by Rich Horton
The Two Paupers
C.S.E. Cooney
PART ONE: A MERCIFUL HEIST
Analise Field did not steal the statue because it was the most beautiful thing she ever saw. Though it was.
She did not steal it because she was angry with its maker and wanted to exact vengeance on him for any number of recent slights. Though she was.
No, she stole it to save its life.
If she hadn’t, Gideon Alderwood would have destroyed this statue like he did all the others. And she couldn’t let that happen.
Not when it opened its eyes and looked at her like that.
Gideon stared at the space the statue had been. An empty plinth. A smear of clay, like a footprint.
The faucet in the outer hall plinked.
That sound had kept him awake for three nights running. He would pace in time to the plink-plink-plink and listen to Analise turn on that diabolically squeaky mattress of hers on the other side of the wall. And he would know she heard him even in her dreams. That she opened her eyes in the dark, thinking of him.
Had the statue walked?
They usually did not move the first day after completion. Not while they were still wet. But they never stayed wet long. After twenty-four hours his statues would harden spontaneously, as if fired from within by some infernal kiln, and he would wake to find their surfaces as smooth and cool as eggshells.
Then they would start . . . quickening.
At first the shifts were subtle. A hand lifted. A chin tilted. One blank gray eyelid tearing itself open to reveal an orb like a beetle’s carapace, black-shining-green. Eyes like exoskeletons. An alien luster that revealed nothing.
It wasn’t until they opened their eyes that he destroyed them.
Gideon thought he could just about bear them if they stopped at movement. If they just stirred like Analise in her bed next door. Slightly, in their sleep.
He would have spared them the hammer if only they did not look at him.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
No. It was too soon. The newest statue could not have walked yet.
It had not been a full day since he smoothed the last lines. The curve of the ear, the high forehead, the careless loops of hair. Not a day since he had washed the clay from his hands.
That left only . . .
Plink. Plink. Plink.
It was past midnight. But no one stirred next door.
“Analise,” Gideon Alderwood whispered. “Goddamn it.”
The problem was, they shared the bathroom in the outer hall of the garret where they rented rooms.
The problem was, Analise was the only one who remembered to buy toilet paper for the bathroom. And, as she’d had cause to point out more than once, she was also the only one who remembered to scrub out the toilet and sink. To which Gideon replied that as she left more strands of hair in the sink than a lobotomist leaves in an operating theater, she was the most logical candidate for cleaning it up.
The problem was he’d been stealing the toilet paper to mix with his clay. Some new invention of his. Clay that would dry quicker and provide tougher structural support for his statues, so that he would not have to make them solid through and through, as he used to do when he was sculpting with an oil-based clay.
He explained this, very reasonably, when she objected to the lack of toilet paper.
“Gideon!” she shouted. “It doesn’t matter what kind of clay you use! You’ll just take a hammer to the damned things the next day.”
“The damned things,” he repeated with his odd thin smile.
“In the meantime,” she raged on, “we don’t have anything to wipe with. Again!”
Then he held up a single finger, still with that smile, bidding her wait (she was standing outside his doorway while he stood just in it, for he rarely invited her into his room), went inside, bent down to remove something from the bookshelf beside his bed, and returned presently.
It was a copy of her book, Seafall Rising.
“There,” he said. “Use that.” And slammed the door in her face.
The problem, Analise thought to herself, storming out into the Seafall city night to buy more toilet paper, was that they lived next door to each other. That they’d ever met. That they knew each other at all.
She bought two crates of toilet paper from the general store. One for her bedroom—and she’d bring a roll in with her whenever she needed it, and then she’d bring it out again—and one for his. And he could use it however he pleased.
When she tried his door handle, it was open. Gideon never locked his door except when he was on the other end of it. He had nothing worth stealing. At least nothing he kept there. Maybe in his mother’s house his bedroom was a treasure trove of original Quraishi oil paintings, diamond cufflinks, and solid gold chamber pots. But Gideon Alderwood had elevated rich boy slumming to a high art.
That was when she saw the statue.
She’d only seen pieces of them before. The carnage of his fits. Heaps of limbs and bits of shattered skull.
To see one whole . . .
To see one proud and haughty and doomed, glowing in the moonlight . . .
Analise thought her heart would explode into fiery wings and fly right out of her chest, leaving behind a gaping hole still steaming, a bloody ribcage like a shattered prison wall.
She had to explore it more closely.
Gideon knew every dress in her closet. When Analise was in charity with him, she was always inviting him over for dinner, or tea, or some kind of soup she’d conjured at her hot plate. He’d had ample opportunity to observe her tiny chamber. He knew every patched pair of trousers handed down to her from her legion of brothers. Every one of those ridiculous vests she and Elliot liked to ferret out in thrift stores and bazaars, the kind that flattered no one, least of all a figure like hers, which would look better in a thin sweep of silk and best in nothing but bathwater. He knew every pair of shoes she owned. All three pairs. Black flats for dress-up occasions, thick boots for every other occasion, ragged sandals for summertime.
So Gideon knew that Analise had packed a small valise.
Enough clothes for three days. Perhaps five, if she rinsed out her underthings. Also, there were a number of books missing from her shelves.
Elliot had pointed out, more than once, that Ana always packed more books than clothes.
Her notebook was gone, too, and her favorite fountain pen. So she’d taken her new novel with her, which she was drafting longhand. The book she would never let him read. Not after what he’d done to her first book.
He had purchased Analise a typewriter for her birthday. It sat in a box under his cot. Her birthday was three months ago. She’d been lusting after a typewriter, he knew, but was too frugal to buy one for herself. It was an Alderwood, of course. His grandfather had patented the design forty years ago, and the family owned, amongst their other interests, the factory in Seafall that produced the latest models. Hers was the newest production design, the Alderwood Diadem, not yet being manufactured on the assembly lines.
“I’ll throw it out the window,” he promised the silence of her room. “Happy birthday to whoever’s standing below.”
The emptiness mocked him.
“Where did you go, Ana?” Gideon whispered. “Where have you taken it?”
The walls swam before his eyes. Wavered like curtains in a breeze. The walls reached out for him.
He squeezed his eyes shut and backed blindly out of the room.
Analise did not know why Gideon destroyed the statues he made. Or why, if he hated them so much, he didn’t stop creating them altogether.
What she did know was that while he was working, he rarely ate or slept. That he worked every day of the week but one, and generally spent that one day in a sort of stupefied swoon on his cot. That sometimes, once or twice a month at most, he would knock on her door, streaked with clay, hollow-cheeked and fever-eaten, and rave about walls moving, and women with hands like linden branches covered in snow, about fal
ling into a deep pit whose walls crawled with wailing purple flowers. And that sometimes in these moments he would kneel beside her bed, where Analise sat very, very still, and lay his hot head in her lap, and she would stroke his hair until his fever broke, and his sweat cooled her thighs and he slept.
In the morning, when Gideon was still weak, he would let her feed him. And smile at her, sweetly, without that bitter edge that made her bleed. And though he never did and never would say thank you, Analise sometimes thought she could rest forever in the cradle of his smile.
Mostly though, he gave her such a headache, roaring and storming on the other side of their shared wall, smashing ceramic, dashing (she surmised from the sound) larger pieces to the floor then taking his hammer to them, that Analise often fantasized about buying a mallet of her own.
Yet she did not move away from her garret room.
“A glutton for punishment,” Gideon had once sneered at her.
“Glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” she’d retorted.
“Analise Field, Authoress, industrializing the cliché.” He paused, then said, glitteringly, “You should write for ladies’ magazines.”
At which point she threw a newspaper at his head.
There had been a period of time (most of last year, more or less) when she did not talk to Gideon at all. This had been after a terrible fight they had at Breaker House, his aunt’s summer mansion, where she and their painter friend Elliot Howell had been invited to fete Gideon’s cousin Desdemona on the occasion of her twenty-fifth birthday.
Gideon had not wanted her there.
Gideon had not thought she belonged there.
He’d pretty much forced her to leave.
Very well, she thought. If he did not want her, why inflict her company on him? So she’d locked her door against him. Left a room if he walked into it. Stopped going to pub parties or group suppers if the invitation came from mutual friends. It wasn’t like he minded. He never tried to talk to her.
Except on his bad nights. Then she heard him stand outside her door, and lean against it, and mutter in that fast, febrile whisper words she trembled to hear.
Covering her head with a pillow helped.
After nearly twelve months, he’d ended up apologizing. More or less. In that ineffable Alderwood style. Probably at Elliot’s instigation. Elliot was the peacemaker among them.
And they’d been friends again for a while. If you could call it friends. Whatever they were. Neighbors.
But their troubles leaked back in. Short spats. Acid insults. Doors slamming. Yelling through the walls.
Then that thing with the toilet paper.
And now the statue.
The statue.
Which, in the moonlight, looked as if it were made of frozen quicksilver. She thought of the love and care and attention lavished in the lines of it. She thought of his hands coaxing the shape into being, building it up from slabs of clay and toilet paper, calling it forth, and she wondered how he dared. How did he dare annihilate something so beautiful?
How very like him!
Analise moved closer to lay her hand against the statue’s cold cheek. Gideon must have laid his own hand there, just so.
Would probably swing the hammer just so, tomorrow.
That was when the statue opened its eyes.
They were huge, glassy, black pools with a green glow at the bottom.
What Analise felt was not shock, but recognition. This. This was why he killed them. Because of that pleading look in their eyes.
“Oh, what shall I do?” she whispered. “What shall I do?”
A single tear fell from the statue’s left eye, a streak of slow-moving mercury that spattered down its sealed lips. She moved her hand to wipe the tear away. Her fingers glittered silver.
Analise felt her face settling into an expression her father used to say could bully the cows into producing pure cream.
“I’ll save you. Wait here. The landlord has a dolly.”
PART TWO: GENTRY MOON MASQUERADE
Desdemona Mannering looked tousled and half asleep when the housekeeper showed Gideon into the breakfast parlor at Breaker House. She was wearing a tea gown of peach silk damask, with sweeping back pleats, and a ruff of ivory lace. Her black hair spilled across her shoulders as carelessly as ink, and she blinked, glossy-eyed, at Gideon, as if trying to recall his name.
“Cousin,” she greeted him. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Desdemonster.” Gideon collapsed into a fragile gilt chair near her knee. “It’s not summer anymore. Why are you in your summer cottage? I rather thought it would be deserted at this time of year. A high lonely place with the wind blowing in from the sea.”
“I’m hiding out,” she confessed. “Boy troubles.”
Gideon smirked. “Chaz Mallister?”
Letting her head fall against the posy-broidered back of her chair, Desdemona laughed. “Those aren’t boy troubles. Those are Chaz troubles. They’re perennial. I don’t let them bother me. No. This was more of an instance of a boyfriend finding out about another boyfriend and weeping all over my bosom. The only thing Chaz does about my boyfriends is steal them, thereby rendering them useless to me. I only choose boys he wants for himself. I like to get there first.”
Gideon had known Desdemona all his life, but he had never been able to read her. Unlike Analise with her glass face, her face that was the barometer of her inner storms and the rosy lamp of her delight, his cousin could keep smiling while she held her arm over an open flame. He’d seen her do it once when they were no more than seven or eight.
Her expression, Elliot had observed upon meeting her, was as serene and sparkling as a lake. Snorting, Analise had added, “She really ought to wear a No Fishing placard around her neck then. One that says, Warning: Barracudas in the Water.” Gideon almost betrayed himself by laughing that time. But if Desdemona could smile when flame scorched her flesh, Gideon could scowl at the only woman who ever warmed him to laughter. Never had a Mannering trumped an Alderwood yet, socially or privately, though a polite war had raged between the families for generations.
“What brings you to Breaker House, Gideon?” Desdemona asked. “Never tell me girl troubles? I don’t think you’ve chased a petticoat in your life. Chaz says they called you the Monk back at Uni.”
“No,” he said absently. “That was Elliot. I was the Stick, for the extra appendage popularly assumed to be affixed up my ass. Ana was the Hick, because, well. Ana. Elliot was the Monk.”
Desdemona gurgled with laughter. “Not anymore, certainly! I never see him now but I think he’s just been tumbled half out of his mind. That little wife of his is a spitfire. I could almost be afraid of her if she weren’t so relentlessly charming. Or, do I mean charming? It’s more like . . . ”
“Enchanting,” Gideon corrected her. “Almost exactly like that, actually.”
He could not but help an inward shudder when he thought of Nixie, Elliot’s wife. When he’d met her, she had been Queen Nyx. She came from the place the statues came from. Recalling her was to remember that place, his descent into that deathtrap of flowers, those laughing bone bells, the walls peeling back to swallow him, the woman with the linden branch hands . . .
There he stopped. To go any deeper would be to press the spongy tissues of an infected wound. He shied away.
He was at Breaker House for one reason. It was a doorway to that world. And it was a doorway Analise must pass through if she stuck with his statue. The statue would try to return home. They always did.
“Are you all right, Gideon?” Desdemona sounded amused, but she no longer looked sleepy. Her placid black eyes had sharpened on him in a way that might have been concerned or predatory. He could not tell. “You look a bit like a bad blancmange, old thing.”
He waved his hand, dismissing this. “I’ve come here on a repairing lease. The city grows noxious. Or perhaps it is merely my roommate who is obnoxious.”
“You don’t share a room with her,” D
esdemona murmured into her tea. “You just wish you did.”
Gideon smiled sourly but did not reply. Desdemona was the only one in the world who lied better than he did, and could catch him at it. For this reason, he never played cards with her, though he took some satisfaction at trouncing her at billiards. In chess or darts they were equals, but both held championship in their own sport. Hers was deceit. His was contemptuous insouciance.
“Stay as long as you like,” Desdemona invited him with a shrug of her wrists that sent her lace ruffs cascading into her elbows. “My summer cottage is your summer cottage. There are seventy rooms, and forty-three of them are bedrooms. Surely you can find a hidey hole where you can lick your wounds.”
She laughed when he glared at her. “Don’t flash your eyes at me, cousin,” she drawled. “You Alderwoods may harness the lightning, but we Mannerings invented rubber boots.”
“Fallacy,” Gideon retorted. “Rubber boots offer no protection against lightning.”
Desdemona gasped in mock dismay. “Horned Lords save me! My metaphor has fallen to the foe!”
He cracked a reluctant half-smile at her, which she knew to be her victory. Then he left her to her breakfast, and went to lick his wounds.
Analise plopped cross-legged on the floor before the statue. After a minute, the statue also sank to its haunches, sliding the rest of the way, imitating her position. As its movements grew more fluid with each passing hour, the expression on its face also relaxed, that first fatal pleading and panic becoming something more somber but no less intense. It never stopped watching her, never blinked, or blinked so slowly she could not categorize it as such.
The consistency of its skin remained cold and white, becoming more like marble than eggshell.
“I think you’re getting stronger,” Analise told the statue. “Look at you! Less friable already than you were this morning. Lay odds you’ll have skin like lonsdaleite if you’re let to live unmolested by sledgehammers.” She reached out and patted its knee. “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Never did an Alderwood stand a chance against a Field. Gideon may not know it, but my name comes from Field of War, and has nothing to do with my family having been farmers since the Neolithic Revolution.”