfortable than any house Skinner had ever hoped to own. She took a few minutes to insist that the movers tour her around the space-getting a feel for distance and location, locating the stove without actually having to risk burning her hands-then hastily ushered them all out. It was far too late at night to begin work, to begin even pondering the work, and so instead she took advantage of the huge, soft, warm bed that had been provided her.

  When morning came around, and anemic sunlight sifted through the gritty black clouds that made up the roof of Trowth, Skinner decided that she would likewise took advantage of a late morning, stirring only faintly as the maid brought her breakfast-covered over, with a tiny heat emitter at the base of the tray, it would stay hot for hours she knew-then pushing her face deep into downy pillows and sweet, satisfied dreams. The weak sunlight crept across the floor of her room, warming and brightening it. Gas lamps along the walls burst to life, bringing with them more light and heat, but Skinner would not be moved.

  It was nearly noon when she finally roused herself, sampling the bacon, eggs, and toast that had been left for her breakfast and was, indeed, still hot. Years of early mornings, to get a start on the day’s inevitably macabre labors caused her a twinge of guilt when she realized the time, but she resolved that she would not regret starting to work as late as she liked. Late mornings, Skinner thought to herself, Are the privilege of the artist.

  Skinner chose a light dressing-gown for herself, rather than struggling to strap herself into the substantial undergarments required by her coroner’s suits. Not having to get fully-dressed in the morning was another luxury she had rarely enjoyed. Waking up in a house, being beholden to no one-it was almost impossible to imagine that, the very day before, she’d planned on renting a rat-trap flat in Bluewater to stay off the streets.

  Downstairs, company was awaiting her, and Skinner recalled that the letter mentioned she would have an assistant who would share the house with her. She’d assumed an arrangement would have to be made, as the knocker required someone who could take dictation for her, but had quite forgotten that the assistant would be living with her.

  “Miss Skinner?”

  Karine. She recognized the voice at once, and of course it was Karine. The young indige women had lost her job at the same time Skinner had, and there couldn’t be anyone more qualified to assist her. “My dear,” Skinner said, “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “They didn’t tell me who I would work for,” her voice smiled, “I am glad it’s you, miss.”

  Skinner experienced a fleeting moment of worry, at the astonishing extent of Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s information. How on earth did she know about Karine? The Vie-Gorgon heiress must have men everywhere. Skinner shook off the thought.

  “Well, have you eaten, Karine? I’d like to get started, but we’re not in any hurry, just yet.”

  “Oh, yes, miss. I am ready whenever you are.”

  “Good. How well do you take dictation?”

  There was a peculiar sound then, a mechanical tapping sound, and then the turn of a dial. Skinner had never heard anything quite like it before. “Yes,” Karine said. “I have been working for my cousin, who is a broker for airshipping. I have learned to use this…the Feathersmith machine.” She did something with her hands, and a machine clacked and rattled alarmingly. “It is like a tiny printing-press.”

  “Well, then I suppose we had better get started,” Skinner said, gamely, as she sat down and prepared to work. It did not take her more than a few minutes of silence to realize that she had absolutely no idea how to begin. The silence hung awkwardly between them.

  The work on The Bone-Collector’s Daughter had been different-the product of an inspiration that had seized her while she had been wholly occupied with something entirely unrelated. When it had blossomed in her mind, she found that the play had practically written itself; Skinner was herself taking dictation, listening to the play speak in her head and then just repeating it to Sitwell in one of their aggravatingly-long sessions. And, for as successfully as she’d been with The Bone-Collector’s Daughter, she’d really never written anything else before, and was altogether unsure as to how to go about it.

  “Miss?”

  “All right,” Skinner said. “Let’s just…start. With…something.” It’s better, it must be better, to just right it down, whether it’s good or not. If it’s bad, we can always change it later. “With Theocles. We’ll start with the poem. Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  Merciful relief, as Skinner found she could spend a good hour reciting the epic story to Karine-working easily from memory, not striving to build something new. She told her assistant the whole story, but had her just write down the main thrust of each of the sixteen books. When they’d finished, Skinner was strongly of a mind to break for the day, enjoy a well-cooked meal, drink some of the liquors that the movers had helpfully pointed out to her the night before. She resisted the impulse, out of an old habit that she’d learned from Beckett: whatever you didn’t solve today was what would bite you in the ass tomorrow. Of course, writing a play hardly had the same urgency or stakes about it that tracking down renegade necrologists did, but the principle could correctly be said to be the same.

  “So,” said Skinner, as Karine’s clattering typing ground to a halt. “So, what is this about?”

  “It’s about Theocles.”

  “Yes,” Sk
inner agreed. “Wait. No. No, Theocles is who it’s about. What is it about, though?”

  “He…takes over the empire.”

  “That’s what happens. What is it about?” Skinner asked again, and Karine said nothing. “All right, I know what this is about. It’s about a man who is thirsty for power. He wants more power, he thinks he deserves more power…no. No, he thinks he can do a better job. He thinks he can do a better job, and so he starts doing bad things in order to get the power.”

  “That’s not in the poem. The poem just says he’s jealous of Agon Diethes.”

  “Well, we’re changing it. We’re allowed to, there’s no rule. It’s more interesting if Theocles thinks he can do a better job. Or maybe both. Maybe he secretly thinks he can do a better job, but then something happens…that makes him sure of it.” What…how could you make that happen? It needs something weird. Something creepy.

  “He fights that troll in the second book. In Daeagea, before my people made a kingdom for themselves, there were all just tribal hetmen. And if a man went out and killed one of the kriegbats or lannershrikes, it was seen as a sign of his destiny.”

  “Yes. The troll.” No, wait. The Loogaroo. “Wait, all right, I’ve got it. First scene. First scene is Theocles and his friend in the forest. After…after a battle. It’s a stormy night. Are you writing this down?”

  What followed was a rough cut of a scene in which two tired, bloody, dirty old soldiers encountered a compelling oddity in the woods. Theocles, still at this point content to be a humble servant of the Emperor, did not fight a troll, but instead came upon two bogeys, behaving in the strange and off-putting way that bogeys do.

  “Steeplechase,” Skinner said, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “And Mumbletypeg are their names.”

  They spoke mostly gibberish; Skinner borrowed liberally from the weird monologues that she’d heard dream-poisoned men spout off, or the terrifically peculiar rants of a man deeply lost on veneine. But in the middle of those weird speeches, they spoke directly to Theocles. They hailed Theocles as a general, and a king, and told him of an impossible future.

  No grown adult in Trowth would admit to believing in bogeys-not anymore, anyway. And few of them would confess, except in their darkest and most private moments, to believing in the Loogaroo. Only on quiet, lonely nights, on desolate windswept roads, when that solitude transmuted into an unbearable feeling of presence, when men and women picked up their paces and hurried back to well-lit parlors and warm fires, would a person acknowledge that there were times when they still feared a fairy-tale like the Loogaroo.

  The Loogaroo was the king of the bogeymen, the Nightmare Prince. It was a dark shadow of a thing, a wicked dissonance in the nature of the Word. The Goetic Church still insisted that the Loogaroo existed, and was present as the black cruelty in the heart of every man-an actual, living entity that, in some small way, possessed a portion of each and every human being’s soul. It was an evil, but a necessary evil, meant to give dimension to the Word. Good, the Goetic Church said, is meaningless without a corresponding wickedness. The Church’s position is why a play suggesting that a doctor of theology might secretly be a servant of the Loogaroo-a play like The Bone-Collector’s Daughter-would have been condemned as heresy in Canth.

  The Church Royal, on the other hand, maintained the official policy that the Loogaroo was simply a metaphor for mankind’s native tendency towards wickedness. The various bogeymen named as its subjects-often given allegorical names like “Lust,” or “Greed,”-were simply poetic personifications of natural phenomena. It was real, but not really what it seemed to be.

  Skinner liked the bogeys in the first scene; there was still enough of a sense of mystery, a willingness to indulge in fantasy, among the Trowthi people that their monstrous prophecies could be true, but a history of painting the creatures as conniving, scheming demons meant that Steeplechase and Mumbletypeg could just as easily be liars.

  As though rediscovering the Loogaroo had burst some levy in her imagination, scenes and incidents and speeches began to pour out of her. Theocles making a pact with the Loogaroo. The bogeymen summoning the Loogaroo. The Loogaroo haunting the coronation ceremony, finding a place for itself at the celebratory banquet. Just write it all, Skinner thought to herself, as they worked through dinner and late into the night. Just keep writing it, we can always cut it out later. By nightfall, they had produced no fewer than seven full scenes, and a dozen more speeches and snippets of dialogue that Skinner liked, but wasn’t sure what to do with.

  When they had finished, Skinner slumped in her chair and absently scratched at the edge of the silver plate across her fate. She had been snacking on a small piece of roast that the maid had brought, but now found herself ravenously hungry.

  “Why do you think,” Karine asked, her chair creaking as she leaned away from the Feathersmith machine, “that Miss Vie-Gorgon wanted this play?”

  “Oh, who can say with the Families? They’re always up to something obscure and confrontational. The Wyndham-Crabtrees and the Crabtree-Daiors own the Public Theater, don’t they? Maybe just a way to draw the audiences off from there.”

  “It sounds…Theocles sounds like, a little bit like what the Emperor is like. Now, I mean.” She coughed lightly, then added, “Word preserve him.”

  “Yes, it does sound like that.”

  “Do you suppose he’ll be mad about it?”

  Skinner was quiet for a long moment, apprehension and pride warring over her face, vying for the chance to change it to a frown or smile. “If I were quite honest with you,” she said, smiling as her apprehension about what she was risking by writing a play like this lost out to the pride she took in her ability to do it, “I would say that that is precisely the point.”

  Eleven

  I believe I have met with some success. I have devised a calculating engine, vastly different in design from our ordinary engines. This new engine relies on a kind of imprecision, an accommodation of likelihoods rather than precise calculation. It therefore does not require that all elements of a question or problem be input directly into its mechanism, but can act and calculate beyond its own parameters.

  I have done this through the use of [lacuna; three pages of the journal are excised by the author. In their place is the following note: “As I suggested, certain events have come to light which make me loath to share my methods. I am not altogether confident that this experiment will result in a positive outcome. Until I am sure of it, I mean to keep my procedures from the world at large, for fear of unexpected consequences.”]

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  Stuck. A month in, and Skinner was stuck. Dead in the water, floundering, as unable to think of a decent simile as…as someone who was stuck. Emilia would be by today for more pages for the actors to chew on, and Skinner had absolutely nothing to give her.

  The first few scenes had gone easily enough. Once she’d worked out the bits with the Loogaroo, a panoply of material had presented itself, ripe for the plucking. And then, when she’d run out there, she just started adapting scenes directly from the poem, changing bits here and there to mesh with her idea for the piece. And now she’d reached a point where everything that might reasonably be stolen from the poem was stolen, and everything inspired by her flirtation with the symbolic dark heart of humanity had done it’s inspiring, and Skinner had no idea what to do next. The play wasn’t hanging together, didn’t feel real enough, didn’t feel like it mattered.

  She would not tolerate being the author of an inoffensive drama. The sort of play that might be enjoyed by a few wealthy families, and then filed away in one of the Groheim collections where it would sit among equally unspectacular dramas, minding its own business on someone’s bookshelf while audiences spent their nights out lusting for meatier fare. Her play would fascinate and hurt, would land like a punch to the gut. It would make people sit up and realize…

  Realize what? Skinner didn’t know. She could hear Karine, waiting bored an
d patient by her machine, ready to resume the work. Skinner sat with her chin in her hand, tapping her cane against her shoe, waiting for an idea.

  No one, she thought to herself, is going to realize anything if I never finish the damn thing. She likewise was starting to grow concerned again about where she would live, and what she would eat. Emilia Vie-Gorgon was certainly generous, but it was doubtful that she was generous enough to provide so much without the expectation that Skinner would produce something.

  “Miss?”

  Skinner sighed. “Karine, let’s…take a break for now. I don’t have anything to write today.”

  “Miss Vie-Gorgon is going to be here this afternoon. She’ll want to see pages.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll talk to her.”

  There was a pregnant silence then, a kind of silence that Skinner recognized: the sound of a person who was hesitating to say something.

  “Yes?”

  “…I don’t…Miss, I don’t want to worry you, at all, but…”

  “It’s all right, Karine, just say it.”

  “Well. I like working for you, miss. I’d like to keep working for you. So. So, I suppose…”

  “I suppose I’ll have to think of something soon, right?”

  There was another pause.

  “Yes, miss,” Karine said, slightly more enthusiastically. “I’m sure you will.”

  “Hmph.” Skinner returned her chin to her hand, and slumped in her chair as Karine bundled up her things and left. She would be out window-shopping for hours. Karine was a very frugal young woman, and did not make extravagant purchases even now that she was, comparatively, quite flush-but she took a great pleasure in looking at fancy and expensive things, in imagining her life with them, in imagining what it would be like to be able to purchase a new silk dress for every day of the week entirely unmindful of the cost. This imaginative pleasure ensured that her trips around town were both long and unremarkable.