The Suburb Beyond the Stars (2 page)

B
rian had to get by the man and the demon baby. He had to get up the steps. He grabbed his cello and then he thought,
Wait. I’ll have to leave the cello.
This was not easy for him to do. He and the cello had been through a lot together: melancholy sonatas … terrifying recitals. But still, that didn’t mean they had to die together. He left it leaning, darted to the side, dashed for the exit.

The freckled man put out an arm and veered toward him.

Brian saw he wouldn’t make it to the steps. He skidded to a stop and dropped low like he had seen basketball players do. He hovered, waiting to see which way the freckled man would move.

The freckled man was not a human organism. His face was crumpling into something creased and alien, and it was clear that the infant on his back was no separate infant but another head on the same body, a hump,
another mouth to feed. The baby was not squinting — it didn’t have eyes. Just that wide, saw-toothed mouth.

The man-infant was, for a moment, poised like Brian, knees bent, hands low. And then it was on all fours. Arms and legs were bending in ways that no human limb could twist without snapping.

The creature was rearing to pounce.

Brian tried to make a break for it. He took a few thudding steps to the left. The monster countered, its infant mouth still screaming and sloppy.

The beast’s father-mouth snarled and snapped. The baby-head, now bloated and distorted, rocked and howled. The monster paced forward. Brian stepped back.

It was now or never. Brian turned and ran past his pillar, past his cello, to a service door in the tunnel. He tugged the handle.

Locked.

The monster had not moved, but smiled a curiously human smile and began to prowl forward, elbows out.

Brian didn’t like the look of those two mouths, nor the gnarled fingers that tapped along the concrete floor.

There was no place to run. There was no more platform.

Brian jumped down onto the tracks. Mice scattered as he hit the sooty gravel.

Farther down the tunnel, he saw the light from the inbound platform. If he could just make it there, there would be people — witnesses — maybe help.

So he ran.

Gravel chiseled at his shoes, spattered behind him. He
heard the
thunk
as the beast threw itself down after him and began to lope forward. He heard it gaining.

Down the tunnel, at the inbound platform, there was not only light, not only the sound of people milling, but music. Brian could hear a man with a guitar, warbling, “You put me high upon a pedestal … so high that I could —”

The monster was at Brian’s side. It was still twenty feet to the music, the light, the crowd. And now the monster was in front of him.

It grinned and lifted one of its emaciated claws. Its clothes were in shreds from its transformation. Its baby-mouth was huge and warping with its cries. The beast was ready to finish him off.

Brian suddenly had an idea. A last chance.

The baby-maw coughed and drooled wet cheese, milk curdled with the blood of some previous victim.

“Uh — uh — okay,” said Brian. “Come on.”

The monster pounced.

And at the same time, Brian hurtled backward, swinging his arms. He straddled the electrified third rail — one foot on either side of it — and thudded back, terrified he’d tumble. He took a chance that the creature wasn’t aware of human ways. He bet that a monster sent by the Thusser wouldn’t know that through the subway’s third rail ran a thousand volts of electricity.

The beast paced toward him as he scrambled away. It swung its heads from side to side.

Digging his heels into the black gravel, Brian kept staggering backward.

The monster slipped forward, raising a bony claw to maul him. Brian shrank away — pivoted — felt the claw swipe —

— and miss —

— and hit the rail.

The alien beast’s body arched. The bulging father-eyes blinked once.

The baby-mouth gave a furious yowl.

And then the thing fell and began to spasm on the tracks. Its back arched further. Its feet flailed.

Brian watched in horror.

Then he saw a train was coming — at first, just light on the wall and a barreling racket.

He scampered toward the outbound platform, where he had come from.

He pulled himself up.

The train appeared in the tunnel. Brian was sitting on the yellow strip near the platform’s edge. His whole body still stung with alarm.

As the train pulled into the station, Brian stood up, shaking, next to his instrument case. The doors opened. People trooped out.

And a few seconds later, Brian got on, lugging his cello, and headed to meet Gregory. There was nothing following him now.

Except the knowledge that he was hunted, and that whatever sought him out would not stop until he was dead.

M
any centuries ago, when the people of Europe still dressed in pelts and scavenged like animals, back when queens pulled birds apart with their teeth, and kings lived in wooden shacks they called feasting halls, a race of sublime, elfin creatures dwelled in the hills. These creatures held court in gemmed ballrooms and delighted themselves with subtle games and whispery fantasias played on instruments of silver. They were reasonably fond of the human animal, though the humans tended to smell bad, eat too much, cry about angels, and leave their droppings on the floor. When the human beasts started to multiply, however, many of the elfin race felt there was no longer enough room for their airy castles and subterranean cities in the hills of Europe, and so a party of them set out for the New World, having read that the human population there was more scarce and not so given to delving in the ground and knocking down sacred groves.

They crossed the Atlantic Ocean in their hovering coracles and galleons. In the mountains of what is now Vermont, they founded a fabled kingdom called Norumbega. Beneath the hills they built palaces and cathedrals and the City of Gargoyles, with stone streets and squares where they held their weird games and rituals for many centuries. They lived there happily — practicing falconry in the forests, holding sub-aquatic jousts in mountain lakes, playing golf with greens and holes in other worlds — until one day when another eldritch race, the Thusser, came to challenge them.

The Thusser wanted to rule over the Empire of Norumbega. They could tell it was built upon an interdimensional rift of great power. They wanted that power for themselves. They felt they would use it more cleverly than the Norumbegans, who spent their days strapping themselves to kites and designing beautiful boots. The Thusser decided they would take the kingdom by force. They began a devastating war, a siege of the mountain.

The Norumbegans plated their highest peaks in metal and sent out airborne warships and dragonauts in goggles to drop bombs on the Thusser Horde crowded below. The Thusser built huge guns and marched in inexorable waves toward the battlements, hurling shot as large as hills at the armored summit.

The siege would have gone on for years and would have exhausted both parties if they hadn’t come to a curious stalemate. The Norumbegans were losing — being somewhat too frivolous for a sustained siege. They called a cease-fire and parleyed with the Thusser, complaining
that they were finding warfare (as they said) “too too dreadfully human.” The idea of making vital political and economic decisions based on how much enemy flesh one could ravage reminded them too much of the animals they’d left behind in the muck of the Old World. It was absurd. They wanted, instead, to decide the conflict on the basis of a much more arbitrary and trivial system. They wanted to play a game.

Each generation, two human pawns were chosen to enter into some kind of a labyrinth. One (without knowing it) represented the Norumbegans; the other (also without knowing it) represented the Thusser. Each round, one team or the other would claim victory — and whichever human won would devise the puzzles and traps for the next round. At the end of all the rounds, the fate of the kingdom would be decided. Either the Norumbegans would take possession again, or the Thusser would sweep in and make it their own.

In the meantime, while the Game was played, Norumbega would remain unoccupied by either team. The Norumbegans themselves went into exile in another world. The Thusser watched jealously over the Game from their haunts.

And now it was Brian Thatz’s turn to create a round of the Game. He had won a victory for the Norumbegans. It was up to him to build a world into which he would, in several years, have to lead some hapless pair of players.

When Brian and Gregory had played the Game, the whole thing had been arranged by Gregory’s cousin Prudence. She was a fan of Gothic novels, so she had
created a round full of menacing servants, monsters in the woods, and mansions with turrets.

Brian, on the other hand, loved old detective novels — hard-boiled stories in which sad men in trench coats leaned against brick walls, coughing on phlegm and watching the silhouettes of lovers on the window shades above. So he had decided he would create a supernatural mystery story, a set of strange puzzles that would lead his players — whoever they turned out to be — through the mean streets of Boston, down darkened alleyways, and into an underworld populated by gangster minotaurs and blond dames with wings.

His workshop for the Game was a series of rooms in an old, unused art deco office building. It had been rented for him by an agent of the Norumbegans, a bitter elfin mechanic named Wee Sniggleping. Wee Sniggleping was in charge of arranging things according to Brian’s specifications and the complicated Rules. In his mountaintop workshop, he was building gangsters and molls, toughs and stooges, so they could eventually populate Brian’s round. When completed and installed, they would swagger and growl like real people.

Wee Sniggleping and Brian had not yet refinished the office building. Above the front door, the stucco shadow of old lettering still read W
ORLDWIDE
I
NDUSTRIAL
B
ATTER
C
O.
Inside, the afternoon light shone through cracked windows into a ruin of fallen plaster, graffiti, and chipped marble facing. Upstairs, there were floors of metal filing cabinets with drawers torn out, hallways where the
wooden paneling had been smashed, and wires yanked out of the walls.

But there was one office that had already been restored and prepared for the Game. On the pebbled glass window of the door was freshly painted N
ATE
F
LOCKTON
— P
RIVATE
E
YE
. And inside was Brian’s headquarters.

He and Gregory had turned it for the moment into a kind of clubhouse. There were huge ornate desks from a century before and some giant fake ferns. Gregory had hung plastic parrots and cockatoos on perches from the ceiling. The two found some horrible paintings in the garbage — Technicolor dogs with their tongues out and landscapes that looked like the surface of Venus after a neon storm — and hung them unevenly on the walls. Brian had brought over some boxes of his favorite books and an encyclopedia that he’d stuck in some church bookshelves.

The upper half of a mechanical secretary — her lower half was just a set of metal struts — greeted them whenever they walked in. “Why, hi there, boys,” she would say. “Mr. Flockton ain’t in. You want I should take a message, or you okay just cooling your heels ‘til he gets back from whatever filthy joint he’s sunk in today?” There was no Mr. Flockton yet — Wee Sniggleping still had to build him, as well as twelve other assorted cops and crime lords. Even the secretary, Minnie, was still in her early stages and could say only a few things — but it was always exciting for Brian to see the world he had planned come together.

Now, however, Brian was pacing around in the inner office while Gregory sat on the old couch, listening to his story.

“You don’t think the Thusser were trying to find this place?” Gregory asked.

“At first I thought that, but now I’m not sure,” said Brian. “I don’t think it makes sense. I know that they’re talking to Sniggleping and the Speculant about all the stuff we’re doing here. They must know where our headquarters are.”

“Maybe they don’t.”

“I don’t think it was just about tailing me.”

“Yeah, the tail. You said he had blotchy cheeks?”

“Like he’d had some kind of disease.”

Brian looked down at Gregory. Gregory was smiling. Exasperated, Brian said, “What? What’s funny?”

“Your tail has pimply cheeks. You have pimply cheeks on your tail.”

“Gregory!” Brian protested. “I was almost killed.”

“I’m sorry,” Gregory said. He tried to drop his smile.

“Stop joking.”

“I’ve stopped. Look. Here’s me serious.”

Gregory took on the expression of an undertaker who’d once dreamed of dancing on Broadway.

Brian frowned and absently knocked on one of the encyclopedias, trying to calm down. Sometimes he hated it that Gregory never took anything seriously. It made him feel like he was some dull boy in knee socks, some twerp bringing down a great party by complaining about almost being killed. He knew that if Gregory had been
confronted with squalling evil on the T, there’d be a great story with lots of sly jokes, and it would sound like Gregory was a hero, calm and cool. And if it could be told to other people, kids would be gathered around Gregory like they always were, boys slapping his arms, girls touching their hair, smiling.

And of course, Brian realized, he himself would be one of the people who’d laugh at Gregory’s jokes. Because that was what was great about Gregory: He never gave up. He never stopped laughing. He balanced Brian’s thoughtful frown. That’s what made the two of them a good team.

Brian sighed and knocked again on the encyclopedias. He said, “I don’t think that they were just trying to follow me. I think their plan all along was to get me alone and kill me.”

“Are you kidding? You really think they would have killed you? Completely?”

“Yes, Gregory! They tried! I’m telling you, this monster really was inches from tearing me apart!”

“Wow.” Gregory nodded. “It’s great that you thought of that third rail trick.” He shook his head. He looked genuinely uneasy.

Brian said, “I’m lucky I didn’t trip or something. I would’ve died, too. I can’t even think about it.”

“I know. Dude.”

“It’s so weird. I can’t tell my parents. They’d think the whole thing was crazy. Here I am being threatened, and I can’t tell anyone. Except you. And maybe Prudence. She’d understand.”

“What are we going to do?”

Brian was glad Gregory had said
we
. He replied, “We have to talk to Prudence.”

“I haven’t heard from her in a week or so.”

“I know,” said Brian. “I’ve tried on e-mail and the mirror. She doesn’t respond.” He sat down heavily on the couch. “Now I’m worried about her, too. Gregory, what if they got her?”

“Why would they ‘get her’?” asked Gregory. “She’s no longer involved with the Game. She was in charge of the last round. And there’s no reason for them to attack you, either. You’re just the, I don’t know, referee or something.”

Brian insisted, “We have to get through to her. She’s the only one who might know what to do. I’m terrified even to walk home.”

“I’ll go with you … as long as I don’t have to carry the cello.”

Brian bit his lip. “If we can’t get through to Prudence in a couple of days, we’re going to have to go up there and see what’s happened to her.”

Gregory nodded.

As Brian dialed Prudence, and listened to the phone ring and ring and go to the message, they looked around their office — the rubber plants, the glass-eyed cockatoos. Suddenly it didn’t look as cozy as it once had. They were aware of how much of the building was empty and how quickly evening was falling outside.

Usually Brian and Prudence wrote notes to each other every few days. Brian was working his way through the huge tomes that explained the Game’s Rules. Though they had been translated into English at some point in the last century, they were not easy to read. Quite often, Brian sent Prudence e-mails like the following:

And Prudence would write back things like:

And then she’d tell him what she knew.

But Brian hadn’t heard from her in at least a week. She hadn’t responded to any of his recent questions. He’d assumed that she was just busy.

Gregory occasionally had a little back-and-forth with her, teasing her about how boring she was, making jokes about how Brian was in love with her. Not for a while, though. There hadn’t been a peep from her.

Brian was worried now. Very worried.

He and Gregory didn’t laugh or joke as they locked up the office. (“Night, boys,” said the automaton at the desk. “I’ll tell Nate you were snooping in his donut drawer, soon as he gets back.”) They didn’t talk as they made their way through the dark interior of the Industrial Batter Co. Building, kicking their way through plaster trash.