Weird Tales, Volume 352

by Ann VanderMeer

  This is how it was every day, once.

  Mr. Itzikoff's severed ear now sits on my writing-desk. It resembles a rare fruit. Tomorrow I will send it to the Caliph, as requested. This involves a trip to the Post Office, which the new men now run. They have made new rules, and keep hours of operation which I do not understand. They require the filling out of forms, and they ask for identification which I do not have. They shake their heads officiously at me. Sometimes they are friendly and sympathetic, which is worse. When did they become so assertive? I do not quite have the strength for the Post Office today.

  Another contract will come soon enough. In the meanwhile, to pass the time, I ride the tram.

  I dislike it intensely. From the windows I can see the new buildings going up, and the days going by.

  This afternoon, to pass the time, I sat down to write. I began a letter to Morgan, but I had nothing to say to her. Beneath my window, children emerged noisily squabbling from their ugly grey school, which I found utterly distracting. I forgot my point.

  My room is full of notes, in my own unsteady and (I will admit) excitable hand. Some are on my fine old stationery, which I have run out of. Others, more recent, are scrawled in the margins of newspapers. (Why do they keep delivering their incomprehensible newspapers to me?) They say: We have a refugee problem in this city. Or my very good friend Moth. Or The Old Game.

  What was the Game? I tried to write it down. The details escape me. There were rules. We fought. What was it for? I forget.

  Dwarf John is dead!

  Not murdered, not murdered as we always expected at last by Morgan, who once loved him and had sworn to . . . But oaths mean little these days.

  Dwarf John is dead of the drink and the cold.

  For it has snowed this last week, and I woke to see our city somberly winding on its funeral shroud, and my heart leapt! How in the old days we hunted each other through the streets, silent, needing no sounds nor words, for we spelled out our names with our tracks, from which one might read who was predator and who prey! Snow was an occasion for singing. . . All too quickly the new men scattered the streets with salt, turned snows to grey muck, vulgar as old newspapers. Snow, you see, obstructs their busses and carriages, makes it hard to take the children to school. I watched the road crews work with a sensation of burning tearful hurt that I can associate only with my own long-forgotten childhood. The crews called to me: “Hey, you! Yeah, you—what are you looking at? Hey—are you all right?” Oh dear, no, I am not. . .

  And there—Dwarf John, bristly, stinking, garnished with piss and vomit, poking up out of the grey snow at the base of a lamp-post like a blighted frozen potato, dead! A pitiful and ridiculous scene. “Poor old sod,” the road crews said. “God, look at him. Hey, you—did you know him?”

  I ran to tell Morgan, of course, mind and heart racing each off-kilter, unsure whether she would laugh or sob, unsure whether to laugh at her or sob together. . . But she was not there. Her warrens beneath the Bridge, where once red silks hung, and incense burned, and tunnels twined like pulsing veins—her warrens are gated, padlocked, dark. Over the rusted iron gate the new men have placed a yellow sign; I did not understand it.

  As I ran raggedly north through the park, past crews of the new men sweeping the paths, past young couples of the new folk promenading in the snow, sliding in my worn shoes across the frozen lake on which they skated, laughing, falling on my arse, snarling and weeping to see the faces of plain young women, chapped by the cold, leaning over to say, “are you all right?”—as I ran I tried to recall when I had last seen Morgan, and could not. We had been lovers once, had we not? It occurred to me that I had not carried the proper tokens or made the proper obeisances to enter her warrens, that I had forgotten even to make the effort, that in fact I had forgotten what her tokens and rituals ever were.

  Moth! Out of the park at Gilliam Street, through the Squires, up the Skeleton Stairs, onto Moth's rooftops, among the pigeons, banging on Moth's door! “Moth, come quick! Have you heard the news? Dwarf John is dead!” Affecting to laugh: “Finally we are free of the stinking little bastard!” Quieter, now: “Moth?”

  If one hangs from the gutters he can observe Moth in his workshop through his upper windows—that is how, had I ever been contracted to do so, I would have killed him.

  Through the windows I saw the following things.

  His tall stooping form, grey and thoughtful, hanging over the new men gathered around him like a willow over toadstools. Moth in his robes, the new men in brown suits—the women favoring beige, and shapelessness—and all of them nodding together, passing papers back and forth. Diagrams—street-plans—blueprints? Moth speaking, the new men listening; then one of the new men, a fat bespectacled one with a ginger beard, who appeared to be their leader, spoke, and Moth listened.

  I rapped on the window.

  Moth, turning slow as a sigh, raised a thin finger, as if to say: One minute. I will be with you shortly. The new men glanced at their watches. Moth, turning his back on me: “Gentlemen, ladies, perhaps you should consider burying the wires. It will save money in the long run. If you look at the plans. . .”

  What could they be working on together?

  I left them to it. I returned to my lonely home.

  Dwarf John's horrid little body had been swept away.

  Dwarf John, dead of the drink! He lay down stupidly in the grey snow not far from my own door, and there he died. Had he come looking for me? To talk about the old times, to bring me news, to kill me or hope I might kill him? Who knows? More likely he was lost.

  Now that I come to think of Dwarf John, it occurs to me that I, too, stink.

  I have never bathed and scrubbed in the neurotic, fearful way of the new men; I refuse to do so now. Also, they have turned off the water in my flat, because I cannot pay the bills.

  In the old days I perfumed myself with oils and inks and musk—bergamot, nightshade, tiger, rosewater, phoenix! Such luxuries are no longer available. No merchants pass this way. Instead I drench myself in aftershave, bottles of which I shop-lift daily on the high street, slipping them under my coat, scuttling out, hiding my face from the harsh neon lights. . .

  I stink. No wonder my neighbors shrink from me! No wonder the lady from the social services called round!

  My coat is threadbare, the scales dull and flaking, the horn cracked like matted hair. I should buy a new coat, but it would be one of theirs. And besides I have no income. Daily I write to the Caliph, to the Cardinal, indeed to the Doge and the Empress and the First Citizen of France and the Governor of New York and even the Head of the Gambino family about whom we read so much now in the papers. . . I write offering my blade and my talents. My letters are returned: ADDRESS UNKNOWN. My way of life is becoming insupportable. Is this comic? My neighbors laugh at me behind my back—and sometimes, now, to my face. I do not think it is comic.

  Today I heard a report on the radio. I do not own one, but my neighbors' two greasy and unappealing teenage daughters play theirs at unreasonable volume, and my walls are thin, and when I complain, they say, “Fuck off, weirdo.”

  A news report! I shivered to hear it. A news report, slipped in briefly between two songs of execrable sentimentality and almost unthinkable rhythmic inanity. One Miss Morgan, the announcer gloated, unmarried, arrested in tears and handcuffs at the Hospital, where she has been until recently employed as a nurse, where she has been until recently and for who knows how long secretly administering morphine in calculated excess to infants in her care, producing how many little stiff corpses, we cannot exactly know how many!

  Yes, Morgan, yes! I wept. She was always a cunning one. To hide among them may be the only way. To put an end to their children, to slow their seemingly limitless powers of increase! And yet no, Morgan, no: she has failed.

  At the courthouse steps I could not get close enough to see her clearly. The woman they led from the police-car past the gauntlet of press and mob appeared old, and ugly, and beaten down, and unfamiliar to
me.

  I have no one to talk to about this. The men in the crowd at the courthouse steps entirely misunderstood the reason for my tears.

  I am scared to visit Moth now.

  The new men are always there talking to him. They come and go with briefcases and plans and papers. They admire his expertise. In what? He is a thief!

  I broke in, one night. There are plans in his workshop for a system of trains, for better street-lighting, for new roads, for reform of the Post Office, for the efficient disposal of waste, including, in particular, those various unusual machines that lie in the ruins of the ancient towers, that we do not understand, that they will now, it appears, be burying under concrete . . .

  “Moth,” I said, shaking him awake. “Moth!”

  It seemed to take him a long time to recognize me. I had so much I wanted to say, to ask, but what spilled forth was: “Moth—Moth! Do you remember Mr. Itzikoff? How together we . . .”

  “Horn,” he sighed. “It's late. I don't want to talk about dreams we may have had. I have a lot of work to do in the morning.”

  What more could I say, after that? I let him sleep. He snores. Is he uneasy?

  On the door of his workshop there is now a plaque. It reads: MOTH & ASSOCIATES CONSULTING, LTD. Consulting on what? It must be important, in the new scheme of things. There are always people there now, with him; he shares office space. He rarely wears his robes, these days. Suits hang oddly on his thin frame. He is still too tall, but now he stoops to hide it.

  I am scared to visit him. The day is coming when I will greet him, and he will not remember who I am.

  And of course Morgan has been taken away, and Feather is vanished from her leaning skeletal Spire, and her Spire is vanished too, it was an architectural hazard, the newspapers said, and the land where it stood is now a supermarket. And I myself forget where Girodias lived, and Talto's Ship appears to have sailed, and Shagreen's Balloon has drifted away, and . . . and . . . and . . .

  Having nowhere better to go, I spend most of my day in the public library, reading the newspapers, looking for news of Morgan, Girodias, all my old friends and enemies. Morgan has been denied bail. Her lawyer says in her defense that she was abused as a child, and may be retarded.

  I search in the new men's newspapers for clues to the catastrophe that drove them here—and what it might take to cause them to return. Nothing. The topic is simply not mentioned. It no longer interests them. Mostly they are interested in sport.

  Their writings, which I once found oblique and incomprehensible, are now quite clear to me. In fact I now believe that they always were. The problem was this: at first, long ago, I looked in their writings for hidden meanings, beauties or horrors, something numinous, something mysterious—I could not believe that their words were so flat and pointless as they appeared. Out of charity to them, I assumed that I misunderstood. I did not.

  When the library closes I visit the park. I like to feed the birds. Their beaks remind me of knives; their squabbles remind me of the old days.

  I cannot deny that the park is a pretty thing. My bench is made of wood and black iron. The evening light fades over the water. The trees are well-chosen, their leaves settle softly, the sweep of the low hills is serene and pleasing. There are too many children on the main lawn, but here, behind the pond, it is quiet. The park is fine work by the new men. In my day it was a blasted heath, fire-blackened, where murderers stalked. It was beautiful, but it was an exhausting, frenetic, febrile beauty.

  Grudgingly, I am grateful for the park.

  And maybe given time there are other things for which I could learn to be grateful—the library? Their cheery music? The clean-swept streets? The kindness of the lady from the social services, who makes sure I am fed? But there will not be time. Some things are inevitable. Some things follow mathematically from certain combinations, transformations, juxtapositions, permeations, thesis and antithesis, insults, incantations . . .

  Oh, I am no thinker. What was I saying? I meant to say: last night I took the tram home from the park.

  The tram chugs up the Scarp to my cold little home with the rattle and shriek of a dying rat. The seats are hard. The young men have slashed the seats' fabric, and vomited on the floor, and scratched the ridiculous names of their gangs and their enemies and their lovers on the windows with screwdrivers. They do not know it, but the young men imitate us. They are an ugly reiteration of my kind, who were beautiful. Their parents do not know what to do about them. Their newspapers fret: their children are aliens among them. This thought gives me little comfort. If it is revenge it is too subtle for my tastes. The young and I have nothing in common.

  “I know, I know.” This, said by the man sitting on the hard seat beside me, folding his newspaper and shaking his head. “Awful, isn't it?” He nods at the graffiti on the windows, which I had been studying, and which was indeed awful, though not for the reason he imagined.

  “You know,” he says, “I've seen you around.” He forces a little laugh. “We take the same tram, you know?”

  He is in early middle-age, ginger-haired, bearded, ugly in a limp and useless way. He wears a clay-colored raincoat, and under that a grey wool sweater and tie. He offers me his hand to shake. His nails are short; he bites them. On the ball of his thumb he has scribbled, in blue ink, call Harold! and Drains!

  Not knowing what else to do, I place my hand in his, and he shakes it limply. He tells me, “My name's Dave.”

  He is a little bit drunk, or he would not be talking to me.

  After a pause awkward enough to make his face a little paler, his lips a little tighter, I say, “My name's Horn.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Horn. You live up on the Scarp?”

  “I have lived there for a very long time.”

  “Nice new development. Nice properties. I work in development for the Council. You get some good deals on properties up there. Values there, you know, only going to keep going up. I'm still only renting, more's the pity.”

  “Really?” I am shaking a little now with the effort of conversation.

  “Yeah. So what do you do—do you mind if I ask?”

  Uncertain, unsure, nearly panicking, the first word that comes into my mind is: “Consulting?”

  He raises an eyebrow. To forestall further questions—thrust! Parry! I begin to understand the technique—I say, “So—what's it like working for the Council?” An inspired move, born of desperation! He talks and talks.

  At one point he asks if I am married, but he does not listen for the answer; he tells me a sentimental story about his wife, then an unkind one. He tells me how he would like to mate with a famous radio-entertainer, whose name I do not recognize. And meanwhile I sit shaking with fear, stinking in my own sweat.

  He asks for my street-address, and I give it. “I know it!” For some reason this delights him. “Ivory Towers, right? Cute name. Nice development. Say what you like—some of those old buildings have character.”

  From time to time he swigs cheap whiskey from a little pocket-flask. He offers it to me; he does not quite notice the loathing and dread in my eyes when I say, “No, thank you.”

  He keeps calling me, “Mr. Horn.”

  I do not want to be found out. I do not want not to be found out. The conversation is intolerable. “Hmm,” I say, and “Oh, really?” and “Ha, ha.” For the first time in my over-long existence I consider suicide—I could throw myself from the tram, roll down the Scarp, perhaps break my neck, I would be found dead in the gutter like Dwarf John, poor bastard, oh well, bag him . . . Lost in that dream, I hardly notice when Dave stands, gathers his things in a hurry, mutters, “Shit—this is my stop,” and stumbles to the door. Laughing, he says the cruelest thing imaginable: he says, “See you tomorrow, Mr. Horn.”

  Some things are unforgivable.

  And so I followed him from the tram. Lately I have had little use for stealth, I am out of practice, and had he not been drunk, and whistling, he would surely have heard me approach. When he p
aused under a streetlight to urinate in someone's bushes I waited behind a tree. As he fumbled for his keys I rushed down the path through his garden, and lunging dragged him from the lit doorstep into the shadows. Whatever happened to my beautiful curving blades of horn, white ivory, black stag? I appear to have misplaced them. I no longer remember what it was like to hold them. Instead I used a wooden FOR RENT sign that I had picked up in a neighboring garden. It took a surprisingly long time, and he made a great deal of noise. In his struggles, he bit my leg, which was remarkably painful, and as I fled home I limped, rather.

  Home; up the hill; up the Scarp; up my Tower, past all my neighbors' doors and frightened faces, up, up, up. If I could have kept going up, up into the night and the stars, forever, I would have.

  They will come for me soon. This, too, is inevitable. I no longer belong here. I am an irritant; a flaw; a monster. I am glad to have clarified the situation. Despite our differences and barriers to comprehension, this at last is a point on which we can all agree.

  My neighbors will tell the police-men—”He was always odd. We always knew.” Or, or—oh, Moth!—Moth will say sadly to them: “Officers, I have a suggestion . . . ”

  I imagine they may be apologetic, at first. “I'm sorry, sir. But you knew this was coming. We've put up with a lot out of you, but there comes a time . . . ”

  But perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps I'm behind the times, these days they're not sorry, they have forgotten this was ever not their city, these days the police-men will probably just, in silent scowling righteousness, kick in the door and then my head . . .

  I have not yet decided whether to run or fight. Either alternative has a great deal to be said for or against. Either might be beautiful, might be squalid; it's all in the execution, of course. I shall find out when the moment comes.