Authors: Felix Gilman
Through the locked halls, filled with shrouded and dusty relics— between two great bronze knights on horseback, offering up their
swords as if in surrender—under a stone arch carved with fat writhing snakes—through a room of cracked beads and brittle yellow fans—the lads from Local 141C making their various excuses all the way. “So glad you’re here, sir, to be frank keeping the thing alive never sat right with me, orders are orders, so glad you’re here to set things right.”
Clever lad, that one. Watch that one.
Down through the corridors, smelling of torches, mildew, cigarette smoke; across a vault of velvet ropes, empty plinths, dark spaces; through a plain unmarked door like any other storage-room door. The smell that escaped through the crack in the door—indescribable. Metals and acids. Formaldehyde? Death and Time. A sense of weight. A
hiss …
And suddenly Maury felt a kind of furtive, overpowering fascination. Whatever was in the room, he wasn’t willing to share it.
“It’s caged? Fucking answer me—it’s caged? Right. Wait outside. All of you. And take her away,” he said, waving a hand at no one in particular. “The prisoner. What’s she doing here? Lock her up. Local cells, go on.”
For a moment it looked, absurdly, as though the woman might object—might
refuse.
Then she gave a tiny, ironical bow—as if to say,
all right. This once.
No time to worry about that now—more important things to worry about.
Then he was alone.
He went in alone.
A small room, but dark. The torchlight that slanted through the half-open door only deepened the shadows. No windows. Underground, of course—felt somehow like it was
deep
underground. Buried. The yellow headlamp eye of the thing in the cage …
Maury noticed—he’d been an Inspector for longer than he cared to remember, he kept a cool head and he noticed these things—that the floor was littered with cigarette butts; and he pictured with sudden savage clarity all the men of Local 141C coming down here, alone, furtive, mumbling, chain-smoking, night after night, waiting for the creature to … speak?
It blinked at him and said nothing.
He got a torch from the corridor outside and held it close. The dark pupils contracted, dwindled into the yellow of its eyes, vanished like tiny black bats retreating into a yellow moon. Intelligence
fled, leaving dullness behind. The eyes themselves—misshapen. Uneven. The folds, nearly human, scarred and stitched. The huge shoulders hunched, the tail dragged. “Fuck, you’re ugly.”
It settled back on its haunches.
“What the fuck
are
you?”
A long tongue the color of spoiled meat flickered across its jaw.
“Speak to
me
, then.”
It sat there in dumb animal silence.
He shivered, shook himself, laughed. “Fuck you, then, you horrible thing. Back in the dark for you.”
When he left, he locked the door behind him and slipped the key into his pocket.
Time to find a bed somewhere. Time to find a bed, and put the thing out of his mind. Go blank, which was something he was good at doing. Big day tomorrow.
Ruth
Marta was scarcely two years older than Ruth. That never stopped her from going maternal at times like these. At first it was, “What happened to you, you left the shop shut all day, where’d you wander off to this time?” And she scowled and crossed her arms like a fishwife. But then she saw the look on Ruth’s face, and Ruth told her the story, and at once Marta was full of a fierce frightened kindness—she alternated all night, and the next morning, too, between concern for Ruth and rage at the fucking Know-Nothings, fucking
Siddon
, that treacherous little shit …
“You know you shouldn’t,” she said over breakfast. “Oh, Ruth, you know you shouldn’t do those things.”
“That poor man,” Ruth said, meaning the murdered soldier. “Someone had to help him,” she explained. For some reason it was always easier to talk to Marta about those things when Marta was frightened—when she was calm those conversations turned into shouting matches. “What could I do? Leave him to Zeigler? They’d both be dead.”
“You’re lucky you’re not dead.” Marta sighed. “Following those ghosts—
this
is the world we have to live in, Ruth.”
“For now, maybe.”
Marta shook her head. They finished their breakfast in an exasperated affectionate silence. The arguments were long familiar to both of them—living in the shadow of the Mountain, in the shadow of their father, with their extraordinary sister, the Low sisters argued about the supernatural the way other families who bore more normal burdens might argue about money.
“I have to see Macaulay about his leg,” Marta said. “Will you be all right this morning?”
“Oi course
I will, Marta.”
“Stay out of trouble, then.”
Outside it was not quite dawn yet, and Fosdyke’s shifts were beginning, the whistles were sounding. Carnyx Street—home to the eccentric, the dissolute, the irregularly employed, those who lived on their wits—was still half asleep. The list of chores Ruth had been neglecting was long and forbidding. She put things off for another morning. Not being shot in the head and thrown in a ditch— that was enough of an accomplishment for the day. She read; sometimes she started shaking. Eventually she fell asleep, and dreamed of impossible creatures, ghosts of unusual beauty and brilliance, a world in which she, herself, was perfect, inviolate, alien and immaterial, a ghost or a dream.
Martha banged the table. “What
happened?”
“Huh? What?”
“Is this you and Zeigler—did you do this?”
Ruth blinked; her head was full of muzzy grey clouds; it appeared to be afternoon. She repeated, “What?”
“They didn’t say anything, yesterday? No? I’m sorry, Ruth, I just—there’s bloody great motor-wagons outside the Museum, and the Chapterhouse.”
“Executives. Someone important.”
“New men, with guns. Have you been asleep all morning? Everyone’s talking. The Square’s full of new men with guns, Know-Nothings, and there’s something going on. They’re up to something. Shouting—Macaulay said he was walking that way and he heard shots. This can’t be good. Can’t be.”
“Marta, what were you doing out by the Museum?”
She stopped, went silent, shrugged. “I don’t know, Ruth. You’re not the only one who
remembers
things.”
Maury
In fact there was no shooting—it came close once or twice, but cooler heads prevailed. There was a scuffle—one of Maury’s boys, Pake, got into a bit of a fight with two of the local lads, had to bloody a few noses. Otherwise the men of Local 141C shouted, simmered, sulked. They telegrammed for confirmation—and found that Maury’s authority was unchallengeable. In the end they accepted the inevitable. They were in enough trouble already.
“You’re all going to be up on fucking charges,” Maury said, “every last one of you, if I get my way. What have you been playing at here? What is that thing?”
Maury had the key men questioned in separate rooms—the Chief Officer, the Local Secretary, the Holcroft Rep, the First and Second Investigators. He told his boys, “No violence yet—nothing too nasty. Go easy.” He sat across the table from those sweating, nondescript, frightened men, waited a carefully measured time for them to speak.
They all had the same story.
The monster in the basement had been there before their time—and when they’d first joined the League, twenty, thirty years ago, the men who’d recruited them had said it had been there before their time, too.
They said it was just—sort of
down there.
They never talked to it. None of them ever went down there.
Well, that was a lie, for starters; Maury had seen the cigarette butts scattered down there by the monster’s cage. He sighed, and told his lads, “Break this lying bastard’s finger—one finger! No more. Don’t go crazy. Not yet.”
Sobbing, they admitted that sometimes—sometimes—they went down there to look at it, to see the horror of it for themselves, but nothing more, nothing more …
That would have to do for the moment; more intensive interrogation methods would require additional paperwork.
They said they didn’t know why the creature was still alive. They said they’d just never got round to killing it. They said the paperwork wasn’t in place, they weren’t sure they were allowed. They looked honestly confused.
They all swore that they never fed the creature—not once in
thirty years. They still swore to it even after Maury had more fingers broken.
Maury spent most of the afternoon typing up charges against the local officers. He typed one-fingered, with a great deal of fumbling, swearing, backtracking. His mood was foul; a whole Chapterhouse corrupted!
Maury was loyal to the cause. Too many of the League, especially the young lads, joined up for the bit extra in the pay-packet, the chance for promotion, the social life, the thrill of a bit of violence. They didn’t really
fear.
They didn’t get out of the Chapterhouse enough. Maury, raised in the shadow of the Mountain, haunted all his long life, scarred by a hundred encounters with unnatural things, knew how to fear. Nearly his earliest memory was of a bloodied and torn and ash-shrouded ghost who’d reached from the darkness of an alley mouth, pulled little Maury from the afternoon’s game of stick-and-ball, away from the other little boys and girls and into the shadows, and said,
all you people are gone
—
the War wipes you away
—
you’re not real
, and had proceeded to …
Maury had very definite ideas about what was and what wasn’t real. The rattle and ring of the typewriter; the sweaty institutional smell of the Chapterhouse; a stack of neatly typed-up charges and indictments!
Without quite meaning to, or thinking about it, Maury got up, walked across the empty evening Square, through the cold rain, turning the Museum keys over and over in his hand, and went down into the presence of the Beast.
Still in its cage. Its head lay flat on the ground, at a mournful angle. It opened one eye to regard him.
He carried a gun. He could have shot it. But then he wouldn’t have evidence for his charges against the local officers. “A few more days,” he whispered. “You monster.”
It was silent.
“There’s new management here now,” he said. “That’s bad news for you. I’m in charge here now.”
It flicked its tongue.
“Look at you. You ugly bastard. Never seen nothing like you. Those bars had better be strong.”
He gave a curt laugh. “Big fucking lizard. Look at you.” He laughed again, louder; it boomed in the little room. “Never was one for
pets, me. The wife had a rabbit but it died. Lizard. Ridiculous thing. If I had kids I’d tell them about you, but they’d never believe me.”
He scowled.
“That ghost said you speak. That woman, Ivy, says you speak. Why won’t you speak to me?”
It stayed silent. After a while, he laughed again. “Just a dumb animal. Speak; it’s your last chance. No? Just a thing. I knew it. I’m sick of looking at you.”
He watched it awhile longer.
I
vy—there was another problem.
At first Maury’s lads had locked her up in one of the Chapterhouse’s cells, but that hadn’t worked out; they’d needed all the cells to separately interrogate the local League boys. Acting on their own initiative, they’d moved her across the Square, into the Museum. They’d locked her in one of the storage rooms on the upper floor, among cracked and dusty paintings, shrouded statues, gold and marble relics—horrible stuff, Maury hated it. She seemed quite at home there—like a queen from one of those old stories, in a chamber of treasures.
He visited her in the evening. The room was half dark and felt haunted; she stood by the narrow window in the light from the streetlamps.
She said, “Can I help you, Inspector Maury?”
“If I want your help I’ll fucking tell you.”
She turned back to the window, ignoring his bluster.
Her beauty confused him. He wasn’t even sure she was so beautiful, really; maybe it was only the light.
Young enough to be your bloody daughter, Maury.
Well, so what? He wasn’t fucking
courting
her. She was his prisoner. She was a whore for fuck-knows-what sort of alien powers, that dreadful ghost Brace-Bel, she knew things about that monster …
He said, “Are you all right in here?”
“Yes, thank you, Inspector.”
“It won’t talk to me.”
“Take me to it,” she said. “It’ll talk to me.”
“Oh no. Oh no. You stay where you are. I’m not having you two
plotting.
Tell me what to say to it.”
After a long silence, she said, “Maybe you bore it, Inspector Maury You can’t threaten it. Try making a deal.”
That was all she’d say. No point roughing her up—Maury had learned that. As he turned to go, without meaning to, he said, “Thank you,” and he felt another little bit of his authority slip.
A
whole new storm of shit in the mo mine !
It turned out that the local Holcroft Rep—the officer whose job it was to liaise between League Local 141C and the Holcroft Municipal Trust that sponsored them—had sent off a telegram of his own, complaining about the Local’s ill treatment at Maury’s hands. And so now suddenly there were men from Holcroft poking around, smooth men in suits and ties, junior executives, a class of men who always made Maury uncomfortable.
They wanted to know what the
hell
was going on.
Who ran the League? Who was in charge here? It was hard to say. The city was a big place, and the League was notoriously, obsessively secretive about its operations, and the Combines were even worse. Need to know. Asking questions not encouraged, not at all. Paranoia was the order of the day, not only a survival instinct but the organizing principle of the polity. Sometimes it seemed like the League answered to the various Combines and Trusts, who paid all wages, sponsored all operations; and it seemed that the League’s men were only there to keep the city’s business running smoothly, to maintain a very profitable status quo. Then again, there were times when it seemed the League was a power unto itself, the city was the League’s to mold and shape, and the Combines existed only to fund it. There were people who said the League and the Combines both served the Mountain, come to think of it—who knows?—Maury wasn’t a philosopher.