The Night Market

For my
mother, for teaching me to love writing.

Copyright © 2013 by Zachary Rawlins
Cover photograph copyright © Özgür Donmaz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any
manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and
incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual
events is purely coincidental.
Published by ROUS Industries.
Oakland, California
[email protected]
978-0-9837501-3-0
Cover design by Dahlia & Poppy Design
Second Edition

1.
Diary of a Young Girl’s Disease
.
5

2. How Like A Fallen Angel
16

3. Some Girls Wander by Mistake
.
28

4. The Young Lady’s Guide to Wasteland Etiquette
.
37

5.  Theoretical Inedita
.
48

6.  Cosmic Horror Slumber Party
.
59

7.  Upon the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of the Hand
.
75

8.  The Cat it Was Who Died
.
87

9.  The Sleep of Monsters
.
105

10.  My Voice is Dead
.
119

11.  The Generous Enemy
.
133

12.  The Mad Tryst
.
145

13.  The Restoration of Yael Kaufman
.
156

Six millimeters of nanotechnology extract oxygen from dense
air, humid and tainted with the odor of burning paint. Leaping playfully from
one puddle of rain to another, the analytic software in the mask’s lenses tag
the spray with a rainbow of hypertext toxin identification. The sky is the
color of a three-day-old bruise.

Dawn began to reluctantly bloom in the poisoned glass sky over Roanoke, while
Yael shivered and tried to hide from the frigid wind that blew in from the
harbor. She had selected her windbreaker and her thickest pair of stockings, the
canvas cut-offs she wore to garden that frayed below her knees, a pair of
flower-print plastic rain boots and her brother’s old gas mask.

The rain stopped a few hours earlier, but the back
alleys she traversed were flooded with a thin layer of polluted water, droplets
of water pooling on the hydrophobic fabric of her tights, forming droplets that
rolled down into the soles of her squelching boots. The strap of her duffel bag
cut into her shoulder, forcing her to periodically pause and switch sides. Yael
tried to limit herself to only that which would be strictly necessary, but she
didn’t have any previous experience, so she wasn’t sure exactly what to bring.

She had rushed her departure, her thinking heavy with
the weight of the previous night’s dreams, which had been troubled, though she could
not recall them precisely. In fact, she could not even remember waking to
stumble out into the early morning cold.

Though she clutched her arms tight across her chest,
her fingers were numb inside her damp wool gloves. The galoshes she wore were
too large, and there was a blister forming on the ball of her left foot, but her
only alternative footwear was a pair of canvas sneakers that would have
disintegrated in the flooded streets.

After pausing to check a battered street sign with her
miniature flashlight, Yael turned onto Drough Street, glad that she had
committed the first part of the map to memory the night before. Though the
streets were deserted at this hour, she wanted to look as if she belonged, as
if she were supposed to be precisely where she was. She did not want to appear
to be lost.

This was, in a sense, the truth of the matter. Yael
had a destination, but only the vaguest ideas about how to get there.

Shivering beneath the impervious fabric of her jacket,
Yael splashed her way through the empty streets, not going anywhere as much as
she was leaving something behind.

Yael followed railroad tracks through the flooded
industrial district, the elevated tracks raised above the level of the water that
covered the streets and undermined the buildings. The vast pools of standing
water diminished the further she moved from the bay, until they were little more
than scattered puddles. Berkshire was built on a ridge above the docks, so a splashdown
in the bay didn’t affect the neighborhood. Accordingly, there were more people
about, warming their hands above steam gratings or smoking Azure, the crushed
leaves that bring dreams from other worlds. The curtains of the fenced and
gated houses would occasionally move aside, nervous residents eyeing aimless
youths gathered on the corners with obvious suspicion.

Yael kept off the main streets and the mixed crowds of
suited businessmen, Visitors wrapped in outlandish regalia, Public Security
officers in pressed blue uniforms, and drug-addled squatters. Occasionally, a
zeppelin showed overhead, probing the streets with halogen spotlights. Yael froze
and pressed herself against a wall, holding her breath until it passed. She
took care to avoid the occasional pair of mounted Public Security on patrol,
their horses still dripping and wet to the fetlocks from scouring the lowlands
for refugees fleeing proxy wars in the Yucatan and Cuba, or poverty and
starvation behind the fences of Suanee.

At the heart of Berkshire was a park with manicured
grass and fountains, in wild contrast to the drab neighborhood. In the center
of the park, the Government Lethal Chamber stood, the etched bronze door
polished to a brilliant sheen. The flowerbeds surrounding the Chamber were
exquisitely maintained and brilliantly colored and the sound of the water
spilling from the fountains was soothing. Around the door there was a cluster
of statues that Yael recognized as Yvian’s ‘Fates’, both lovely and
disquieting. It took an effort for Yael to keep herself from shuddering as she
hurried across the park.

Berkshire gave way to one of the rings of
post-industrial slums that radiated out from Roanoke like blight, the kind of
neighborhood that Yael visited only with a local guide. She found herself
wishing for Elan and Carlos, for their friendly faces and rotting teeth.

Despite the isolation of her gas mask, Yael felt the
stares of the emaciated men who watched her from beneath huddles of rags,
hollow eyes tracking every movement. Flustered, she made a series of turns at
random, spoiling her route, but panic would not allow her time to check the
signs. She couldn’t make herself stop long enough to determine if the footsteps
from behind her were more than echoes, or whether she could hear the sound of
voices through her own panting.

Yael made a wrong turn.

The street ran directly into the hillside ahead of
her, a dead-end surrounded by decrepit warehouses and factories dormant for so
long that she couldn’t guess what they might have produced. Yael risked a
glance behind her and promptly wished that she had not. At least three men
followed her, with the slack features and nervous hands of Azure addicts,
cracked and bleeding lips mouthing cultic gibberish. One of them clutched a
shard of obsidian like a crude knife, blood dripping between his fingers from
where the stone had cut him. Another raved and shouted at Yael, spittle
dripping from his grey beard.

“Thirty six pillars hold up the sky! The Pallid Mask! Fragile
as flesh and bone...”

Blank warehouse walls hemmed her in on either side.
Yael examined the slope behind her. Halfway up the hill, the mouth of a tunnel yawned
out at the poisoned sky like a perfect concrete orifice.

She ran for the tunnel as fast as she could manage,
mud squelching beneath her galoshes as she fought her way up the sodden hill.
Thorns and stickers broke on the impervious surface of her tights, the wet
ground threatening to swallow her feet with every step. She was forced to
clamber on all fours, her hands sinking into the mud up to her knuckles, one
glove disappearing into the black ooze. Her breath fogged the lenses of her gas
mask and sweat burned the corners of her eyes.

Yael braced herself the entire climb up the hill,
waiting for a hand to grab one of her boots and drag her down into the mud. Yael
couldn’t tell if she was being followed or if she was hearing the sounds of her
own struggle up the slope. The ground was frigid against the skin of her bare
hand and her fingers stung.

The darkness of the tunnel swallowed her and she was
grateful. Yael didn’t stop until the light from the outside had faded away
entirely.

Yael used the thin beam of her flashlight to pick out
a winding path along the tunnel. The tracks were rusted and broken, but she remained
leery of the third rail. Trash was piled to her waist and she had to hold her
duffel above her head, grateful for the mask. The concrete walls were layered
with graffiti murals, vivid and ornate, entirely illegible messages left under
the earth where no one but the artists and the destitute would see them.

Signs of life diminished gradually while the trash
expanded, until she reached a place where the tracks cut off completely. The
wall caved in on one side, leaving only a narrow space perhaps a foot wide, the
faintest breath of air from the other side cool against her face.