Authors: Felix Gilman
He realized that Ivy was there in the garden watching him; it seemed she’d been watching him for some time.
“How was last night’s … ah … ?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“I remember Brace-Bel,” he said. “In his own time he was considered mad. Much of what he says is true. There
were
Gods, there
were
better times in the city, there
are
doors, there
are
paths. I have walked them myself. But Brace-Bel will never find them, Ivy. He’s a fool. You’re wasting your time here.”
She raised an eyebrow. He felt himself being minutely scrutinized for flaws.
He wondered what kind of desperation would cause a woman of her evident intelligence to follow Brace-Bel, to remain with Brace-Bel, to put her hopes in Brace-Bel after night after night of failure and absurdity.
“And you?” she said. “What about you?”
“What
about
me?”
She stepped closer. “You know what I fucking want.”
“I imagine, since you’re here with Brace-Bel, since your own time is what it is, that you want to leave the world behind. To escape.”
“To
understand.
That’s part of it. Can you help me?”
“Yes. Come home. There are better times out there, and I remember the way. Come home to your sisters, and we can all go together. “
She leaned in very close. Her eyes were the green of diodes, synthetic chemicals, strange stars. She sneered. “You want to be part of the fucking family, do you? If you had any sense you’d run away now and never come back, and you’d go alone. You don’t understand
anything.”
Her sudden anger shocked him. Anger and … hurt?
“You told Brace-Bel something about a Beast that talked,” she said. She flashed him a brilliant smile, and for a moment she reminded him again of Ruth, and he was charmed; then he saw how cold her eyes were. “Now
that’s
interesting. Tell me everything about it.”
H
e told her. She listened in silence, nodding with excitement, as if the story of the Beast reminded her of something important,
confirmed something she’d begun to doubt. Without warning she walked off. He tried to follow but she stalked fearlessly across the trapped and deadly garden where he only dared
creep
, and he lost her among the willows and shrines.
After that she avoided Arjun for the rest of the day. So did Stevie.
Brace-Bel saw him reading the
Letters
and pronounced a terrible curse on all scholars and antiquarians, then withdrew to prepare for the evening’s performance.
Arjun declined to participate. He fell asleep while the household was still at work.
A
larms woke him; or rather the memory of alarms—there was a terrible mechanical howl and drone that suddenly cut short with a whine and a crackle in the moment before he woke, and Arjun wondered, as he stumbled to his feet, in the dark, head pounding, if he’d dreamed it—but the house was full of shouting and movement and banging doors, and he knew at once that something dreadful was at the door.
He fumbled for the lamp on the shelf. He couldn’t light it. No spark, only a dismal fart of inert gas.
They have found you again.
He ran out into the corridor. The shouting was coming from upstairs, from the ballroom. He staggered in the dark into a dressing table and broke a vase and bruised his hip.
He found the ballroom door shut. Behind it he heard Brace-Bel’s voice, Basso’s voice.
He pushed the door open.
Inside was shifting darkness, windowless, packed with nervous sweaty bodies costumed in inhuman shapes. Only the crystal on Brace-Bel’s stick gave a cold light; it reflected in Brace-Bel’s eyes, and Basso’s eyes, and Ivy’s, and off Stevie’s jewels, and the boy’s mirror-plates, and off white feathers and brass buttons.
Basso was pointing a gun at Arjun. He lowered it with a sigh and said, “Only you. False fuckin’ alarm. What were you doing in the garden?”
“No,” said Brace-Bel, pulling on his trousers. “There’s something
else coming.” He raised his stick; the crystal was very bright now, in the dark. “See?”
“Something set off the alarms,” Ivy said. “And then
silenced
them. Arjun can’t know how to do that. Even I don’t know how to do that.”
“Only a few minutes ago,” Brace-Bel said, buttoning up his coat, “each of our musicians suffered the embarrassment of a broken string or a snapped reed. All of our candles guttered. The electric light died. My watch—see?—has gone still. I’ll wager good money that the milk in the pantry is spoiled. Arjun is a sad and somber little man and his presence may kill a joyful mood, but can he break clocks? He cannot. Something comes. At last something comes.”
“Brace-Bel,” Arjun said. “There’s something I should have told you. I am being pursued. There are two men who pursued me down the Mountain, and have pursued me since. I am very afraid of them. If I run from here I think they will leave you alone. Ivy, will you come now?”
Basso raised the gun again, and looked from Ivy to Arjun and back again.
Brace-Bel appeared not to have heard; he was staring with eager anticipation at the darkness of the doorway.
There was a hollow and distant sound of footsteps; slow, methodical, regular as the ticking of a clock.
Brace-Bel’s servants shuffled nervously in the dark. “You should all run,” Arjun said. “Go on, go on!”
“At last,” Brace-Bel said. “At
last.
Can you feel them coming? This is magic.
This
is the uncanny. The walls of reality shake. The doors are opening. Together we have called them here. Something comes and the laws of science tremble.” He removed his watch and stamped it flat.
“You don’t go nowhere,” Basso said. “You don’t go nowhere, Arjun. You come here and tell me what this is.”
“They are
Gods,”
Brace-Bel said. “Feel how everything quivers at their coming.”
The footsteps grew closer.
“They are not Gods,” Arjun said. “They are the Hollows.” He felt suddenly ashamed and embarrassed, and mumbled, “That’s only a name. I don’t know what they are.”
Ivy’s eyes were wild and excited, her cheeks flushed; she hovered between Brace-Bel and Arjun and seemed unsure whether to be frightened or thrilled or both.
“Close that fucking door,” Basso said.
Arjun and Brace-Bel said,
“Doors won’t keep them out.”
A
nd in fact it seemed clear that no door
could
have kept the Hollows out, for they appeared in the middle of the ballroom without passing through the doorway, and no one saw them enter.
Two.
They stepped out silently from the crowd of Brace-Bel’s servants. The young man in mirrors stepped aside, tinkling, to let one of them pass. Mrs. Down, who wore rags, flinched from the other. They stood side by side in the cold light of Brace-Bel’s crystal.
They wore dark suits. They were of average height, and no particular build. Their faces were not quite clear in the shadows and glitter of the ballroom, but appeared doughy, baggy,
scarred
, poorly shaven. One was pale, one dark. Their blank eyes were fixed on Arjun, who was about to speak, who was about to ask,
what did I do to offend you, who is your master
, when Brace-Bel stepped forward.
“Welcome! Welcome. I have
waited
for this moment. Since I was stranded here. No doubt it pains you to come forward to these terrible last days of the city but your presence here is …” Brace-Bel lowered himself stiffly to his knees and shuffled forward with his head bowed.
Basso lowered his gun, uncertain, and Arjun stepped back, toward the doors, looking around for Ivy; she’d gone.
The intruders looked blankly at Arjun, and blankly down at Brace-Bel. They appeared confused. There was a coldness in the air around them.
There was a distinct sense of
shame;
they radiated it. Arjun felt very conscious of his own wrongness and awkwardness. Brace-Bel’s servants blushed and shifted.
Only Brace-Bel seemed oblivious to shame.
“I don’t know your names,” Brace-Bel said. “As you can see I am a pious man but I don’t know your names. Once I raged against your kind, but I have learned the error of my ways. I have made a particular study of the Gods of the old city; look around you!” He gestured at his servants.
The intruders moved their heads with camera-shutter suddenness to regard each of Brace-Bel’s servants in turn.
Stevie attempted a curtsy, and stumbled.
When she lifted her head one of the two Hollows was suddenly standing over her, examining her head to toe with scrupulous exacting slowness. She raised her eyes to it and something passed between them; it was impossible to be sure what. Arjun watched as Stevie’s eyes fixed intently on the thing’s unremarkable face. She seemed to be trying to solve a complex nagging puzzle; she seemed to be trying to recall something important. It was easier for Arjun to look at Stevie than at the one of the two that stood over her. She bit her lip as if on the verge of saying: I remember you! She didn’t rise from her crouch but her face seemed poised finely between terror and contempt—as if she was unsure whether that one of the two was a boss to be bowed to and pleased and amused, or a beggar to be driven from her door. The thing awoke contradictory emotions, none pleasant.
Stevie had played the Spirit of the Lights in the evening’s performance. She wore a thin dress of sequins and shimmer that left her bony and bruised back bare. There were fake jewels in her hair and her ears and hung on her neck and woven into her dress. She wore bracelets and bangles. She’d carried a candle in a stained-glass lantern—it had gone cold and dark as the Hollows approached and she’d left it at her feet. She stepped back and stumbled on it, shattering it, as the thing reached a hand slowly toward her hair. Its thin fingers shook with—displeasure? Outrage? Fingers brushed and knotted and tangled in her lank yellow hair and she tugged loose with a shriek. And then as she staggered away for the safety of the crowd and found that crowd inching away from her, refusing to look at her, creeping into the shadows—then the glass jewels of her dress began to glitter with a nervous uncertain light.
Arjun stepped forward and called for the intruders to
Stop
, but their interest was momentarily diverted from him.
While the one stood watching Stevie shriek—its hands hanging loose at its side, twitching, as though it was not sure what to do with itself—the other held a hank of Mrs. Down’s rags in its fist, and those rags now
stank
, and seemed to stretch like snakes and writhe. And it seemed there was a third, and perhaps a fourth, stepping into the crowd and fixing on the young man in the mirrors,
who was now bleeding from a hundred sharp incisions, and on the pierced girl, who also bled, and whose flesh now crawled and bulged as things grew and delved beneath; something sharp like a hooked steel finger erupted from her cheek spraying blood. All this was visible by the light of Stevie’s jewels, which burned and blazed now and lit the room with glare and stark shadows. The young man in mirrors began to divide against himself; a sharp dark fault line opened down his screaming face. A fifth Hollow and a sixth moved in the crowd. Arjun called for them to
Stop
again, but they still ignored him. Stevie’s hair caught fire; Arjun reached for her hand and withdrew, his fingers blistered. He remembered now those men in their dark suits; he remembered them emerging from the shadows of doorways and windows as he turned up and up onto the streets that led to the Mountain. They were merciless to things that were not in their place. That was what they had been made for. They found Brace-Bel’s display unacceptable; they would turn it neatly against itself until it was not there anymore. He could not remember how to stop them. He could not
remember.
Basso shoved Arjun aside, raised his arm, fired a shot; one of the Hollows dropped silently to the floor. A moment later Basso’s body jerked and shuddered as a dozen bullets struck it from all sides, and Basso dropped dead.
Stevie was now impossible to look at. She was a terrible brightness that burned the retinas and filled the room with shadows and after-images: the sun’s flashing light caught in the glass of a high window, and behind that window a thin girl, suspended, screaming. Then there was an explosion, and then darkness, full of motion.
“I was warned,” Brace-Bel said. He stood at Arjun’s shoulder. His voice was madly calm. “Mr. Shay warned me. He wanted me to assault the Mountain, you may recall. Are these the guardians of the Mountain?”
“They’re the Hollows,” Arjun said.
“Are they the guardians of the Mountain?”
“I expect so.
Yes.”
“Then Shay armed me against them. I wonder—will this work?”
Brace-Bel raised his stick, then rapped it sharply on the floor. As Arjun’s eyes adjusted to the shadows he could see the men in
dark suits—six? Seven? More?—approaching with some curiosity Brace-Bel’s stick, and the glowing crystal on it. They identified it as a thing that should not exist and swarmed in like sharks. Distant undersea shadows rippled across their white faces and the stone’s light glittered in a dozen dark eyes.
“Come on, then!” Brace-Bel said. “I have no idea, Arjun,” he added, “how this device is intended to operate.”
Arjun silently withdrew. He stumbled against a young man half naked in furs who crouched sobbing on the floor; Arjun lifted him by his arm and sent him with a shove on his way through the door.
Brace-Bel lifted the stick higher and let it shine brighter. Dark intent shapes pressed in around it and around him. He shivered; his whole fat body shook. He muttered. The forms around him lengthened as they approached. It was now hard to tell their shapes from their shadows. There was strain and stretching, shiver and scrape. As Arjun closed his eyes there was
shattering.
When he opened them again the Hollows were gone.
The electric lights in the ceiling flickered into life and the bloody room was starkly visible again.
The curtains were singed and the windows shattered; a cold wind blew in.