The Grimscribe's Puppets (3 page)

—They found a girl in the road, my grandfather began. His large hand covered mine, and placed it back down on the map. He looked so tired, so old. —The skeleton of a large girl, a colossal girl, a giantess. Rising up from the blacktop. Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

—Not different girls, I said, slipping my hand away. —The same girl, trapped in the same part of the road a hundred thousand times. Layers of the same girl, trapped over and over again from kindergarten to sixth grade. Seven years, ending only last spring.

—Yes. My grandfather rose from the table, and started to fold up the maps and diagrams before my mother came downstairs. He didn’t have to ask me how I knew.

~*~

My grandfather abandoned his maps not long after that. It wasn’t that he lost interest. So many incidents occurred, it became useless to record them all. All put together, the entire town became an incident, and the map drowned beneath the network of inky words and roads, until all that remained of white paper was the tiny dot we called home. I don’t think either one of us could bear to fill in that small, lonely white circle. We knew it would happen. My grandfather placed everything in the trash can barrel at the side of the yard one day, and we watched it curl into grey ash and float away in the sweet hot air. And after a while, no one remembered what day it was, or what week, or whether the season was fall or winter or spring. It was all the same season, the same day. I woke up to the same ghostly, lifeless images on the television as the day before, dressed for a school day I wouldn’t recall going to by evening’s end, when I sat at my desk, looking through books and papers for homework I never found.

And then one afternoon, although which afternoon of which month of what year it was, I would never know, my grandfather didn’t come home. He left early in the morning for his job at the electric and water company as he always had, his soft grey fedora over his white hair, a thermos of milky coffee tucked into his briefcase. He kissed me on the forehead and told me to be safe, then drove off in the large car he had bought years ago when he became supervisor. I got ready for school, but I can’t say if I went or not. The day passed, like all the days, in a soft haze of warmth and numbing sweetness that festered into early evening; and then the sun was pushing long bands of shadow and sun through the windows, over the dinner table. My grandfather would never abandon me. He wasn’t coming home, I realized, because he couldn’t; and the shock and sorrow of it sent something cold and hard trickling through my veins, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt I was awakening from a terrible, suffocating dream.

—Are we going to wait for Grandpa? I asked my mother.

My mother set the casserole dish on the table, and stared at me. In her face, traces of what I might become, in another time, in another town. Her eyes, bright and furnace dark. Unbearable and all-consuming; and in her pupils I saw the small reflection of myself sink into the road a million times. I knew her answer then, before she said it.

—No.

She poured me a glass of lukewarm milk, and sat down. We ate in silence. The shadows lengthened until there was no more sun, and in my mind, I saw my gentle grandfather filling in that one remaining dot of white on his map with ink as blue as his eyes. And then he, too, was gone.

The next morning was not the same as all the other mornings. In the sleepy-sweet air, I dressed for classes I knew I had never attended, and never would, for friends and teachers I had never met or seen. Silvery thin men and women danced and fought in the snow of a television set that had long ago lost its cord. Images that did not exist. Everything in the world around me, a perverted misremembering, a suffocating lie. I put my schoolbooks under my bed, then changed my mind and stuffed them into the backpack. I had wanted to go, I had wanted to learn. I wanted to grow up. I had wanted the pale young man with the red-rimmed, pool-black eyes.

In the kitchen, my mother folded the top of my paper bag lunch as I drank my lukewarm milk. She licked the palm of her hand and ran it across my hair as I stared at the empty surface of the table, where my grandfather’s hands had drawn rivers of blue ink over the map of my life. Her breath was whisper-cloying, as though I had walked into a web. In the distance, a train sounded out, mournful and low and long. I stared up at the ceiling, watching small spores detach like faint candle sparks and float down through the thick amber air, wink out as they hit my face, my skin, the ground. Everyone had known that the town had been dying, long before I truly saw it. The ground trembled and buzzed beneath my feet. I thought of my grandfather and the pale young man, and my face grew porcelain-tight.

—I have to go to school, I whispered. Each word took a century to slip from my mouth, as slow as the dying spores.

—No, you don’t. My mother clasped my hand in hers, hard, and I felt our bones shift and crackle, our skin cake and fuse together like velvet and mold.

—Let me go, I said.

—No, she said. —I don’t have to.

—Yes, I said. —You do.

A century later or more, I pulled my hand from hers. Her fingers stretched like taffy, wriggled and dropped away. Centuries later, my other hand thrust my grandfather’s pen at the pulsing hollow of her throat. Droplets hung in the air, ruby and indigo comets catching the light as they orbited our wounds. Outside, the sun fell and rose as many times as the stars in the sky, and in that epoch my mother curled back her cracking lips wider, wider until there was only teeth and the volcanic black of her open mouth. With each step back from her and away, she bloated and burst, exponential in rot, pushing away the flimsy walls of our home, her veined translucent flesh pulsing with all the unborn variants of my life pushing outward to be free. In the molasses air, I turned, a millennium spent directing my terror and trembling legs away and up to the end of our street. If I cried, time looped back and ate the tears before they fell from my eyes. Only the pounding of my heart, a beat for every revolution of the galaxy, only the echo of a footfall with every dying star, only my mother always behind me, exploding, grasping, expanding, only everywhere the low dark roar of thunder and never rain.

—
They found a girl in the road, my grandfather had begun, in another universe. —Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

Down the street, past the crosswalk and the thick white lines, and after that each step was quicker, and the centuries burned away. I never looked back. I passed myself, stuck in the blacktop a hundred thousand times, the giantess made of a hundred thousand girls, each one falling apart and clattering to the ground. And I ran to the edges of my northern town and past it and slipped beyond into the world, as all the cold bright skeletons of who I could have been swarmed behind me, plunging into the quivering moist mountains of putrescent flesh that had birthed us all, sinking her into the road where she lost me, all of them dying within her desire like little miscarried dreams.

I never stopped running.

Neither did she.

~*~

I’ve lived in this southernmost town for many lifetimes now, having lived in many other towns, each further south than the last. But all of the towns of this world have succumbed, as I knew they would, and there are no more towns beyond this one. There is nothing beyond this one, except the vast southern ocean, fields of ice, cold skies, colder stars. Here, winter is a diamond-hard fist, and summer an impossible dream. Or so it used to be, when I first made my way here, centuries or eons ago. I feel her now, again, in the air, in my bones. The days have begun to blend into each other as they did in all the other towns, the minutes and months and years, and a numbing sweet languor warms and slows us down until we no longer know or care. Everyone has known that the town is dying, long before we could see it. But only I know the reason why. My mother is coming for her little girl, once again burning the world away until there is only us and the memories of us together, until there is only her memories of how it used to be, how it should have been. And there are no more towns left to hide in, no more versions or dreams of me left to fight.

So I sit at the window of my apartment in that southernmost town, watching leaves turn red and gold that had only for the first time yesterday been green, watching the sun wax fat and throw off the late summer sparks I knew so well when I lived in the northern town, feeling the air grow camphor-bloated warm and sickly sweet. I sit at my window, turning the pages of school books I’ll never learn from, watching the buildings do what I have never done. They age, morph, change. They bloat, fuzz over, and release soft spores from fat cankers sagging off their rotting faces, they malform and reform, they become more familiar with each calcifying day. The southernmost town is disappearing, and the northern town is rising, again. A steam engine howls in the distance as it gobbles up the miles, and so much more. The townspeople’s movements weaken, slow, stop. They fade and drift away like vapor. The face of the pale young man appears in the windows, sliding from the flickering edges of my sight into full view as the weeks pass: and then the day will come when he will stand in the street below, as he has stood in all the other dusty streets of all the other towns, his large black eyes fixed on me as the twin-beaked raven in his grasp grotesquely struggles to call out my name, all the names of the monsters of my mother’s memories. Behind and around him, behind and around me, the fully formed streets of my childhood soon will stand, birthed out of the ruins of the southernmost town like a still-born giantess, a puppet of calcified dreams and bone, pulled into unwanted existence by the strings of someone else’s desire. This, this is my mother’s endless suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.

I place the blue pen at the small pale circle of my throat.

I can stop time, too.

By Daniel Mills

From the Chronicle of Brother Johannes Kohl, O.S.B.

And so it was that the Appointed Day came to Muelenberg, arriving in our city like a thief in the night—and then, having robbed us of all hope and contentment, it did not linger, and in departing left no sign of itself, so that I cannot now recall when it began.

I remember only a shout from the garden and the sensation of sudden wakefulness. Through the window of my cell, I glimpsed first the stars, glimmering in the east, and then the Cathedral spire like God’s shadow on the sky. A light snow had fallen, and the cold wind howled through my room, slashing through the fabric of my robes.

The cry came again from the garden below. I recognized the voice of Brother Friedrich, our cantor, with whom I had been a novice and whom I counted as my dearest friend. He knelt weeping before Saint Martin’s Oak with his face in his hands. The source of his distress was obvious. For that venerable tree—planted long before by the departed Abbott Martin, first of our Order to settle in Muelenberg—had been burned to a standing cinder. The stench of char was layered thickly on the air, and smoke stood in plumes at the end of each branch.

I donned my heavy cloak and dashed to the stair, passing cells from which the occasional head protruded—brothers roused, like myself, by Friedrich’s cry. Downstairs, I emerged into the courtyard, where the oak swayed and crumbled, shedding ash in clouds. I dropped to the ground beside Friedrich and gathered him into my arms. The bell sounded from the Cathedral, tolling the hour, and I was surprised to learn that it was not yet Vespers.

Afterward, when he had recovered his faculties, Friedrich could say nothing of what had transpired. He thought that he had fallen asleep in his cell and that perhaps he had sleepwalked to the garden. The first thing he remembered of that evening was the rush of wind over his ears and the feeling of stiffness in his joints, as though he had knelt for hours with the smoking shell of the tree before him.

But Friedrich was not the only brother among us to have experienced this queer somnambulance. The Abbot himself was helpless to explain how he had come to be in the Scriptorium with a lit candle suspended mere inches above a pile of our oldest manuscripts.

Likewise the earth beneath the oak was found to be soaked in pitch and tar, even as the Prior discovered the complete absence of such flammables from the Abbey stores—a fact for which no one could account.

Confusion fell, mingled with suspicion. When word of his discovery reached the refectory, where the brothers had gathered, Friedrich loosed a strangled cry, so hoarse and ragged I feared he would never sing again. The Almoner bowed his head and prayed, feverishly, for understanding. The Abbott, upon whose strength and wisdom we relied, offered us no reassurance, but merely gazed down at his hands on the table.

Beyond the Abbey walls, Muelenberg had become a dream city. Townsfolk wandered the streets by day and night, proceeding slowly, cautiously—uncertain of the stones beneath their feet and yet unwilling to admit, even to each other, the terror they shared. Rumors spread of Saint Martin’s Oak, causing no small wail to go up from the faithful, who saw in its destruction a sign of God’s displeasure.

The city is cursed, said many. Their faith deserted them, and they sought instead distractions of the basest sort: drunkenness, avarice, and sins of the flesh. Even the Count, long reclusive in his leprous affliction, withdrew his patronage from the Church, so that the Cathedral was nearly empty on the Sabbath, excepting the Bishop and his priests.

With this gloom upon us, and winter drawing in, the Abbott fell into an impenetrable melancholy. Things appeared less real to him, he admitted, and he felt keenly the absence of the Paraclete. All was flesh, he said. He could give no reason for these doubts but believed they had their origin in that autumn evening when the oak had burned.

Soon discontent spread throughout the Abbey, manifesting itself in lazy illumination work and gossip at the refectory table. The Prior took to carrying a rusty ladle at mealtimes with which he might strike any offending rumormongers. Matins was sparsely attended of a morning, as many slept through the tolling bell, dreaming so deeply that even the threat of the Prior’s wrath could not rouse them from slumber.