Dust City

by Robert Paul Weston

  There’s the sound of several footsteps from beyond the door. The first to come in are a pair of globs. They’re dressed in gray uniforms and caps—chauffeurs. They stand on either side of the doorway and clasp their hands in front, not saying a word. Next, Ludwig comes in, and then Karl. They’re in their familiar lab coats, the same ones they wear on their billboards and on television. Karl is pushing a metal handcart shrouded in a white sheet. Something pointed and angular lies underneath, pitching the fabric into hills and valleys. The last to enter is Skinner. He’s limping, his one leg tied in a splint from where we crushed it under the golden giant. He comes straight for me, standing before the cage. “I owe you,” he says. He raises one of his hands between us and starts to remove his glove.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” says Karl, waggling a finger as if admonishing a child. “We told you: look, but don’t touch.”

  Skinner spins to face him. “I owe him,” he growls. “For this!” He pounds a fist against his injured leg.

  “Don’t worry,” says Ludwig. “Everyone will get what’s coming to them in due course.”

  “You too,” spits Fiona, speaking to everyone there who isn’t locked in a cage.

  “I quite agree,” says Ludwig, smiling back at her. “My brother and I expect to get what’s coming to us. Wealth, influence, prosperity—more of the same, I suppose.”

  Skinner has moved to the corner of the room, sulking in an armchair. His injured leg spills out sideways at an awkward angle.

  “They killed them,” I whisper, trying to flex my fingers. I look up at Ludwig. “And now you grind them up, don’t you? You grind them into dust.”

  “It’s more complicated than that, I assure you,” he says. “But ultimately yes, we do. We grind them up.” He bends to open a drawer in the side of the handcart. When he rises again, he’s got some sort of machine in his hands. It looks like a shortwave radio, complete with technical readouts and illuminated dials. On top there’s a wooden flap. “It wasn’t always that way. Initially, killing the fairies was merely a sound business decision. If the thaumaturgists were the city’s only purveyors of magic—even a lesser, basically medicinal brand of magic—then we’d corner the market. But we failed to anticipate that without the fairies, the leftover dust we mined would someday run out.” He places the machine on a nearby desk and starts fiddling with the dials.

  “Then,” says Karl proudly, “we hit on the idea of digging up the bodies themselves—which by that time had grown into those ghastly deadwood trees. We wanted to see if we could refine them into a new brand of fairydust.”

  “Sadly,” says Ludwig, “our experiments never turned out properly. They only revealed that dead fairies make for bad dust, as you’ll soon see.”

  “Experiments,” I say. “Like on my father.”

  “And the others, too,” says Fiona. “Those animals we saw at the refinery.”

  “And yet others still,” adds Ludwig.

  An image of that creature from the tunnels flashes into my head.

  Fiona growls. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s your plan. You want to use dust from dead fairies to turn us into those—those animals.”

  “But, my dear,” says Karl. He waves a finger in her face. “You are an animal. Don’t forget that. We’re merely helping you regain your true form. It only makes sense. Once the magic has run out of this place, we’ll need certain new economic principles in order to allow people, like us”—he waves his hand around his half of the room—“to maintain a privileged position. We’re merely using the last of the City’s magic, that which is contained in the bodies of the fairies themselves, to return us to a time when the beasts occupied a more appropriate position. Namely, as our labor. And as our food. An idyllic time when mindless wolves such as yourselves were hunted for sport.”

  “Yes,” agrees Ludwig. “We merely wish to return to the natural order of things. Permanently.” With a flourish he pulls the sheet off the handcart, revealing the fairy skeleton underneath. The poor thing is curled in a ball, her back turned to us. The refined bone structure of her wings flares out from the spine like the spray of a fountain.

  “All these years,” I say, “you’ve been experimenting, trying to come up with the worst possible end for us all.”

  “Not the worst,” says Karl, clearly insulted. “Merely the most sensible.”

  “Guys, guys,” says Richard, cutting in. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘How did they get ol’ Richie’s keys?’ Was he helping them, perhaps? Did he just pass them off to the first wolves he met? No! Of course not!” He points to me. “This guy here stole’em!” As he says it, his voice crackles and he coughs to clear his throat. “And yes, I know I look—and maybe sound—a little funny right now. But trust me, it’s just a temporary thing. At heart, let’s face it. I live here. I work here. I’m an Edenite, through and through.”

  For a moment, Karl and Ludwig stand there gaping. It’s hard to accept Richard’s argument when you can see his face. Only Skinner, grumbling in the corner, seems unsurprised. He’s probably used to hearing this kind of protest. He sits there with a small grin on his lips, gnawing calmly on his straw.

  “Well then,” says Ludwig at last, “there’s a simple way to determine if indeed you’re one of us.”

  Richard takes a step toward the rear of his cage. “Um, what do you mean?”

  Instead of answering his question, Karl holds up a pair of something like garden shears. He applies them to the skeleton, cleaving a nugget out of the fairy’s leg bone.

  “What are you doing?”

  Richard’s question falls on deaf ears. None of us speak. We watch as Karl hands the chunk of bone to his brother, who opens the wooden flap on top of the radio-looking machine. He drops the chunk in and adjusts the dials carefully. Then he pulls a lever on the side. Lights flash, needles quiver, and there’s a cool stirring of air all through the room, air that smells like a spring thaw—budding bushes and boggy soil. The candles flutter out, and Ludwig’s face seems to go rotten, valleyed in deep shadow. Then the air falls still. The candles reignite themselves. The earthen scent vanishes, quick as it appeared. From inside the wooden machine, there’s a sound like soft, rancid almonds, crumbling in a nutcracker.

  “There,” says Ludwig. He opens a side flap and sweeps the contents into his palm. It’s fairydust. No more than a thimbleful, pure and shimmering. Ludwig smiles. “Straight from the source.”

  He brings the dust over to Richard’s cage. “You really believe you belong here, do you?”

  Richard gapes at Ludwig’s hand. “What is that stuff?”

  “Weren’t you watching? It’s fairydust.”

  Ludwig blows gently and the dust wafts through the mesh of Richard’s cage. It floats in slowly, filling the space with golden light. Richard holds his breath for a moment, but it’s no use. He has to breathe. He inhales and the dust flows in as gently as I’ve ever seen.

  Then he begins to change.

  The skin all over his body shifts in color to match the sickly green around his bulging eye. His skin takes on a moist glow, oily and slick. His mouth widens even more, bisecting the whole of his face. And his eyes—they bulge and migrate upward, almost to the top of his head. Richard has become a frog.

  This must be how he looked as a young man, before he was married, before he came up here to live as a hominid. He turns away from us in shame. But then he shudders. The transformation isn’t done with him yet.

  Fiona covers her mouth. “What’s happening to him?”

  Richard’s legs go even more rubbery than they already are—so rubbery he can’t support himself. He folds down to the floor of the cage, his legs crossed behind him and his hands down in front. He’s shrinking, getting smaller and smaller before our eyes. He could fit inside my palm. He turns his head to Fiona and me, regarding us with huge, sad eyes. He opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a mournful croak.

  Richard has become a frog, but not the usual sort—not the ones you see w
alking down the sidewalk, hurrying to work. This is something else entirely, something primitive, something millions of years old. This is a naked frog from one of Mrs. L’s biology posters.

  “So,” says Ludwig, unlocking Richard’s cage. “It would appear you’re not an Edenite after all.”

  Richard flops mindlessly on the floor of his cage. But he’s not entirely vacant. His primordial brain knows enough to frantically hop away when Ludwig reaches into the cage. But it’s no use. The thaumaturgist scoops up Richard in one hand.

  “Yech!” he says, squeezing the frog. “Slimy beast.” He turns and tosses Richard at Skinner.

  Startled, Skinner bumbles with Richard’s tiny body until he finally catches him. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “I don’t know,” says Ludwig. “Whatever you want.”

  Skinner shrugs. “Okay then,” and a moment later, Richard has been turned to gold. “That oughta put him out of his misery.” Skinner plunks the golden frog on a table beside his chair. “You can use him as a paperweight.”

  Karl and his brother come to stand in front of our cages.

  I growl at them. “That’s what you’re gonna do to us, too, isn’t it?”

  “No,” says Karl. “We have something a little more colorful planned for you.”

  Skinner slips out of his armchair and hobbles over. “Colorful, you say?” He points his twisted features at me and grins like a corpse, flesh pulling unnaturally away from his teeth.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this part.”

  41

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  KARL TAKES A VIAL OF FAIRYDUST OUT OF HIS JACKET POCKET. IT’S NOT GOLD like the stuff they used on Richard. It’s silver, tinged with blue. It squirms behind the glass like a scourge of insects.

  “This,” says Karl, waving the vial, “is one of our older blends. Experimental, you see. Before we perfected things.”

  Fiona points her chin at the “paperweight” on the side table across the room. “If you call that perfection,” she says, “I’ll happily take whatever’s in your hand.”

  “Bold words,” says Karl. “But I wouldn’t be too hasty.”

  Skinner rubs his hands together. “I think I’ll quite enjoy this.”

  I cower to the back of the cage, struggling to push myself through the mesh, but there’s no escape. Both Skinner and Ludwig step forward.

  Karl pours a thimbleful of dust into his palm. “As I said, everyone gets what’s coming to them.”

  Instead of puffing the fairydust into my cage, he turns to Skinner, whose face curdles with shock.

  “What’re you—?”

  That’s all he gets out before Karl exhales. The dust leaps at Skinner’s face. The little man waves his arms frantically, spitting and cackling, waving his gloved hands like a mad preacher. But it’s all for nothing. As always, fairydust knows what it’s for. It rushes in through his eyes and nose and every rutted fold of his face.

  “No!” he screams. Skinner stamps on the floor, slapping and tearing at his eyes and cheeks until his face is streaked with blood. He throws his gloves off and points at Karl and his brother. “You!” he screams, blood and spit flying from his lips. “You can’t do this!” His body curls into a dwarvish question mark, and he rips at his hair, tearing out chunks of scalp. “You’ll see! You can’t do this!”

  Both brothers are unimpressed with Skinner’s accelerating tantrum.

  Ludwig frowns. “You allowed this wolf, barely more than a cub, to discern nearly every intricacy of our operation. You jeopardized everything.” He shakes his head gravely. “You, my angry little friend, have failed us.”

  Skinner throws off his gloves and screams. He limps forward, shaking his head from side to side, trying to steady himself. He reaches for the handcart but the wheels spin it out of reach.

  “I’ll kill you!” he screams. On the word kill he stamps his good foot on the floor, ramming it so hard it bursts through the wood. He tries pulling it out again, but it’s stuck. And for an instant, he peers down at his trapped leg and his anger vanishes.

  “Not again,” he whispers.

  He looks back at the brothers and his rage returns. He reaches for them with his bared hand, gnashing his teeth together so fiercely I can hear them crack. “I’ll kill you for this!”

  Golden sparks pop from his fingertips as he lunges at the brothers. He strains and screams and then—something happens. There’s a sound like thick, wet paper being ripped apart. Only it’s not paper; it’s flesh and muscle and bone. And then Skinner, number-one bagman to the nixies, tears himself in two.

  “A bad destiny, indeed,” says Ludwig. “Though I suppose now we know how he acquired that awful scar.”

  “Let’s hope this time he doesn’t put himself back together again,” says Karl.

  Ludwig gazes over the dwarf’s steaming innards. “I should think not.”

  I’m swaying on my feet, as soft and lifeless as the guts all over the floor. It’s because of the handcart. In his tantrum, Skinner spun it to face us. So now I can see the fairy skull from the front. I can see its screaming mouth, its hands held up to its face, both of them clenched in terrified fists. And on one of those fists—the left one—there are rings. A deep blue gem for every finger.

  Faelynn.

  Karl tips out another thimbleful of dust. “Now let’s see what the fates have in store for you, my canine friend.” He holds his hand up, palm wide open and glistening with pure fairydust. “I think you’ll find that destinies are inherited. Like father, like son.” He exhales and the dust spins around my head, blotting out the world. The last thing I see before blacking out is the table where Skinner was sitting.

  There’s nothing on it. The golden frog is gone.

  The trees loom over me, lacing their branches together into dark, jagged bridges. The sky is tormented by fast clouds and a ghostly moon. I’m on all fours, padding through the forest. Every tree is electrified with wind. All I hear is a rage of leaves, urging me on, pushing me farther into the trees, my belly pressed low to the earth . . . only . . .

  Only it’s not earth.

  It’s pavement. The trees aren’t trees. They’re lampposts. They’re buildings, crammed together like passengers on a train. I see clutches of steel. Glass cliffs. Canyons of cement. There’s no cottage. No clearing. No door. I’m in the City. Can this be happening? It feels just like my dream, like I’m watching myself in a film.

  There I am. Across the street. Below a window. Halfhidden. My huge, flat feet padding across the road. I stalk behind a defunct streetcar, dark and empty.

  There I am. Shunning the puddles of light. Loping along the curb. Moving past a homeless, muttering mule.

  There I am. Going into that alleyway. A recess between two redbrick buildings that—

  Pine Street.

  I watch myself saunter into the alley, all the way down to a plain wooden door at the deadest of ends. Number 1020. There’s no buzzer. The door groans open when I push it. I climb the stairwell. Every one of them sighs, moist and rotting under my feet. Seven flights up, step by step, to 7B.

  I’ve arrived at Siobhan’s apartment, where she lives with Gram. Seeing myself from the outside, I can believe what folks say. I’m a beast. I’m a wolf at the door. Wet nostrils flaring, muscles on my back straining through torn clothes. Broomlike hair blossoming from my cuffs, doing nothing to conceal long, leathery fingers tipped with claws (or what’s left of them, at least). Hot slaver foams between clenched teeth, dripping over my rubbery lips. I look like an animal.

  There’s a twitch inside me. I remember now: Eden. Fiona. Karl and Ludwig. Richard. Faelynn. Skinner—and what he did to himself.

  What am I about to do? To Siobhan and Gram, a girl and her grandmother. Like father, like son.

  The twitch is drowned out. There’s nothing inside me but irrational anger. I’ve no control. I have to battle this. I inhale sharp, ragged breaths. I’m convulsing. My paw—cosmically huge in this elven place—reache
s for the door. I tear the knob out of the wood, leaving a wound I can see through. The scent of incense filters out. A dull smash of my shoulder and the door crumbles like bread.

  Siobhan’s lying asleep, swaddled in bloodred blankets. I’m on the verge of lunging. This can’t be my fate. It can’t be. I’m not a murderer.

  I hear the click of loose joints, the creak of loose wood. It’s Gram, crooked as a winter willow, wrapped in a black housecoat and elven slippers. She looks confused.

  “Henry?”

  Behind her is a window. The fire escape. There’s another way. I can fix this.

  The primitive bloodlust takes hold, and I lunge at her—but the moment my father described has come—the one moment I’m in control again. If I recognize it, I can use it.

  Gram screams, and my brain sends a desperate message to my legs. I push sideways, veering into the glass, crashing through, spinning over the black metal, falling into the dark.

  Motes of light hover like dust. They gather in wriggling caterpillars of light, crawling into shapes. A hand, a wing . . .

  Faelynn floats down, humming her lullaby. She’s real enough to touch. Her face is like a sun, brighter and brighter until she swallows me up in brilliant blue light.

  This must be where they went. A distant land where winged creatures, luminous and divine, take care of everything.

  I can only hope it’s real.

  42

  ONCE IN A LIFETIME

  THE LIGHT HURTS, SO I KEEP MY EYES SHUT. I SNIFF INSTEAD, BUT THERE’S only an empty scent. Wherever I am, it reeks of sterility. I try pricking up my ears.

  “Henry?”

  “See his ears? They twitched.”

  I recognize that voice.

  “I think he’s awake.”

  I recognize that one, too. Gravel and honey. My senses are returning. I can smell things again. I smell nutmeg. Old coal and applesauce. Peppermint and stale sweat. Cherry blossoms.

  “Henry?”

  It stings, but I open my eyes. All I see are hints of the real world. Everything is sideways. Because I’m lying down. In a strange bed. My big feet (as always) are hanging over the end.