The white face held as still as the marble carving it resembled altogether too much. He couldn’t tell whether the empty eyes were gazing at him or the book, if they could see at all. He found he was desperate to provoke a response, any response. “Don’t you like being talked to? Better make yourself scarce before I call someone.”
He very much hoped this would do the trick, but the figure stayed lifeless, not even displaying a breath. Its defiant inertia and his failure to shift it enraged him, and he strode at it, hardly knowing what he meant to do. He grabbed its left hand to jerk it into some kind of life, but let go at once and fell back. However cold the day was, the man’s hand felt dismayingly colder, and as hard as stone.
Donald could have thought the fellow had frozen to death overnight, except that as he made for the junction he heard a surreptitious rustling behind him. He’d heard that sound before, and now he recognised the turning of a page. He swung around to catch the statue in the act, but its stance was challenging him to prove it had moved. “I warned you,” Donald shouted and strode furiously to work.
Mildred blinked at him. “Aren’t you feeling well? Do you want to go home?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I need to be here,” Donald protested and thought of a reason he could say aloud. “Two of us can keep twice as much of an eye out for pilfering.”
That needn’t entail staying still whenever a customer came in. Donald followed them about, enquiring whether he could help. Perhaps he shouldn’t have asked quite so often, since it visibly irritated Mildred. He tried varying the question, not least because it had started to feel like a threat of stagnation. “Can we show you anything?” he said, and “Anything we can find for you?” as well as “Are you after anything in particular?” until at last it was time for his lunch.
There were human statues in the streets, but not the one he’d touched. Ten minutes of dodging through the crowds brought him to the town hall. While a number of stone statues occupied the square in front of the colonnaded entrance, none of them depicted Samuel Huntley. The girl inside an enquiry booth in the marble foyer sent Donald into an enormous hall where a roped-off zigzag queue brought him at last to a clerk behind a window. “Do you authorise street performers?” Donald said.
The greying man peered at him as if trying to decide what manner of performance Donald might put on. “They need to get a permit from us, yes.”
“And if they don’t behave you’ll deal with them.” When the clerk raised his face to prompt more information Donald said “I’d like to report the man who’s being a statue of Samuel Huntley.”
“We don’t tell them who they have to be. You’d need to give us his name.” The man squinted at Donald before adding “A statue, you said. What’s your complaint?”
“He’s been following me home. I believe that’s called harassment. Yes, I said a statue. I can see that may sound a bit ridiculous.”
The clerk’s face wasn’t owning up to an opinion. “Any reason he should do that?”
“I took back my money when he didn’t move. Maybe this is his revenge.”
The clerk’s lack of an expression was an answer in itself. “It wouldn’t be our business,” he said. “You’d want the police.”
“And I’ll get them if I need to, believe me.” Donald’s fury at the scepticism he sensed made him almost unable to say “Perhaps you can tell me where the actual statue has gone.”
“Mayor Huntley, did you say? He’s gone all right, for good.”
Donald wouldn’t have expected the clerk to sound so openly gratified. “Why, what happened?”
The clerk leaned towards the aperture beneath the window and lowered his voice. “The contractors weren’t too careful about moving him, and someone here didn’t think he was worth sticking back together.”
“I thought he had a reputation. Didn’t he pioneer some way of calming children down?”
“That’s the tale his friends put about.” Lower still the clerk said “There’s some families that know what he used to do to our grandparents. Made them stand for hours and Christ help anyone who moved an inch.”
Donald found he preferred not to hear any more, let alone to ponder what he’d heard. He hadn’t time to go to the police now, and he rather hoped he’d already done enough. Mightn’t the confrontation have sent the street performer on his way? Donald hurried back to the shop, which was less of a refuge than he would have liked, even from his thoughts. Whenever a customer lingered to examine an item he was seized by an urge to budge them, so that he felt compelled to point out other articles to them—anything he could find that seemed even remotely appropriate. “You need to calm yourself down, Donald,” Mildred said after he’d tried to sell a book of cartoons to a man who was deliberating over a comedy film. “Make sure you get some rest tonight. You’re disturbing people.”
Better that, Donald almost retorted, than leaving them so undisturbed that they mightn’t be able to move. Besides, dealing with customers felt like postponing his return home. All too soon he had to make his way through the crowds that might be hiding somebody less active than they were, although why should that be so threatening? As the streets grew emptier he began to hope for company or else to see nobody at all. When he reached the side street where he’d seen the frozen man, he almost couldn’t look. But the street was deserted, and so was everywhere closer to home.
He’d been secretly afraid that if he was the first to touch the statue, that might have brought it after him. Suppose the woman at the book group was right, and Samuel Huntley had been roused somehow by the destruction of his image? If Huntley had regarded stillness as power, how determined might he have been to exert it? Although Donald was able to conclude none of this was true—the part about Huntley, at any rate—he found his thoughts distressingly irrational. However dull tonight’s meeting might be, at least it would make sense.
The tenants met in Miss Hart’s apartment on the top floor. Until now Donald had quite liked the figurines in her living-room, miniature sculptures collected from around the world, and why should he change his mind? Everyone agreed that the apartment committee should campaign against the proliferation of nightclubs in the neighbourhood and involve the local councillor. As Donald wondered why agreement had taken several sluggish hours, Miss Hart said “There are too many people lurking round here as it is.”
“You’ve seen him?” Donald blurted. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t mean anyone specific, Mr Curtis. I was referring to the types who loiter near the clubs.”
Donald couldn’t let this reassure him until he looked out of her window. As far as he could see, the street below and all those in sight were deserted. He very much hoped that the Huntley imitator hadn’t merely gone away but had found a new role or reverted to his previous persona. “We all need to deal with any undesirables in the locality,” he said as he left Miss Hart’s, and didn’t mind sounding pompous.
He walked down three floors to his apartment without feeling any need to put on speed. He took his time over preparing for bed and promised himself he would sleep. He was taken aback to find he’d been so nervous earlier that he hadn’t opened the bedroom curtains. They looked untidy from his fumbling at them in the night, and he made to adjust them. Taking hold of them let him glimpse a man outside the window—waiting for a friend, no doubt, or else a taxi, or simply having halted to talk on the phone. But the figure was silent, and the object in its pallid hand wasn’t a phone. When Donald snatched the curtains apart he saw that the statue was staring at him.
The wide blank white eyes were directed at him, at any rate, and so was the colourless face. The statue had altered its posture, so that the head was turned towards him. In a moment he realised that Samuel Huntley was waiting for him to read the book. A solitary name was etched at the top of the left-hand page—Donald’s name.
He had evidence of harassment now. He had a reason to contact the police. Should he let the man hear him calling them, or would that warn th
e fellow off? Better to make certain he stayed there to be arrested, and Donald made to turn his back, except perhaps he should keep his persecutor in sight to ensure he didn’t escape. Donald needn’t leave the window; he had only to take out his phone. Or perhaps he should summon witnesses first, in which case he would have to shout loud enough to be heard all the way upstairs, although how would he let anybody in when he was having trouble even reaching in his pocket for the phone? The struggle seemed to be interfering with his vision, filling his eyes with the glare of the streetlamps or with some other pallor. In another moment unrelieved white was all he could see, though it wasn’t quite like seeing. With an effort that stopped his breath Donald wrenched his arms up so that he could find his eyes, but when he groped at them he didn’t know which felt more like stone: his fingertips or the globes beneath the unblinking lids. Then the distinction ceased to matter, any more than it applied to the rest of him, though he felt anything but calm. Indeed, his panic felt as though it was set in stone.
SANCTUARY
by
KEALAN PATRICK BURKE
“Go get your father,” Mother said, and the spoon froze a half-inch from Liam’s milk-sodden lips. His gaze moved from the daydream he’d been projecting upon the wall above the scarred kitchen table, to his left, where his mother was laboring over the stove. The bacon and eggs were burning. He could smell them as they hissed and popped. His mother, almost skeletally thin beneath her threadbare robe, stabbed at them as a blue plume of smoke rose around her, or maybe from her. It was hard to say. It was, after all, Sunday morning, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her be anything but angry on a Sunday.
Between his mother and the table stood an empty chair, where on any other morning, his father would have been sitting, face buried in a newspaper and communicating in mumbles. But as the sacristan, Father was required to go to church on Sunday, both services. Afterward, he celebrated spirits of a different kind.
With difficulty, Liam swallowed his cereal and lowered the spoon. His mother’s request made him feel sick. He didn’t want to get dressed, didn’t want to walk through the snow down the narrow crumbling street. Lately it had begun to feel like a throat eager to ingest him. And most of all, he didn’t want to go to McMahon’s, the corner bar where he knew he’d find his father. He just wanted to finish his breakfast and go back upstairs to his room, to his sanctuary, where he spent most of his time reading and writing and drawing. It was safe there, surrounded by the portraits he had drawn to keep him company, portraits he wished were real so that they could take the place of the real world. Down here where the adults existed, there was nothing but raised voices and hurt feelings, infrequently punctuated by unexpected bursts of violence from which not even he was immune. Like the smell of those burning eggs, he felt the sourness and uncertainty of the world outside his room trying to attach itself to him like a second skin, trying to induct him into the same misery that had assimilated his parents.
“Won’t he be back soon?” he asked his mother, quietly.
“Do what you’re told,” she snapped without turning to look at him, and that was good because he felt as long as the coldness of her gaze was not on him, he could be brave, continue to make his case. As soon as she looked at him, she would kill the words in his mouth and he would know he was doomed.
“The weather’s really bad,” he said, and glanced out the window. Beyond the frosted glass, thick snowflakes fell like feathers from a ruptured pillow. “He’ll probably want to get home before it gets any worse.”
He jumped as the spatula made a sharp clang against the side of the frying pan. “For fuck sake, Liam,” she said in a dangerous voice. “If I have to ask you again, I’ll put your head through the wall.”
He rose quickly, careful not to let the legs of his chair scrape against the stone floor. His parents hated that. He didn’t like it much either, but it’s not like it was ever intentional. He cast a longing glance at the half-eaten bowl of soggy cornflakes and the slice of cold toast and marmalade sitting untouched next to it, and went to get his coat and boots on. At the doorway, he looked back at his mother. Although he was only ten years old, he could remember a time when she didn’t look so pale and faded, like a photograph left too long in the sun. There were still memories of her lit from within by the light of summer. He remembered her smile and the color in her cheeks, the twinkle in her eyes. He remembered her love. Now, as he looked upon a lank-haired witch glaring down into a frying pan full of blackened, twisted things, he feared he would never know that love again.
“And tell him if he doesn’t come home, he can stay with whatever whore will have him,” she said through an ugly sneer that made her face look like a cheap mask melting in the heat from the stove.
Silently, Liam exited the room.
* * *
Winter had made a monochrome gradient of the world, broken here and there by dark strips where the snow had fallen like flesh from the withered arms of the trees and the twisted remains of broken streetlights, which bent over the street like the ribcage of some long-dead giant. Liam was bundled up in a thick woolen jacket, but the holes he’d worn in the elbows allowed the icy wind to creep in, chilling him where he stood. Over his scarf, the wet wool sent bolts of discomfort through him whenever it brushed against his teeth.
He looked down at the path. The snow had all but erased his father’s footprints, leaving only faint impressions behind.
A series of muffled thumps behind him. Liam turned around. The house was an old Cape Cod, as dilapidated as everything else in this part of the city: a squat dispirited structure, the gaps in the once-white siding so stained with green mold, it looked like the side of an old boat. The inverted triangle of his mother’s vulpine face, contorted in anger, filled the kitchen window. Mercifully, the thick glass and the soughing of the wind immunized him from the poison of her words, but the jab of her finger made the message clear enough: Get moving.
Breath held, shivering for reasons other than the cold, he did as instructed and stepped off the stoop.
The snow reached his knees, which made traversing the short path to the street all that more difficult, but he was thankful for the delay. The world on this side of the chain-link gate may not have been a paradise, but it was still home and home was where his sanctuary was: up the stairs and down the end of the hall. It may as well have been another country. That’s where dreams were allowed; the nightmares stayed downstairs.
Aware without looking that his mother’s eyes were on him, he trudged onward toward the gate.
* * *
The street was too narrow to allow the passage of vehicles, even if such a thing were possible, and the snow made it narrower still, which did nothing to alleviate Liam’s impression of it as a gullet that would feed him into the ugly belly of the neighborhood. Once upon a time, this part of the city had thrived, an extension of the bustling metropolis that had long ago been rendered inaccessible by a wall of kudzu vines and weeds, which, almost unnoticed, had sprouted from the earth from between the remains of the old steel and grain mills before tearing them down and fortifying the wall. Before nature had reclaimed it, this had been a vital industrial outpost on the outskirts of the city, but with the death of industry and the departure of men whose aspirations ran further than drink, drugs, and murder, it had become a dead zone, a literal wrong side of the tracks, themselves buried beneath the tangles of blackened vine and twisted steel.
To Liam’s left stood a rank of dead blank-faced houses, their eyes lightless, the caps of their porch roofs pulled low as if in shame, open maws empty of anything but dust and dark. Discarded toys half buried by the snow made an incongruously colorful cemetery of the yards, rusted swing sets like shriveled scale models of all that remained of the mills which had once served as the district’s thriving heart.
To the right, a sharp decline led down to all that remained of the train tracks, the veins through which life had coursed through this outpost. In places some unknown fo
rce had ripped the tracks up and twisted them back in on themselves. The gravel had long been scattered. Beyond, the land fell away, became an industrial wasteland masked by the drifts. Here there were no children building snowmen or throwing snowballs or sledding. Everything was quiet, everything was buried. This did not surprise Liam. It was, after all, a Sunday, and in places such as these, places in which all that’s left is faith, Sundays meant reverence. Outward signs of joy not directly affiliated with the gods would have been considered an affront.
Liam shivered, the cold now deep within his bones, his hands chilled beneath the gloves. He welcomed the discomfort, however, for it kept him from thinking about what he had seen the last time his mother had forced him to fetch his father.
Open your mouth about this, Liam, and it’ll be the last time you’ll be able to.
The houses drifted silently by and his school hove into view. Liam hated the school almost as much as he hated church (though he would die before he’d admit such a thing out loud), the tavern, and the neighborhood itself. School was prison, the walls speckled with some foul-smelling mineral deposit that glowed blue in the halflight. The hallway floors were bowed upward as if they’d built it atop the back of a sleeping giant. Few of the classroom lights worked and the teachers all appeared as if they’d been raised from the dead: pallid, drawn, their voices those of people who have found themselves in some terrible dream. The bathrooms smelled of brine; the chalkboards appeared to ripple when written upon, as if made of tar. To anyone else, it would have been a thing from nightmares. To Liam, it was the place of his education, though as he grew older, he had started to question the catechisms and syllabi to which he was being exposed. They seemed antiquated and decidedly cruel.
Dark Cities Page 28