Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  Similar formations in other charts: the Ragpicker (Mural Chart, NQ1).

  * * *

  When the salt had worn it to translucence and a faint smell of copper, the ghost finally began to talk, though it told her nothing she did not already know. She’d netted enough ghosts by that point, left enough of them huddled in their terror on her shelf and telling each other tales of elsewhere to keep their longing for escape alive, to know just what it was about the map that drew it. Listening to it now she could almost see the pale ghost-roads that linked the stars, could almost see it walking them, both feet freed, heart light, and not alone.

  She wondered after the other ghost, the one it sought. Had Wasp salted that ghost, caught it, crammed it in a jar, reeled its memories out hand over hand, and dumped it out amid the scorchweed and windfalls to wend its way back to its wandering? Or had it gone on, the way the tales said that they could go on, and left Wasp’s captive ghost behind? Even if she freed this ghost now, would it go on chasing the other as a dog chases its tail, or the sun the moon: reaching always, all unreached?

  At least it has something important to search for, she thought. All I can think of to look for is a way out.

  Wasp blinked. For a fraction of a second she had seen something like a dream. In it, a daisy-chain of Archivists went back and back and back, an ancient hut their jar, their holiness shackling them as sure as salt. She had forgotten what it was she sought before she only sought escape. If she’d sought anything at all.

  The daisy-chain could knot her up into it and continue on. Or she could end it here.

  Before she knew what she was doing, the knife was in her fist. She crossed the tiny room to where the ghost sat slumped. Kicked the salt clear from its feet. Held out her hand.

  It trusted neither her grin nor the glint in her eyes, but got up all the same.

  The Archivist

  Area: 65.002 sq. deg. (appx. 0.16%)

  from the Ragtree Chart: plant-based pigment, human skin

  Winter

  Four stars, all minor: hardly enough to reasonably discern the image of what this tiny grouping is meant to represent; namely, a woman with a knife in one hand and a sort of scroll in the other, frozen in the act of stepping forward.

  This trickster’s status as culture-hero is provisional—her motives are dubious, her intentions suspect, the queues to her shrines no longer than the trails of corpses that rattle along in her wake through a half-dozen tales—but persistently widespread.

  What makes it particularly strange is that she seems to have played culture-hero to the very spirits of the deceased.

  If this woman truly was, as a fairly large body of conjecture suggests, one of the Archivists, the historian-priestesses of the bitch-god Catchkeep (see above), she would have been an extremely capable fighter, trained since early childhood to single combat and little else, and it is true her skybound avatar does hold her knife point-out, in brawling stance, against the vacuum of space.

  But why the scroll? These priestesses are well known to us for their striking methodology, half clever half quaint: while the quantities of information they gleaned from their informant ghosts was massive, nothing was committed to paper, for paper had they none. It is a reasonable supposition that to a one they were in fact illiterate. So this constellation, gazing blankly out at us from a face it does not have, begs the question—why should the ghosts have borne this woman any loyalty at all? Had she gone turncoat? Shirked her bound and holy duty to enslave them? Flouted Catchkeep’s law?

  The only clue we have can be found in a strange fragmented text discovered with the Ragtree Chart, interred beneath that tree itself. (The tree in question is a crabapple, and a curious one. Thrice the size it ought to be, at one point it appears to have grown up through a sort of hut, its footprint approximately four paces by four, constructed of automobile parts and leather and stones: most of the leather is long gone, but the framework that once supported it, in minor part, remains.)

  The text itself is in grievous disrepair, scrawled on a few palm-sized fragments of scorched paper crushed into a glass bottle of palest green. Interestingly, it appears to have been penned by two different hands: first in a dire penmanship, blocky and childish, which peters out as though in great exhaustion midway through; the writing that continues after, while legible and even flowing, gives the observer the unmistakable impression that its scribe was able to maintain only through great concentration only the most tenuous grasp on his writing implement (which appears to have been a pin or needle dipped in blood)—as though he, or it, were made mostly of air.

  If we are reading the text in its proper order, it tells us how an Archivist of Catchkeep, name of Wasp, in a total upheaval of all of the ritual structures of Catchkeep’s worship, challenged her keeper/overseer in single combat and bested him. Gravely wounded, she used the last of her strength to free all of the dead man’s captive ghosts and destroy every last one of the Archivist tools (see fig. 7 for a replica of a typical field kit) by which those ghosts and others had been hunted and enslaved.

  It is not known what became of her—whether she died in her blood on the dirt floor of the priest of Catchkeep’s house or else somehow healed her wounds and went on to become the sort of patron saint for ghosts the evidence suggests.

  In the end, every wildly disparate theory sinks its roots in the same pot: the proto-tale rather uninspiredly entitled “Archivist Wasp Frees the Ghosts.” Wherein, after destroying Catchkeep’s priest and all his tools, our mortally wounded heroine conjures Catchkeep herself down out of the sky and tricks the dog-god into suffering the newly-released ghosts to climb up upon Her back. From there they are borne, clinging on like barnacles, aloft into the night. Meantime, our retired Archivist and a single anonymous ghost (though some sources insist that there were two) remain to see that none are left behind, vowing to rejoin the others when their work on earth is done.

  And if they’re not there yet, as every version of the story always ends, they are here still.

  BEACH BUM AND THE DROWNED GIRL

  Richard Parks

  The drowned girl was a corpse drifting to shore on the evening tide, her eyes wide and staring. The not breathing part of being a corpse was easy. She found that what really gave her trouble was not blinking. Unlike breathing, it was a habit she’d found very hard to break.

  Her once-white dress was tattered enough so that it flowed and drifted with the current. Strands of seaweed tangled her pale arms and legs and a small crab nipped at her ear. She didn’t bother to brush it away, even though its claws tickled. She could hear the surf rolling not more than twenty yards distant, from the sound of it, and she didn’t want to give the game away.

  A small shark circled her hopefully, but when it got too close something in its primitive brain fired a warning and it immediately flicked its tail and disappeared into deeper water. She almost smiled, but didn’t think a smile was proper in a drowned girl. When the tide finally retreated, it left her washed up on the beach about ten paces from the surf, and there she waited with the patience of the dead to be found.

  So patiently, in fact, that when someone finally did approach, she was dreaming of swimming alone through an ocean of stars and didn’t hear him until he spoke.

  “Excuse me, but were you going for horror or pity? I was just curious.”

  The drowned girl saw the young man leaning over her now, since she’d lost the trail of the comet she’d been chasing just a moment ago and her eyes now focused on where her body, at the moment, resided. The interloper looked young, about the age that the drowned girl appeared to be, and she knew in him it was just as big a lie. His hair was dark, his body tanned, his eyes older than the sands of Egypt.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, pausing first to spit out a bit of sea water and a tiny periwinkle that had hitched a ride. She didn’t stop to think how she could speak without breath, any more than she worried about why she didn’t need to breathe in the first place. It was just the way things were.r />
  “The effect of the tableau you’ve created,” the young man continued, “What effect were you going for?”

  “The effect is the thing,” she said finally. “Not which one.”

  “I see. I just wondered because your eyes were open and staring. That’s best for horror. For pity, the eyes work better closed. If it was me, I’d go for pity. Such a tragic fate for such a pretty young girl. You could work that.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Uninvited, he sat down a few feet away. The drowned girl turned her head to look at him looking at her. It was still dark there on the beach. There was a moon, but she didn’t need it to see, though she thought the effect of the moonlight on the water was quite poignant.

  She thought his presence somewhat rude, but admitted to a certain curiosity herself—it wasn’t often she met one of her own kind … if by “not often” one meant “never.” Since she existed, she did assume that others did, though this was the first proof of this assumption that she’d actually come across.

  “My name’s Damon. That is, I call myself that. I like the name. The people I meet call me the beach bum. Or rather, that’s what they think when they think of me. Rather old-fashioned, but it suits me.”

  The drowned girl thought about it for a moment. “Lucia,” she said finally, referring to herself. “Do you mind? It rather spoils the effect if someone comes across me and I’m not alone. I’m the drowned girl. I should be found alone.”

  “Don’t worry, you will be. This is a stretch of protected shoreline. No one lives nearby and no one will come along until morning this time of year, and that’s still an hour or so away. So. What happens then?” Damon asked.

  “It varies,” she said. “Sometimes they scream. More often they just stare, then run away to call more people over, and someone remembers to call the authorities, and police come and surround me and measure and take pictures, while a crowd comes to stare. Later I go in a plastic bag.”

  “Then what?”

  “Usually to the morgue and to a cold place there. I stay for a while, and then I leave before the autopsy. I’ve never actually had one, but it sounds unpleasant.”

  “‘Drowned girl’s body disappears,’ eh? Keep that up and you’ll be a sort of urban legend … or I guess that’s the point.”

  She frowned then. “What’s that?”

  “In your case, the pictures are there but no corpse, and it happens over and over. Sort of a Flying Dutchman of drowning victims. Essentially a story that almost everyone’s heard and some believe, but isn’t true.”

  “I’m true,” she pointed out.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter. The legend is the important part.”

  The drowned girl shook her head. “I like it when they find me.”

  “Ah. So it’s the attention you crave, yes?”

  She thought about it and realized that entity calling himself Damon was probably right. She couldn’t say why that annoyed her. “What’s wrong with that?”

  She wasn’t looking at him just then, but she knew he was smiling. “Nothing,” the beach bum said. “I’m the same way.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m the boy they meet in the summer. The one who is at the beach every day. Where you’re unexpected, I’m anticipated, often hoped for. Wanted, I think. I’m here when they want me to be. Someone usually does.”

  She frowned. “A beach bum. That’s all?”

  “I don’t mind, because you’d be surprised how much that is. Consider—everyone remembers you, but in your case no one’s glad to see you. When they recognize me for the first time, what I am or will be to them, they smile. I like it when they smile.”

  “Perhaps, but what about after?”

  His smile turned a little sad. “The end is never as happy as the beginning, but one has to follow the other.” He shrugged. “Some hate me. Some wish they’d never met me. And there are even some who remember me fondly. But, either way, and as with you, they all do remember.”

  “Otherwise….” The drowned girl who called herself Lucia didn’t finish the thought, but the beach bum would not let it go.

  “What happens then?”

  “I start to leave. There’s a place where they are not. I swim through stars and chase comets there. It’s beautiful, but it’s lonely. I think I’m dreaming then.”

  He nodded. “Did they need us once, do you think? The way we need them now?”

  “They need us still. Maybe not the way they once did; I’m not sure if I remember that part right. But they do need us. Otherwise, why are we here at all?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, wonderingly. “I think I need to.”

  “Suit yourself.” She glanced toward the east. “The sun will be coming up soon.”

  He nodded. “Then I guess I should go now?”

  “Goodbye,” she said, and that was all, because it was time to be a corpse again. And, for a little while, dream of chasing comets. She remembered being lonely, but she did not remember feeling so much alone, the way she did now. That was new.

  * * *

  It was probably three years before the beach bum saw the drowned girl again. He looked down at her on the narrow beach, noting that she had closed her eyes. “Good choice. The pitiful look really works for you.”

  “Go away,” said the corpse.

  “Look around you,” said the beach bum.

  The drowned girl reluctantly opened her eyes. They were on the narrowest stretch of beach that could possibly hold a body. High, rocky cliffs loomed overhead, but trees grew at the top and there was greenery and vines wherever they could find a hold in the fissures of the rock.

  “In a war not so long ago, people from the losing side used these cliffs to kill themselves by leaping into the ocean. People still use this place to kill themselves; it’s become a tradition. No one except the authorities and the jumpers come here, and the ones in charge come along in a boat and pull you off the beach with a long hook and stuff you in a bag. I do not think they will remember you for long, so you might as well talk to me.”

  She stood up then, shedding seaweed, a marine snail, and one pathetic little puffer fish. She found a boulder half in and out of the surf and sat down. “Are you following me?”

  The beach bum smiled. “I’m doing the same thing you’re doing, in my fashion. I’m surprised we hadn’t met before that last time.”

  Neither spoke for a little while. The beach bum leaned against the rock wall, the drown girl perched, mermaid-like, on her boulder. The longer she sat, the less corpse-like she became, and it occurred to the beach bum that she had never smelled especially corpse-like even that first time he’d found her washed up with the tide. He sniffed the air discreetly, but the only scent that came from the direction of the drowned girl was a strange combination of sea water and cinnamon.

  “I can’t do the full effect,” she said. “If that’s what you were wondering. I can’t rot, even in the sun. I can’t bloat or change colors. I’m always recently drowned, no matter how long it takes for them to find me. So. I wonder where I’ll wash up next?”

  Blushing slightly, the beach bum said, “The current here runs north. China, most likely.”

  She nodded. “I’ve probably been there, but I don’t remember. How do you know about the current?”

  “I’m a surfer, when I’m expected to be. We know weather and currents and where the waves are the best. What’s it like?”

  She frowned. “What’s what like?”

  “I’m by the ocean, but I’m seldom in it, except splashing around near shore. What’s it like out there in the dark, far from land, drifting?”

  “Peaceful, except when it storms,” the drowned girl said. “Then I roll and spend a lot of time bobbing around under water. Mostly the ocean rocks me, and it’s quiet, not like near land. That’s when I sleep, and dream.”

  “Of comets?”

  “And stars. That’s where I am, then, until I wake up. But sometimes there a
re creatures beneath me making lights under the water. Blue lights and green lights, red lights … like I’m floating over the stars again.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  There was a brief silence, but it was the drowned girl who broke it. “So what’s it like?” she asked then. “Being with someone, I mean.”

  “For a little while you’re the focus of all their attention. At other times, they are the ones who are the focus of my attention, or at least I think that’s how they perceive it, and it makes them happy. It’s attention born of a deception either way. Sort of like what you do.”

  The drowned girl thought about it. “Deception. Yes, I suppose that’s true. But you get to touch them. Or they touch you. Same difference. No one touches me if they can help it.”

  The beach bum got up and walked over to the drowned girl and he put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t mind touching you,” he said.

  She almost smiled, like some great leviathan almost but not quite breaking the surface of the ocean. The beach bum thought he knew why. He didn’t feel the same thing that she didn’t feel.

  “Something about us just isn’t real, when we’re away from them,” he said finally, and took his hand away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you ever dream?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Sometimes, you know … between. Like when you’re drifting on the ocean. When I’m least real.”

  “What about?”

  He sighed. “The same thing you do. Sometimes I wonder what it means. I wonder why we dream of stars when we’re less real.”

  “Are we really less real? I think it means that we are real, more real than we know, and the stars are waiting for us. Some day, when the reasons we’re here don’t make sense anymore.”