Adornments of the Storm

by Paul Meloy

  “What of the Despatrix?” asked Index.

  “I don’t know. I saw it blown backwards by the force of the light. There was no sign of it when I got there.”

  Elizabeth opened the door. “They’re awake,” she said.

  They went in. A single bedside lamp lit the room. Steve and Claire were sitting next to each other on the edge of the bed looking rumpled and disoriented.

  Anna sat next to Claire and took her hand. Claire’s face was white and still strained despite the sleep, but she managed a smile for Anna. Steve ran a hand over his face and yawned. “What did you give us?” he asked Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth said, “Trade secret.”

  Steve shrugged. “Takes me back to my youth,” he said.

  Index said, “I’m going to open a Gantry and we are all going through it. I suggest that Steve, Claire and Elizabeth close your eyes.”

  “Now?” said Steve.

  “Now,” said Index.

  And they were gone.

  COAL DUST. SPARKS. Firebox heat. Steam.

  Colin opened his eyes and blinked. It was dark. As his eyes accustomed he saw that he was standing on the edge of a platform in a small train shed. He realised that his eyes were not adjusting to darkness within the shed but were adjusting to daylight after being blinded by the light from the Gantry.

  He felt chilly. A cool breeze ran the length of the train shed and intruded up the legs of his shorts. The light was pale, early morning light. The doors at the end of the shed were open and a wedge of dusty radiance was creeping up the weed-choked rails. A skylight made from semi-transparent fiberglass let in a little more light and Colin was able to see clearly now the wonderful and mythical thing that waited on the tracks in front of him. He put his hands on his bony hips and whistled.

  Alex appeared on the footplate, his face and hands already blackened with streaks of soot.

  “You alright, COLIN?”

  “Survived worse,” Colin said. He took a step nearer the edge of the platform and peered into the cab. Alex had begun shoveling coal into the firebox already. “Can I come aboard? I want to see it for myself. What a beauty.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll still work,” Alex said. His tone was hopeful, but Colin could see the flicker of doubt in his eyes. “There’s a piece missing.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Colin said, and stepped over into Railgrinder’s cab.

  “It’s the throttle lever,” Alex said, and pointed to a large, greasy nut above the driver’s seat. “It’s gone.”

  “Maybe we can find a spanner or something, rig something up?”

  “That’s what I thought. We can have a try, but I’ve got a feeling it needs that lever.”

  “I’ll have a look around,” Colin said. “I’ve heard so much about this beast. I’ve always been a bit of a train spotter. Can’t believe I’m actually standing in its cab.”

  Alex shoveled another pile of coal into the firebox. There was a yellow flutter of flame from within and a burst of embers. “I thought Railgrinder was wrecked,” he said. “Someone must have brought it here and repaired it. Kept it ready for us. I’ll get it fired up.”

  “Where’s Eliot?” Colin asked.

  Alex gestured back towards the platform.

  “He’s getting breakfast.”

  Colin was surprised to see Eliot emerge from a small door set into the wall of the shed carrying bacon rolls wrapped in cellophane. As Eliot opened the door, Colin could see that behind it was a small but busy café. A brass urn sat on a narrow counter at the back of the café and filled the place with steam and all the tables were packed with people eating and drinking and reading newspapers. Colin frowned. Voices were raised.

  “Are they all speaking French?” he asked as Eliot stepped into the cab.

  Eliot handed him a roll. It smelt wonderful.

  “It’s a Lacan-café,” he said, and put a roll in Alex’s reaching hand. “It can appear anywhere in the Quays where there’s a vacant lot or an empty shop. It’s for people to get together and process stuff, make sense of their dreams. Everyone speaks French because it’s the language the Autoscopes hate the most. It’s too elegant for them.”

  “I can’t speak much French,” Colin said. “I can ask for a beer or the toilet but that’s about it.”

  “You’re not dreaming, Colin. They are.”

  Colin considered this as he bit into his roll.

  “Actually,” he said, “I could do with a wee. The old bladder’s not what it was and this chill isn’t helping. I’ll nip in and ask. Ou est la toilette, right?”

  Eliot was looking past his shoulder.

  “Too late, mate,” he said.

  Colin looked around.

  “Merde,” he said through a mouthful of bread.

  The door stood open, askew on broken hinges. Inside all was dark and stripped bare. The room looked burnt out. The café was gone.

  “I’ll go behind a bush,” Colin said, and lobbed his empty cellophane wrapper underarm into the firebox.

  JOHN STAINWRIGHT AND the others emerged from a Gantry inside Bismuth’s arcade.

  Elizabeth staggered and Steve caught her. She looked dazed and her face was flushed.

  “First time for me,” he said, “I came out on a beach in Quay-Endula and spent half an hour standing with the sea up to my knees just staring at the horizon. I thought I was dreaming. Are you ok?”

  Elizabeth reached out and put the palm of her hand against Steve’s bearded cheek. She closed and opened her eyes. “I’m fine, dear.”

  Steve had to wonder, “Hasn’t Daniel ever...?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “I’ve never asked,” she said.

  Index led them through the arcade, past the dark and empty units. As they approached the end where Bismuth’s father’s shop was they began to hear a lively murmuring sound.

  “That’s voices,” John said. Above his head came a sudden muted flapping as a pair of gray doves settled onto one of the slender support rods high in the roof.

  “Look,” Elizabeth said. She was standing at the entrance to one of the units. In the rear stood a stainless steel pail full of orange roses.

  “This place likes life,” Index said.

  The arcade was responding to something and as they came around the side of the last unit that ran up the center of the arcade they saw what it was.

  The derelict café that stood between Bismuth’s father’s metal workshop and the old barbershop was no longer empty. The windows were misted with steam and the shapes of people could be seen clustered around tables and sitting at the counter. They were all reading newspapers and speaking French in loud voices.

  Index opened the door. Immediately the arcade was filled with the sound of people arguing, shouting, and laughing. They went in and made their way to the counter. There was a radio playing in the back of the café, tuned to a French station and broadcasting what might have been news or a variety of educational program; the voice was smooth, cultured, and seemed a calming background against which all the other voices were raised. French newspapers rattled and were thrown down, or changed hands, each emblazoned with their own cryptic headlines. A voluminous urn atop its brass burner hissed and blew jets of steam against the low plaster ceiling. Condensation gathered in wobbling droplets. There was a tall, slender man standing behind the counter wearing a blue apron. He had small, very dark eyes, slicked back hair and a pencil moustache. When he saw Index he threw down his dishtowel and yelled,

  “Jon Index! Bienvenue a mon café! C’est Index! Jon Index, tout le monde!”

  Broadsheets were lowered and conversations went quiet for a moment. Curious faces peered at them. Cups of coffee and pastries paused on their way to and from mouths.

  “Bonjour, Johnny!” Index said and reached across the counter to embrace the owner of the café.

  Index turned back to the others. They were clustered in the middle of the floor in a negligible aisle that ran from the front of the café to the counter. Everyone had gone ba
ck to reading, eating and making a noise. A short man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a loosely-wound paisley cravat stood to make room for them, pushing his chair beneath his small cluttered table. He gave Lesley a rakish wink and said something to her in French that made Steve take her arm and glare at the man. Index smiled.

  “Elizabeth how’s your French?”

  “Mediocre,” she said.

  “I can speak pretty passable French,” Steve said, still frowning at the man in the black hat. “Learned it on my travels. Stayed with a couple in Languedoc for six months picking figs.”

  “I want you all to stay here. Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll come back for you.”

  John said, “I’m going with you. I want my dog.”

  Index nodded. They went to the door while the others found a table that abutted the counter. Johnny was taking their orders as the two men left the café and went back out into the arcade.

  John looked up towards the roof. A group of pigeons had joined the doves in the struts and as they watched, four sparrows darted in through the entrance and sped low along the aisle. They landed on the roof of the flower stall and hopped about, pecking at the felt.

  They walked over to the metalwork shop and went inside. It was gloomy and cold. The counter was bare, as were the shelves behind it. Index followed John to the rear of the shop and John opened the door that led onto the bombsite.

  There was a figure coming towards them, treading with slow, heavy steps over the rubble, and he carried something limp in his arms. The sky was a pale, sick purple bandaged with wide strips of high gray cloud. The air was thick with particles of masonry dust.

  “Oh, no,” John said.

  THE INCURSION GANTRY blazed at their backs. The chipped ceramic door of the refrigerator blushed a hot pink, reflecting the crimson light and seemed to lurch backwards as the shadows fled. The edges of the flattened boxes beneath it glowed like filaments in a gas fire and looked like they were about to combust.

  Bismuth and Bix span around to face the Gantry. Bix lowered his head and snarled. Bismuth took a step forward, a lever held in each fist. The Gantry was a vile gash exposed immodestly in the night air, glistening with putrescence and hot with infection, and it pushed the beast from it with a great, rippling contraction that sent it spewing onto all fours in the dump’s slurry.

  It was titanic, at least twice the size of Bismuth, and covered in a moldering black cape with a hood that covered its head and hid its features. Its forearms, piston-straight against the ground, ended in hands with fingers fused and covered with horn, hoof-like and heavy as clubs.

  It lifted its head and began to stand, the hood of the cape peeling back to reveal a huge elongated skull covered with the flesh from a boar’s head. The meat had been crudely stapled to the bone; heavy black jowls hung and the pointed, interrogatory V of its mouth lolled, thick with a bulging white tongue, beneath a short, broad snout.

  Morgoder had joined the War.

  ITS STENCH WAS incredible. The vileness of the already putrid air increased by an order of magnitude. Morgoder seemed to emit the pestilence like an aura.

  Bix whined and put his front paws over his muzzle, burying it in the wet, gray dirt, smothering it in a filth that was preferable to the mass grave reek coming off the Autoscope.

  “Don’t let it touch you, Bix. It’s death.” Bismuth said, and as he said it, Morgoder charged.

  Bix lifted his head. Filth dripped from the fur around his mouth. His eyes were half shut but he saw the monster charge towards them. His paws slipped in the dirt and he felt Bismuth’s weight against his flank as the man tried to push him aside with his leg, but it was too late.

  Morgoder hit them like a wrecking ball. A caped shoulder hit Bismuth and sent him spinning, staggering against the wall at the back of the dump. He found his feet and slammed the ends of his levers against the crumbling brickwork to thrust himself forward, pushing off from the wall in a shower of golden sparks. His boots thudded in the dirt.

  Morgoder was standing over Bix, a hoof raised to bring it down on the dog’s head. Bix lay against a pile of junk, his chest heaving and his muzzle open. He rolled an eye that was full of fear and pain and fixed it on the creature that towered over him.

  Bismuth shouted, changing direction, and instead of running to attack Morgoder, he ran back to where the refrigerator stood on its dais of rotten cardboard.

  Morgoder swung its foul, heavy head. The boar-skin mask slid on the bone of its skull, quivering. The white tongue slid from the side of the lolling mouth, across ridges of blunt, brown teeth. It made a sound; a deep, feral grunt, which clapped against Bismuth’s eardrums and made him wince. Bix shuddered and his feet paddled as though he was dreaming.

  Bismuth grabbed the refrigerator’s handle and threw open the door.

  Morgoder lowered its arm. The bulging, viscid pig’s eyes gazed blindly at what had been revealed but Bismuth could see a light somewhere behind them, thin filaments of nihillumination deep in the monster’s head, watching with sudden caution from behind the dead bulbs in the boar’s face. The light hurt Bismuth’s head and he looked away, looked back towards the refrigerator and to what had been hidden inside.

  It was a boy.

  Bismuth slid his levers into his belt. Tears blurred his sight and he felt himself trembling. Here was the boy.

  He bent and lifted the boy into his arms. He was no weight. He was pale and did not breathe. He was like a ghost in the crook of the giant’s arm.

  Morgoder made no sound as it stepped away from Bix and moved towards the Firmament Surgeon.

  Bix opened his eyes. He was cold. His fur was slathered with filth. There was a great pain in his side from where Morgoder had clubbed him against the junk. He could taste and smell the overwhelming odour of death, and it was black and nightmarish with not so much as a pinhole of light at the end of it. It was the collapse of everything, the absolute stemming of the fountainhead of light, the silencing of The Word forever. The closing of the slot.

  Bix lifted his head from the dirt and barked.

  Bismuth turned, the boy light as sticks in his arms. Morgoder lumbered towards him, fused fists raised to bring them down on the back of Bismuth’s neck.

  Bismuth ducked and sidestepped. Morgoder charged past him and thundered into the refrigerator, slamming it against the back wall of the dump. It fell sidelong, its door dropping shut against the emptiness within.

  Bismuth watched as Morgoder lifted itself from the ground. It fumbled at the handle of the refrigerator with its bonded fists and lifted the door like a car bonnet.

  There was a new darkness inside, a darkness full of eyes. It welled against the opening like a vat of tar too dense to pour, seeming to coagulate against the stinking atmosphere of the dump.

  Bismuth held the child tight against his chest. This was what he had come here for. This was what he had always come here for. It was a terrible decision, but one he would have always made.

  Bismuth ran, his long coat swaying and his heavy boots slamming through the dirt, and took the child away from the dump.

  Behind him, Morgoder roared. Bismuth glanced back, sure it would be in pursuit, but it was still hunched at the door of the refrigerator. It was watching him, though. Bismuth felt his retinas itch as he looked into the vicious sockets that smouldered behind the mask.

  Bix was unmoving, whatever dream he had been having now over.

  Morgoder shouldered the door open, bending the ancient hinges until they snapped. The door crashed against the side of the fridge and broke off, sliding onto the ground behind it. Morgoder wrestled the refrigerator upright again, hugging it like a bear; urgency in its purpose, and Bismuth could see the eyes sluicing in the blackness, welling against the border of the darkness.

  Morgoder stood sentry, the bulging rim of the devil-in-dreams straining against its containment, a remorseless predator pressing against a wall of curved glass.

  Bismuth ran.

  INDEX PUT A restraining arm acro
ss John Stainwright’s chest and held him firm.

  John was devastated, his eyes wide and flaring with fury, but his voice was steady and firm.

  “Let me go, Jon. I want my dog.”

  Index softened his grip on John’s shoulder but stood in front of him, blocking his way.

  “We have to see to the boy.”

  “You see to the fucking boy.”

  Index closed his eyes.

  “Morgoder will kill you. You don’t want to die in this Quay.”

  John stepped to the side, like a child trying to see past a father protecting him from a sight of carnage.

  Index raised his hands. They were huge hands, the palms deeply lined.

  “I’ll stop you if I have to,” he said.

  John clenched his fists, but now his eyes were wet with tears and he was trembling.

  “Take the boy inside. I’ll get your dog,” Index said.

  BISMUTH CARRIED THE boy through his father’s shop. John stood at the door and watched as Index trod across the bombsite towards the dump. He felt hollow and very afraid. Old feelings of isolation and exclusion rose from a part of him he had long forgotten and he closed his eyes tight against the hideous panic threatening to unwind him. He should never have let Bix go.

  Bismuth had stopped at the door that led out into the arcade. He was watching John, his face lined with ancient compassion.

  “I had no choice,” Bismuth said. “But I am so sorry.”

  John let the door close against the bombsite. He looked into Bismuth’s tired eyes, at the boy curled in his arms. He felt the coldness of the empty shop around him. He looked down at the counter and saw something that had not been there before.

  It was a thin, silver curl of metal—a ringlet of swarf from a lathe—and he picked it up and twirled it in his fingers. It was serrated and sharp as a blade. He put it down again and stepped around the counter, the sensation of alienation and anxiety ebbing slightly. He walked over to Bismuth and put a hand on his arm. Bismuth nodded, and John knew he would never be alone again, not in this life or the next.