by Jeffrey Ford
“We can only know what the Master tells us,” he said, smiling.
I considered paying him a visit the next day in my new, official capacity and ordering him in for a reading. I wondered how many deaths he had been responsible for over the years. As I pictured his head being filled with inert gas before a crowd in Memorial Park, swelling to match his sense of self-importance, I caught myself. “You are hating again, Cley,” I told myself. I remembered the word carved into sulphur in Professor Flock’s tomb—“forgive.” It was a struggle, but before long, I could see that Graves was simply trying to survive. He had his own disguise, like me, like the rest of them. We were all trying to hide our true selves from Drachton Below, waiting for his “glorious dream” to finally come to a close.
The affair abruptly ended when the Master entangled two young ladies in rapidly growing vines, like spiderwebs, and left through the double doors of the kitchen. The minute he was gone, the music stopped, the lights came up, and the attendants began cleaning up. The demon was then led away. Guests were wrapping up the delicacies of the territory in napkins and pocketing them to take back to their families. I was quite drunk but relieved that I had made it through the evening.
The coach was waiting for me outside on the windy street, but I told the driver to go on without me. I walked the city for an hour or so, trying to sober up. It was down on the Boulevard of Montz along the man-made lake of floating lilies that I realized I was being followed. I first heard the footsteps in syncopation with my own. Finally, I spun around and saw a shadow clumsily dart into a doorway on the other side of the street.
I went directly to my apartment, locked the door behind me, and listened with my ear to the keyhole. When I had established that there was no one there, I rushed to my desk and prepared a vial of the beauty. My skull itched terribly, and I was beginning to quiver on the edge of withdrawal. I took it in the head and called on Flock, but he would no longer come. The floor and walls wavered and sparked, the yellow flowers wept, and before I dozed off, of all people, Frod Geeble, the tavern owner of Anamasobia, appeared before me and spent a half-hour belching.
23
The next morning I was up early, filling out appointment cards for those unlucky citizens I would decide to read. Of course, I had no intention of turning ten people over to the Master for execution. Whatever it was I was going to do, I had ten days in which to do it and then figure out some way to flee the city. For now, though, I would need to follow through with the charade by requesting that certain individuals I encountered through the morning come to my offices in the afternoon for a reading.
I left my apartment before the crush of workers on the way to their jobs could choke the streets. My first stop was to be the Top of the City, where I had dined the previous night. I took a circuitous route, doubling back, stopping in passageways, passing through the Academy of Physiognomy and then out the back door. I had not noticed anyone following me, but if someone was, I felt confident that I had lost him.
When I got to the restaurant, the cleanup crew was just opening the doors to the elevator that led to the dome. They tried to prevent me from going up, but I told them who I was and asked them if they would like to stop by my office for a reading that afternoon. When they instantly lost all interest in detaining me, I realized that my new power would come in handy. I didn’t bother to give any of them cards, and they smiled thankfully at me. I smiled back as the elevator doors closed.
The restaurant was empty, save for a cleaning woman, who entered soon after me and was trying to scrub the blood of poor Burke from the middle of the dance floor. She ignored me and I her. I could see the sun coming up beyond the dome, and the room began to glow with its warmth. My plan was to use the tower as a lookout point in order to see if I could spot any signs of construction going on throughout the city. I walked the rim of the crystal, staring down, watching carefully as the insectlike inhabitants scurried purposefully along paths and through holes in the coral structures. “Palishize,” I thought to myself.
I spotted nothing. All seemed as it always had on the city’s skyline. There were no great depressions in the earth, no accumulation of building equipment, no scaffolding. As I spied from my perch, I noticed that the woman had walked up next to me and was also looking down.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Was wondering if you were looking for the demon,” she said.
“The demon was here last night,” I told her. “That mess you are working on is the fruit of its labor.”
“I know that,” she said, and smiled through missing teeth. “But I guess you haven’t heard about what happened last night. As soon as they took it through the kitchen over there, it managed to burst out of its chains. They tried to flame it, but they ended up flaming each other. It killed the ones that were left. It’s out there now, hiding in the city,” she said.
“That is not good,” I said.
“I read in the paper where one of the Master’s experts said that it must be hiding underground during the daylight hours. They said there shouldn’t be a problem until the night comes.”
The news was frightful, but I did not miss the fact that there was much information to be garnered from listening to the populace. I thanked her and she seemed genuinely happy that I had acknowledged her help. She went back to the stain, kneeled, and continued scrubbing.
Having found nothing in the visible topography of the city to indicate the construction of the exhibit, I left and went immediately to a newsstand to purchase a copy of the Gazette. Sitting down with it in front of a steaming cup of shudder at the outdoor café by the park, I turned to the second page and read the headline: DEMON LOOSE. I sped through the story, which told me little more than the cleaning woman had. “Since when has Below begun admitting to mistakes?” I wondered. In the past, this incident would never have been reported. This was something I would try to ask him about at our next meeting.
The shudder went down well, and I ordered another cup. I sat contemplating the thought that an ally of some kind might be helpful, but who was I to trust? The cleaning woman seemed the only one I had met since my return who didn’t appear to have any ulterior motive behind her words. I thought about her and then recalled her telling me that the demon was probably underground somewhere. It struck me that not only was the demon hiding beneath the surface but also that was probably the location of the exhibit.
I remembered from my student days when I had to be across town to attend a reading or fetch reports in a hurry from the Ministry of Security. I had traveled underground to avoid the busy hours on the streets. When the foundation of the city had been laid, Below had ingeniously built in a vast network of underground passageways, tunnels, and catacombs that he himself had used as a means of traveling unseen from location to location. “Surprise is my meat, Cley,” he had said to me on one occasion, referring to that very network. Officials were allowed to use it but rarely did, not wanting to be found down there by the Master and raise his suspicion of some hidden plot.
“Beneath the surface,” I said to myself, and wanted to go and investigate right then. Instead, I kept my revelation in check and got up and passed out appointment cards to the other patrons of the café. They thanked me in pitifully weak voices. I could see how frightened they were, but I had to keep a severe gaze as I took down their names.
On the way back to the office to keep those appointments, I passed through the mall where I had witnessed Calloo battle the claw-man the day before. There was another match going on and quite a bigger crowd of onlookers. Belows were exchanging hands, and the audience was calling for gears and springs to be scattered across the ring. Luckily, the participants were not familiar to me.
I walked up to a soldier who stood behind the crowd, holding a flamethrower. One of the automated gladiators had just lost his head to a battle-ax blow. “What happens to the ones that are defeated or broken?” I asked him.
“None of your business,” he said.
“Do you kn
ow who I am?” I asked him in a pleasant voice.
“You’re about two seconds from being burnt beyond recognition,” he said. “Move on.”
I handed him an appointment card. Seeing it, he immediately understood the gravity of his mistake.
“Your honor,” he said.
“Perhaps we could discuss it in my office this afternoon,” I said. “By the way, has anyone ever read that forehead of yours?” I shook my head and grumbled a little.
“A million pardons, your honor,” he said. “The ones who are defeated are taken back to the big warehouse behind the munitions factory. If they are beyond saving, they are incinerated after the brass and zinc parts have been removed. If they are salvageable, they are outfitted with new pieces and sent back for another battle match.”
I snatched the card from his hand. “You are very helpful,” I said.
As I walked away, he called after me, “Welcome back from Doralice.”
I spent the afternoon at my office, reading those who I had made appointments for. They were all just simple people of the realm, and I did not make them undress. Instead, I played around with the calipers and the lip vise, every now and then jotting down a bogus note or two as I had done back in Anamasobia. No matter how deficient the Physiognomy told me they were, I lauded praise on their features and encouraged them to talk. At first they were wary, unused to having so important a member of the realm seem friendly to them. I believe they each reached a point where they intuited that I would do them no harm, and then they told me everything—about their children, their jobs, their fears concerning the demon. I nodded and listened attentively even though I was itching for the beauty.
Then the last of the fellows who came through my examination room, a young gardener, whose main job was keeping the tilibar bushes blooming in the park, mentioned something that I found interesting. He had heard I had been to the territory and wanted to let me know that he too had been there.
“I was sent out to the wilderness beyond the boundary of the territory about a month after the Master’s expedition had returned, a few weeks after you were so wrongly sentenced,” he said.
“Interesting,” I said.
“I was ordered by the Master to bring back a variety of species of plants and trees—a great quantity of them. The operation was immense,” he told me.
“What did you do with them?” I asked.
“It was the strangest thing,” he said. “We brought them back to the city and were told to deliver them to the western side of town, over by the sewage treatment plant and the waterworks. We dropped them off in the middle of the street, and they nearly filled the whole thoroughfare. Then I was dismissed from the detail and was sent back to the park to my tilibar bushes. The next day, after work, I went to see what they had done with them, and they had all vanished.”
He wanted to then tell me about his fiancée and his plans for the future, but by then the chills were running through me, and I needed a fix desperately. I ushered him to the door as he was still talking, assuring him that he was a great asset to the realm and wishing him well in his marriage. The instant he was outside, I closed the door and went to my desk to prepare a syringe. Through the years, I had become so good that I had that needle in my neck in less than three minutes.
Since I had been able to quit the beauty once, it seemed to know that I could do it again, and because of this it did not treat me so roughly as it had back before my imprisonment. I would still hallucinate, but there was less of it, and that overwhelming feeling of paranoia was replaced by long stretches of deep thought. That afternoon, I daydreamed about rescuing Calloo from his mechanized, walking death and enlisting him to help me. Then I watched out the window the illusion of the city melting in a fine black rain that fell beneath an opulent sun.
I knew none of it was real, and yet I continued to fantasize, this time about Arla. How I would rescue her and she would forgive me and fall in love with the new me. It all seemed so simple, so absolutely necessary. I had my arms around her and was just about to kiss her, when there came a knocking at my door that scared me so by its suddenness that I nearly fell out of my chair.
“Package for Physiognomist Cley,” a voice said.
My head spun as I got up and walked shakily to the door. I opened it just enough to let the package in and then closed it. “Thank you,” I called, but there was no response. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. There was no name on it, no return address. I laid it on my desk and then just sat staring at it for some time. Finally, when the effects of the beauty had nearly worn off, I opened it. The first thing I pulled out was a note written in the Master’s hand.
Cley,
Here is the demon horn I promised you last night. Try to stay away from the ones that are attached to a head. If you can’t, I have enclosed something to help you protect yourself. Do not go out at night until the crisis has been abated.
Drachton Below,
Master of the Realm
Inside the package I found the hard black horn of a demon. Holding it in my hand, I realized that with its weight and sharp tip, it would make an adequate weapon. Beneath it, though, wrapped in tissue paper, I discovered something far more effective—my old derringer, fully loaded, along with a box of bullets. When I put on my topcoat that evening to leave the office, I had the gun, the horn, and a scalpel, each in a different pocket. None of them was a flamethrower, but I did feel a little safer as I stepped onto the street beneath the starlit sky.
I moved with some confidence amid the sea of homebound workers. When they recognized me, they gave me that curious one-fingered salute. Upon seeing it, I smiled and lifted my middle finger to them as a show of solidarity. To my annoyance, they did not smile back, but dropped their gaze and moved off, looking disgusted. It was then that I wished I was one of them, a nobody in the crowd, living a simple life like the gardener and his fiancée.
24
The streets had emptied completely by the time I got to the munitions factory. This was one of the older parts of town that did not have gaslamps on every corner. There were no stores there to light the way with glowing signs. It was a district of manufacturing, where the Master’s ideas were transformed into brass and zinc. There hadn’t been a war in over thirty-five years, yet the munitions factory had triple shifts. One of the Master’s greatest feats of sleight of hand was how he stored all of the rockets and bullets that were made there. As I passed by, I could hear the machines banging out shells, and the glow from the windows was as vague as twilight.
Two blocks behind the factory, I found the warehouse I thought the soldier in the mall had been talking about. It ran, windowless, nearly the length of a full block and was deep to the point where I could not see beyond it. The entrance to the place was two huge wooden doors with a loose chain attaching them. I could easily slip through the opening between them. I took out my lighter and my derringer and went into the dark crevice.
I could barely make out the rows and rows of large cribs that lined the aisle I suddenly found myself in. Next to the cribs were rolling trays of tools, gears, and wires. My lighter went out for a moment, and it took me too long to get it going again. When I held it lit over one of the cribs, I saw a near-human Below creation of metal and flesh, half-open and completely asleep.
It took me over an hour to check all of the faces for Calloo’s, but I found him. He seemed to have been patched since his contest in the mall. In fact, he looked much better. The scar tissue I had noticed on his neck and chest was greatly diminished, and his arms looked as powerful as they had in the territory. I put the lighter down near his open eyes to see if there was any movement. At first I noticed nothing, but then—and I nearly burned his lashes to see it—his pupils began to contract. Then his eyes began to rapidly jiggle ever so slightly from side to side.
Five minutes later, muscles all over his body began twitching, and then the lighter went out for good. Through the darkness I heard a great commotion of rolling and quaking fro
m the crib. I almost ran, afraid someone might hear. Suddenly it stopped and there was quiet.
“Calloo,” I whispered.
There was no answer. I tried the lighter, but it was spent. I whispered his name again and again. “It’s me, Cley,” I said. But the longer I stood in the dark, the more frightened I became. I was ready to bolt in an instant when I heard his voice. The horrible sound of it set me off, and I was stumbling back down the pitch-black aisle of cribs, ramming into their corners and slamming against trays of tools. I groped along in desperation as I heard him behind me now, yelling the word he had whispered. “Paradise,” echoed through the warehouse, and I heard some of the Master’s other inventions begin to stir.
Eventually I found my way back to the crevice between the doors and slipped out. The first thing I did upon gaining my freedom was throw that damnable lighter across the street. I began walking very quickly, and my breathing rushed to catch up with me. In my confusion, I took the wrong street and walked for two blocks before I realized I had not passed the munitions factory.
I tried to turn back but I was totally lost by then. Though I had changed direction and decided to push on, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that it was one of those situations where I was heading in the exact opposite direction. I thought I saw the lights of the center of the city ahead of me, but I couldn’t be sure.
It seemed as if I had walked all night when I came upon a bar with a glowing sign in the window on the corner of an otherwise unlit street. The sounds of voices and music drifted out through an open window. The sight of it so relieved me, I didn’t care if I was spotted after hours in a less than reputable place. I went through the door, went up to the bar, and ordered a Rose Ear Sweet with which to erase the memory of those mockeries of life, squirming and squealing with a rudimentary electromechanical awareness.