Arcane II (26 page)

“It’s just the two of you, huh?” Cal said. “It’s safer to be in bigger groups, you know?”

“We used to be in a bigger group,” Michael said.

“Yeah, there used to be more of us too,” Cal said.

Michael knew that Cal had misunderstood him and was glad for it. Cal had meant that the creatures had killed the rest of his party; Michael was happy to let Cal think the same of him and Ashley. He didn’t want to tell Cal that they’d been exiled, and that they both saw banishment as a gift. They’d expected to be killed by the group.

“Well,” Cal said, pointing to Ashley’s belly, “I see you got another person you’ll be traveling with before long.”

Neither Michael nor Ashley responded.

“I bet that was an accident.” Cal laughed. “Unless you all are crazy enough to think raising a child in this world is a good thing.”

“We’re not crazy,” Ashley said.

***

In the late afternoon, Ashley dozed off to sleep. Michael had wanted to go hunting today, but he didn’t want to leave Ashley alone with these strangers. And he didn’t want to leave the shelter of the house just yet. He hoped that these strangers would shove off tomorrow morning and that he and Ashley could have the house to themselves for a few days. He could rest, hunt, perhaps get some strength back. Sitting in this room with these strangers wasn’t the best use of his time, but he felt trapped. If he forced them to leave, he was being inhuman. But he didn’t trust them enough to let them stay.

After at least an hour of silence among the five people, Cal pulled out a faded deck of cards and asked Michael if he wanted to play.

“For fun,” he said. “No real gambling.”

Michael agreed. This would pass the time, and he wouldn’t have to engage in conversation. But Cal kept talking as he passed out the cards. Michael tried to keep quiet without being rude, as if to signal to Cal to shut up. But Cal didn’t listen. He beat Michael over and over at poker, but didn’t seem to need to concentrate at all to do it. His mouth talked and his hands played cards. The wind outside howled through the cracks in the boarded window frames. The sun was going down, and the light in the room was just beginning to fade. It would be time to light the fire soon, if they were going to.

Michael was tiring of the game when Cal, as he dealt another round, leaned forward and said, “That’s a fine-looking woman you got there.” His eyes gestured toward Ashley, and Michael’s head turned to look at her too.

“My wife,” Michael said, believing this should be enough to end the direction of this conversation.

“If you wanted to,” Cal said, leaning back and nodding with his head toward Jessie and Elise, “we could negotiate some sort of trade. Just for the night, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Michael said, rising from the floor and walking back toward Ashley. His shotgun leaned against the wall next to her.

“You’re probably sick of doing it with a pregnant woman,” Cal said. “But I won’t mind.”

“That’s enough,” Michael said, not trying to hide the anger in his voice.

His tone jerked Ashley from her sleep and she blinked her eyes, trying to orient herself.

“Oh, come on,” Cal said, his eyes on Ashley. “We can barter. I’ve got things to tr—” Then his eyes went wide. “What is that?”

Michael had been watching Cal, but now he turned his head to Ashley. A tentacle had slipped out from the bottom of her shirt—green and sinewy like a snake—and then another worked its way out. She tried to push her shirt down, looking up at Michael apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You know I can’t always control them.”

“What the fuck is that?” Cal shouted again, jumping from the floor and scrambling backward.

Michael reached down for his shotgun as Cal grabbed the crossbow. They brought the weapons up at the same time, Cal aiming at Ashley, Michael aiming at Cal.

“Drop it!” Michael shouted.

“Is she one of them?” Cal gasped, his face red.

“Drop that weapon!”

The mess of tentacles growing from Ashley’s belly was squirming now, and she tried to pull her coat around her stomach to cover them up. Jessie and Elise remained seated on the floor, both watching the event before them as if it was a TV show that disinterested them.

“She’s not pregnant!” Cal shouted. “She’s a fucking mutant!”

“Put that crossbow down right now!” Michael yelled.

Cal ignored him, focused solely on Ashley. But then the girl, Elise, softly said his name—“Cal”—and he heard that. He turned to look at her, keeping the crossbow pointed across the hole at Ashley.

Elise slowly pulled the gloves off her hands and held her fists up in the air for everyone to see. She opened her hands to expose her palms. They looked almost normal at first, with small lumps on each palm, but then the lumps opened up, revealing an eyeball in the center of each hand. Narrow black retinas on red irises stared out from the girl’s hands.

“I’m changing too,” Elise said.

Cal’s eyes widened even more and his mouth dropped open. He gasped, the noise a high-pitched shriek. In a blur, he turned the crossbow on Elise.

“And you let me...?” Cal shouted. “You’re dead, you f—”

Michael squeezed the trigger of the shotgun just as Cal pulled the trigger of the crossbow. The blast knocked Cal off his feet. The arrow from the crossbow hit the wall a foot from Elise, sinking in to its fletching. The smell of gunsmoke filled the air, and Michael’s ears rang. He pumped another shell into the chamber and turned the gun on Jessie and Elise. They looked at him, both seeming dazed. Michael realized for the first time that their weariness was probably drug-induced.

“Was that your father?” he asked Elise, who was putting her gloves back on.

She shook her head.

“Your husband?” he said to Jessie.

“He was just somebody with weapons,” she said.

Michael lowered the shotgun. He looked at Cal, lying sprawled on his side, his leg still twitching like a dog flinching in its sleep.

“Well,” he said, “his weapons are yours now.”

With this, Jessie and Elise rose—slowly, dreamily, as if they were walking underwater—and went to Cal. They ransacked his backpack, searched his clothes for articles. Jessie took a necklace from his pocket that Michael assumed had once belonged to her. Elise took a small pistol—a .38 Special, it looked like—from inside Cal’s jacket and hid it inside her own clothes. Jessie found a sheath knife that she strapped to her belt. She took a bottle of pills from another pocket, which disappeared into the folds of her own clothes. When they were done, most of Cal’s outer clothes were gone; all that was left were his jeans, shoes, and a tank-top tee shirt, once white but now greasy brown and stained with blood. Michael walked over and measured his foot against Cal’s. Seeing that his feet were bigger than the dead man’s, he left Cal’s shoes on his feet. He grabbed the body by the leg, pulled it over to the edge of the canyon in the floorboards. He shoved Cal over into the hole where a creature had once come from. He disappeared into blackness before they heard the sound of his body hitting the gravel.

Michael walked over to Ashley, who still sat on the floor. She wiped tears from her eyes. He reached down and offered her his hand. She took it, and he helped her to stand. The tentacles were under control now, intertwined and resting, making the bulge in her shirt look like she was pregnant again. Jessie and Elise stood looking at them, Elise now sheltered in Cal’s coat, Jessie holding the crossbow at her side.

“We’ll sleep in the barn tonight,” Michael said. “Then we’ll head out tomorrow. You can go with us. Or you can go on your own. Whatever you want. You’re not prisoners.”

Without waiting for an answer, he and Ashley—still holding hands—walked outside. Jessie and Elise followed behind them. The wind had finally died down. The sun sat on the edge of the horizon, seconds from setting, casting a beautiful orange and pink glow through the clouds. Michael looked at Ashley. Her face seemed to glow beautifully in the fading light; her expression was relief and hope and doubt. He leaned toward her and kissed her on the cheek.

His City

Craig Pay

He walks the city streets in an army surplus long-coat, listening to the whispers of the concrete and red brick. Each of his shoes is a different size, a different brand, both now sullied to the same sooty grey. His hair is matted and frayed. Stubble never much more than that.

This is what he does: walk. To keep warm at night, to find shade in the summer, to use his sly words on the faces in the crowd to liberate a coin or two. Mostly, though, he just walks to find new voices.

The city is home to so many souls, each telling its own part of the story. He still hasn’t heard it all, even after all these years. Something about a boy who lived here once. A long time ago. A boy who died and became trapped within the city.

Something like that.

He won’t know for sure until he’s heard it all. Pieced it all together.

He visits some of the places again and again, each time listening to the same frantic words. Each time the story seems a little nearer, perhaps clearer.

Today he’s walking the Northern Quarter. He stops to lean against a wall, flattening his palm and splaying his fingers across the slick red brick. Cocking his head, he closes his eyes and hears the words:
Gathered up all my bones, tied them in a silk handkerchief... Gathered up my old bones, tied them in a silk handkerchief...
Over and over again.

But he also hears a new noise. A grinding. Like nothing he’s heard before. It started three evenings ago when he was south by the flyover near the tall buildings, glass and steel fingers reaching up to the sky. Beneath the hum of traffic, the grinding scraped up through the soles of his mismatched shoes, making his shins ache as if he’d been running for hours or sitting too long in the cold. He stood there for a while: feeling, listening, trying to understand. Then he headed north again, back towards the centre to search for the source. As he reached Chinatown the grinding stopped again; the city returned to its usual mumbling drone. A brief respite. A few hours later—early hours later—the grinding started up again. Worse than before. The city in pain—

He is jarred from his reverie, his hand pulled away from the red brick, as someone shoulders into him. The city’s whispers are gone. Forgotten. Instead, two men are standing there, telling him to watch where he’s going. Dark jackets, fair hair cropped close to their skulls, a clinical stench from their pale scrubbed skin. They laugh and start to walk away.

Clenching his fists, fingernails digging into his palms, he rocks back on his heels and feels the tug of the city down through his knees and ankles. Grounding him. He couldn’t move now if he tried. Sucking in air through his pursed lips, he exhales and the city breathes with him. His fingers gradually unclasp as he reaches down into the roots, fingering his way through the ground, finding concrete foundations and long-forgotten basements of the buildings all around him. He moves up past timber floors, further and further until he reaches the eaves and then the tiles and the ridges. To a battered stone gargoyle peering down into the street and an old pigeon sat there atop its head.

A moment’s stillness. The gargoyle shakes and the pigeon takes off in a splash of panicked feathers. It falls a few feet, defecates, and starts to clamber back up into the sky on hinging wings.

Down in the street, he smiles. His hands relax. The two men are now swearing, staring down in disbelief at the bird shit streaked across their jackets.

He walks on.

Still smiling.

***

He finds Old Marge sitting at the bottom of a stairwell in the multi-story car park, huddled amongst a pile of old newspapers. She is wearing, as always, a dozen different layers of clothing so that she looks almost spherical. Today she also has a new scarf made of shiny new bubblewrap. She is reading a thin book, the paper brown with age, corners scuffed and curled. No one ever comes down here—the exits are all on the next floor up; the stairs just finish at a whitewashed concrete wall that seldom has much to say.

Standing a couple of steps above her, looking down, he asks, “Have you heard it?”

She scowls. Continues reading her book. When she speaks, she still avoids looking at him. “What? Heard what?”

He reaches out with two fingers to touch the bone-white wall.
Give me the apple... Give me the apple...
Grinding pain. He takes away his hand again. “I must find it,” he says. “Wherever it is. Whoever—whatever’s doing this.”

She grunts. He hears the scrape of a page being turned. “Dunno what you talking about.”

He looks down at her. “You can find out.”

A long pause. Her eyes flicker back and forth for a while as she reads a few more lines. Then she dog-ears the corner of her page and closes the book. He sees the title
Juniper Tree
across the cover before she hides the book beneath the strata of her clothing.

She nods. “Reckon so.”

Silence again, so he reaches into a pocket and takes out a handful of coins. He hands over a couple of the silver ones. She inspects each coin in turn, licking the metal and thumbing away some imaginary speck of dirt before tucking the coins away inside her clothing.

She stands, allowing scraps of dirty paper to sleet to the floor. Old Marge is short, not even five feet tall, perhaps not even four. Gathering an armful of newspaper from her nest, she walks past him up to a small landing where the stairs dogleg around. She dumps the rubbish onto the floor and goes back down for more. She does this twice again, and then she starts to arrange the rubbish into a small circle. He sits down on the steps to watch, leaning against the wall and letting the city’s wounded murmurs roll over him:
Give me the apple... Give me the apple...

After a few minutes Old Marge pauses, settling back on her haunches to stare at the circle. She nudges and tweaks. She picks up a till receipt, gives it a twist, and drops it back down into the circle. Then he realises he’s just yawned because she’s staring at him with her fierce eyes.