Crackpot Palace (31 page)

“The granting of my wish?” he wondered and pictured himself standing upon the stone head in the field. “Cured by earth magic.” He rolled out of bed, careful not to wake Cynthia, and limped to where his robe hung. He put it on and left the bedroom. On his way down the hall to his study, he whispered, “Or cursed by Griet Vadar?”

Sitting in the same comfortable chair he had occupied during his bouts with the phantom limb, he poured a tall whiskey from the decanter on his desk. He sipped and listened to the wind in the trees outside the window and to the beat of the grandfather clock. It became clear to him that the emptiness was seeping out of the ivory appendage and invading the rest of his body. He drank faster, thinking that might stave it off. “Calm down,” he whispered to himself. “A dead woman is not stealing your soul.” He poured another drink, downed a quarter of it, and had a creeping inclination to add a couple of morphine pills to the mix. “Not smart,” he thought. “I'm getting all worked up just so I can have an excuse to take the drug.” To distract himself, he got up and walked across the room to fetch the mask, which lay atop a pile of books on a shelf. Returning to his chair, he held it in front of his face so that he was eye to eyehole with it.

The white visage was smiling, almost broadly. Her always closed lips appeared just on the verge of opening. If he hadn't been holding it, he'd have sworn the facial muscles moved, but what muscles?—it was plaster. She was beautiful, no doubt. He stared for a long time, the grandfather clock chiming the hour at some point. De Vries appeared in his memory, standing over the corpse of a cherubic-faced child he'd just finished sewing up. “Remember,” the old man had said, “death is our business, but we should never become friends with it. It's single-minded and exquisitely shrewd.”

Stan poured some more whiskey into the glass on his desk. His entire body felt numb, his mind dull. “What do I want?” he wondered. He closed his eyes and swayed, sitting forward in the chair. The wind blew outside, and the tall clock chimed again. He fell back, the mask hanging from a finger hooked through its right eyehole. His eyes were closed, he was breathing deeply, but in the next instant, he sprang up and hurled the mask. The white face shattered against the glass clock face and littered the floor. Crossing the office, he opened his bag and retrieved his pills. Returning to the chair, he placed them within easy reach on the desk. He freshened his drink and waited.

The pain started so subtly, like an eye opening, and that was all for a while. When he felt the first twinge of real discomfort, he took two pills and washed them down with a long swallow. Then there it was, the pain as he'd missed it, moaning like a ghost. He winced, he groaned, and his mind swirled with dark thoughts. At one point, he had a premonition that Groot would never see retirement. He saw the dogged detective clutch his chest and fall over into the field before the Wish Head. Then the birthmark lifted off, and flew, buzzing through the coroner's skull.

S
tan was awake when the phone rang at 6:06 the next morning. He pulled himself out of the chair and answered it. “Midian coroner,” he said.

“Stanley, is that you?” The voice was angry. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Dr. Rashner, did you get the body?” Stan asked.

“Are we playing games? Are you mocking me?”

“I don't know what you mean,” said Stan.

“I read your report. Incorruptible flesh, a victim who has died but exhibits no signs of death. Then I open the body bag, and what do I find?”

“The woman?”

“A bag of rotten leaves dug up from the creek bed. Have you lost your mind?” yelled Rashner.

There was silence, and then the medical examiner said, “I want an explanation.”

Stan looked up, noticed the first light coming through the window, and realized the pain had once again vanished. He lifted his left leg a few times to feel the life in it. Rashner was still talking, but Stan hung up, his attention drawn to something on the floor. Alina's mouth had separated from the mask and lay unbroken. He walked over to the smile, hesitated for a moment, and then picked up the piece of plaster. Brushing it lightly with his thumb, as if
it
had kissed him, he slipped it into the pocket of his robe.

Weiroot

W
eiroot, you madman, what do you think you're doing, sitting in the chill of the night, winking at the winking stars? Are you sending them a message? Come visit me? And what if they were to? What if in say a year or two a star fell, swept down out of the dark, trailing green fire, and smashed with an explosion of sparks and black diamond debris into the dunes surrounding your wooden plank palace? What would you do then? Oh sure, you'd call for your four marble men without faces, those savage quadruplets whose stone sculpted arms move with supple grace. “If they get obstreperous, let them have it,” you'd whisper and the four white dolts would nod and flex.

But then, imagine your surprise when the rock from space breaks open and out crawls a little fat baby, purple as a plum, with a ridge of webbed spikes like a lady's open fan running from the crown of its head back to the base of the skull, orange eyes, and a little O of a mouth. You know you'd gasp and wave your arms in the air . . . well, at least you'd wear a look of consternation and shake your head, and who wouldn't? But then, even the four stone flunkies would make amazed faceless expressions when the little fellow from beyond the moon would say, “Feed me, Weiroot,” in a psychic voice that sounded between the ears. That would snarl your line of thought. So, I can see it now, you'd scoop that star baby up in your robed arms and shuffle with your lame stride back into that cockeyed palace.

Then what? A cold leg of mutton? A rasher of game hens from the forest beyond the dunes? Octopus and eel heads you purchased that morning from Yakus, the Bold but Battered? And the miracle is, the babe devours all of it. That's right, that cute little mouth holds rows of needle teeth, and he's got an appetite. He takes off one of the stone goon's index fingers in the feeding. Then surprise and a portion of horror when the mewling fright drops a neat little pile of space scat onto the clean-swept floor of the dining room. You'd be screaming orders like a second lieutenant in the pontiff's royal guard, “Drop the rose petals!” “Man the shovel!” “Haste and earnest effort in the name of all that's holy!”

And after the tumult and chaos of the exigencies of biologic existence, then the quiet time, holding the snoozing fin head cradled in your arms, rocking in the rocker next to your telescope out on the open-air observatory while the wind transforms the face of the dunes to a whole new physiognomy, the ocean laps the shore in the distance to the south, and the night birds sing in the forest to the north. In that peaceful time, that's when the deal will be sealed and you'll promise your life in protection and care for the helpless fellow. Because, Weiroot, even though your face is a rippling moonscape of healed wounds, your posture is worse than that of your listing home, and you're feared by those who don't know you as a strange and cantankerous entity outside of society, the Man Who Escaped Hell, you are no more nor less than any man—a hungry heart and a wavering will.

That's right, don't deny it. You're thinking, “Here's my family. Here's my opportunity to care and have someone return the emotion.” I see right through your schemes. Your thoughts are utterly transparent to me. And oh, what great pleasure you will derive from naming the wee beast, like it's a puppy, like it's your own invention. You'll try Hartvill, Tharnweb, Wenslav to see how they roll off the tongue, every now and then checking the child's countenance to see if the word fits the face like a tailored mask. But all along, all along, you know you're slowly but resolutely spiraling in a decreasing orbit toward Weiroot Junior or Weiroot II, and the excitement of that has your big toe itching in your eel-skin ankle boot. When you're just about to grasp for one of these narcissistic monikers, something grabs you instead, some dim glimmer of reason, and you veer off and christen the child Oondeshai, which was the name of an island in Hell. Then a kiss to that purple brow and you lean back in your rocker and rock beneath the stars from whence he came, closing your eyes and falling into a dream of the future. Beautiful.

Or so you think, but wait, Weiroot. Just a second. Dreams are dreams and the future is like a hall of mirrors reflecting the past and offering up wavering illusions until everything shatters and you're cut to ribbons by shards of reality. Allow me to suggest where all this is leading. Little Oondeshai will be both a pleasure and a trial for some time, and, though difficult at first, you'll learn to give of yourself, to feed, comfort, and care for your charge. Your stone men will be put through their paces as they've never been, even in the ancient time when they were created to serve and protect a princess who knew no restraint in her demands, long before you found them in the cave in the sea cliff and brought them to life with an inadvertent sneeze.

There will rise up a hurricane of activity in the wooden palace, all centered on the child, and every action will embrace him as its eye. This won't necessarily be bad, for it will take you away from your melancholic study, it will resurrect you from your pointless pondering of the stars. I don't deny there will be long walks among the dunes in which you will tell the boy stories, half true, half the product of your own skittering imagination, like the one about the man who teaches the monkey to be a man while the monkey teaches the man to be a monkey and they switch places only to discover deep philosophical truths they'd never before conceived of until the man puts the monkey in a cage and the monkey escapes and kills the man and then is shot by the man's wife, who loved the monkey turned man more than the man turned monkey. Yes, you'll fill the child's head with that kind of simplistic claptrap to make him a dreamer, and he'll show no revulsion when he runs his fingertips over your scarred, tree-bark face.

Together you'll fly dragon kites, running over the dunes, in the slanting light of cool evenings. You'll fish for Tillibar skeeners off the ocean cliffs with a long rope, a hook to snag Leviathan, and the stone quadruplets heaving and ho-ing, hoisting the wriggling silver behemoths of the deep high up the cliffside in the full moonlight. You'll teach him something like right from wrong, and punish him by confining him to his room. He'll stamp and howl like a fox in a leg trap and pass through the walls a hundred times, for this will be one of his special powers, and you'll patiently catch him and put him back and tell him NO! He'll, of course, say, “I hate you, Weiroot, you turd.” You'll know he doesn't mean it, but still, these words will prick your heart like a thistle in the thumb. Later, there'll be the reconciliation and you'll give him an orange sugar god on a stick for apologizing.

Time will change you both like the wind changes the dunes. Both of you will grow, he physically, you inwardly, expanding to care for two. His purple complexion will lighten to a pale violet. His fin will recede to become a mere ridge of lumps. He'll lose the webbing on his fingers and toes, the split in his tongue will meld to a single point. He'll grow taller than you, and his alien abilities will manifest themselves—his ability to detect a lie, to see in the dark, to speak to the dead and know the secret thoughts of the marble quadruplets. All of this will have a profound effect on you.

Just to know that your stone servants have had inner lives all along and dreams and anguish will weigh upon your conscience, and you'll finally be forced to give them their freedom and bid them well in the world. They'll leave you one day at the end of summer when the leaves in the forest have begun to change and each will choose a direction of the compass and strike out on his own. You'll extend them each the favor of a pouch of coins, a knife, and a painted expression you or Oondeshai will draw upon their blank faces with the indelible ink of the red octopus. A smile for one, a frown for another, a quizzical look for his brother, and the last will be marked to show compassion. Then they'll be gone and it will be you and Oondeshai.

And he'll ask you about your past, and there will be no way to lie to him. So you'll have to say, “I'm the man who escaped from Hell.” But this answer will only give birth to a hundred more questions and you'll walk with him on a bright morning over the dunes to the edge of the ocean and there you'll sit as the waves lap your feet and you'll tell him everything. “I, Weiroot, committed an unpardonable sin,” you'll say. “Why?” he'll ask. And you'll begin, stuttering at first, and then your confession will flow like blood.

A Note About “Weiroot”

Longtime readers of my stories might recognize the character of Weiroot from an earlier piece titled “The Boatman's Holiday.” This is the second entry in what I hope to be a series of stories in different styles, some with Weiroot as the protagonist, some with him as a tangential figure. I figure I'll do one every five or so years. I was lucky enough to have this story accepted for publication in my favorite incarnation of the magazine
Weird Tales
—the one with the cutting-edge fiction, eye-popping covers, and great nonfiction, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Stephen Segal.

Dr. Lash Remembers

I
was working fifteen-hour days, traversing the city on house calls, looking in on my patients who'd contracted a particularly virulent new disease. Fevers, sweats, vomiting, liquid excrement. Along with these symptoms, the telltale signature—a slow trickle of what looked like green ink issuing from the left inner ear. It blotted pillows with strange, haphazard designs in which I momentarily saw a spider, a submarine, a pistol, a face staring back. I was helpless against this scourge. The best I could do was to see to the comfort of my charges and give instructions to their loved ones to keep them well hydrated. To a few who suffered most egregiously, I administered a shot of Margold, which wrapped them in an inchoate stupor. Perhaps it wasn't sound medicine, but it was something to do. Done more for my well-being than theirs.

In the middle of one of these harrowing days, a young man arrived at my office carrying an envelope for me. I'd been just about to set off to the Air Ferry for another round of patient visits in all quarters of the city, but after giving the lad a tip and sending him on his way, I sat down to a cup of cold tea and opened the card. It was from Millicent Garana, a longtime friend and colleague I'd not seen in months. The circumstances of our last meeting had not been professional. Instead, I'd taken her to the Hot Air Opera and we marveled at the steam-inspired metallic characters gliding through the drama, their voices like so many teakettles at the boil.

It was with that glittering, frenetic memory still twirling through my head that I read these words:
Dr. Lash, please come to my office this afternoon. When you have finished reading this, destroy it. Tell no one. Dr. Garana.
My image of Millicent, after the opera—her green eyes and beautiful dark complexion, sipping Oyster Rime and Kandush at the outdoor café of the old city—disintegrated.

Apparently it was to be all business. I needed to show I was up to the task. I pulled myself together, tidied up my mustache, and chose my best walking stick. There was a certain lightness to my step that had been absent in the preceding days of the new disease. Now as I walked, I wondered why I hadn't asked Millicent out on another nocturnal jaunt when last we parted. In my imagination, I remedied that oversight on this outing.

Only in the middle of the elevator ride to the Air Ferry platform, jammed in with fifty people, did I register a sinister thread in what she'd written. Destroy the message? Tell no one? These two phrases scurried around my mind as we boarded and later, drifting above the skyscrapers.

We were in her office, me sitting like a patient in front of her desk. I tried not to notice how happy I was to see her. She didn't return my smile. Instead, she said, “Have you had a lot of cases of this new fever?”

“Every day,” I said. “It's brutal.”

“I'm going to tell you some things that I'm not supposed to,” she said. “You must tell no one.”

I nodded.

“We know what this new disease is,” she said. “You remember, I'm on the consulting board to the Republic's Health Policy Quotidian. The disease is airborne. It's caused by a spore, like an infinitesimal seedpod. Somehow, from somewhere, these spores have recently blown into the Republic. Left on their own, the things are harmless. We wouldn't have known they were there at all if the disease hadn't prompted us to look.”

“Spores,” I said, picturing tiny green burr balls raining down upon the city.

She nodded. “Put them under pressure and extreme heat, though, like the conditions found in steam engines, and they crack open and release their seed. It's these seeds, no bigger than atoms, that cause the disease. The mist that falls from the Air Ferry or is expelled by a steam carriage, the perspiration of ten thousand turbines, the music of the calliope in the park—all teeming with seed. It's in the steam. Once the disease takes hold in a few individuals, it becomes completely communicable.”

I sat quietly for a moment, remembering from when I was a boy the earliest flights of Captain Madrigal's Air Ferry. As it flew above our street, I'd run in its shadow, through the mist of its precipitation, waving to those waving on board. Then I came to and said, “The Republic will obviously have to desist from using steam energy for the period of time necessary to quarantine, contain, and destroy the disease.”

“Lash, you know that's not going to happen.”

“What then?” I asked.

“There is no other answer. The Republic is willing to let the disease run its course, willing to sacrifice a few thousand citizens in order to not miss a day of commerce. That's bad enough, but there's more. We've determined that there's a sixty percent survival rate among those who contract it.”

“Good odds,” I said.

“Yes, but if you survive the fever stage something far more insidious happens.”

“Does it have to do with that green discharge?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Come, I'll show you.” She stood up and led me through a door into one of the examination rooms. An attractive young woman sat on a chair by the window. She stood to greet us and shake hands. I introduced myself and learned her name was Harrin. There was small talk exchanged about the weather and the coming holiday. Millicent asked her how she was feeling and she responded that she felt quite well. She looked healthy enough to me.

“And where did you get that ring?” my colleague asked of the young woman.

Harrin held up her hand to show off the red jewel on her middle finger.

“This ring . . .” she said and stared at it a moment. “Not but two days ago, a very odd fellow appeared at my door, bearing a small package. Upon greeting him, my heart jumped because he had a horn, like a small twisted deer antler, protruding from his left temple. The gnarled tip of it arced back toward the center of his head. He spoke my name in some foreign accent, his voice like the grumblings of a dog. I nodded. He handed me the package, turned, and paced silently into the shadows. Inside the outer wrapping there was a box, and in that box was this ring with a note. It simply read—
For you,
and was signed
The Prisoner Queen
.”

Millicent interrupted Harrin's tale and excused us. She took me by the arm and led me back into her office. She told her patient she would return in a moment and then shut the door. In a whisper, she said, “The green liquid initiating from the ear is the boundary between imagination and memory. The disease melts it, and even though you survive the fevers you can no longer distinguish between what has happened and what you have dreamed has happened or could have happened or should have. The Republic is going insane.”

I was speechless. She led me to the opposite door and out into the corridor. Before I left, she kissed me. In light of what I'd been told, the touch of her lips barely startled me. It took me the rest of the day to recover from that meeting. I canceled all of my appointments, locked myself in my office with a bottle of Fresnac, and tried to digest that feast of secrets.

I never really got beyond my first question: Why had Millicent told me? An act of love? A professional duty? Perhaps the Republic actually wanted me to know this information, since I am a physician, but they couldn't officially announce it.

My first reaction was to flee the city, escape to where the cloud carriages rarely ventured, where the simply mechanical was still in full gear. But there were the patients, and I was a doctor. So I stayed in the city, ostensibly achieving nothing of medical value. Like my administration of the Margold, my decision to remain was more for me than any patient.

The plague spread and imagination bled into memory, which bled into imagination—hallucinations on the street, citizens locked in furious argument with themselves all over town, and the tales people told in response to the simplest questions were complex knots of wish fulfillment and nightmare. Then the Air Ferry driver remembered that to fly the giant vessel he was to ignore the list of posted protocols and flip buttons and depress levers at a whim. When the graceful, looming behemoth crashed in a fiery explosion into the city's well-to-do section, wiping out a full third of the Republic's politicos, not to mention a few hundred other citizens, I knew the end had come.

Many of those who had not yet lost their reason fled into the country and from what I'd heard formed small enclaves that kept all strangers at bay. For my part, I stayed with the sinking ship of state. Still tracking down and doing nothing for those few patients suffering from the onset symptoms of the disease.

Scores of workers remembered that their daily job was something other than what it had been in reality and set forth each day to meddle, renowned experts in delusion. Steam carriages crashed, a dozen a day, into storefronts, pedestrians, each other. A fellow, believing himself one of the gleaming characters at the Hot Air Opera, rushed up onstage and was cut to ribbons by the twirling metal edges of his new brethren. There was an accident in one of the factories on the eastern edge of town—an explosion—and then thick black smoke billowed out of its three stacks, blanketing the city in twilight at midday. The police, not quite knowing what to do, and some in their number as deranged as the deranged citizenry, resorted to violence. Shootings had drastically risen.

The gas of the streetlamps ran low and the city at night was profoundly black with a rare oasis of flickering light. I was scurrying along through the shadows back to my office from a critical case of fever—an old man on the verge of death who elicited a shot of Margold from me. As I'd administered it, his wife went on about a vacation they'd recently taken on a floating island powered by steam. I'd inquired if she'd had the fever and she stopped in her tale for a moment to nod.

I shivered again, thinking of her, and at that moment rounded a corner and nearly walked into Millicent. She seemed to have just been standing there, staring. The instant I realized it was her, a warmth spread quickly through me. It was I this time who initiated the kiss. She said my name and put her arms around me. This was why I'd stayed in the city.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked her.

“They're after me, Lash,” she said. “Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There's something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives.”

“How many are after you?” I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.

“All of them,” she said, covering her face with her hand. “I can tell you've not yet succumbed to the plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled.”

“Come with me. You can hide at my place,” I said. I walked with my arm around her and could feel her trembling.

At my quarters, I bled the radiators and made us tea. We sat at the table in my parlor. “We're going to have to get out of the city,” I said. “In a little while, we'll go out on the street and steal a steam carriage. Escape to the country. I'm sure they need doctors out among the sane.”

“I'll go with you,” she said and covered my hand, resting on the table with her own.

“There's no reason left here,” I said.

“I meant to remember to tell you this,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “About a week ago, I was summoned out one night on official business of the Republic. My superior sent me word that I was to go to a certain address and treat, using all my skill and by any means necessary, the woman of the house. The note led me to believe that this individual's well-being was of the utmost importance to the Republic.”

“The president's wife?” I asked.

“No, the address was down on the waterfront. A bad area and yet they offered me no escort. I was wary of everything that moved and made a noise. Situated in the middle of a street of grimy drinking establishments and houses of prostitution, I found the place. The structure had at one time been a bank. You could tell by the marble columns out front. There were cracks in its dome and weeds poked through everywhere, but there was a light on inside.

“I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man in a security uniform, cap, badge, pistol at his side. I gave my name and my business. He showed me inside, and pointed down a hallway whose floor, ceiling, and walls were carpeted—a tunnel through a mandala design of flowers on a red background. Dizzy from it, I stepped into a large room where I saw a woman sitting on a divan. She wore a low-cut blue gown and had a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. Her hair was dark and abundant but disheveled. I introduced myself, and she told me to take a seat in a chair near her. I did. She chewed the tip of tortoiseshell for a brief period, and then said, ‘Let me introduce myself. I'm the Prisoner Queen.' ”

My heart dropped at her words. I wanted to look in Millicent's eyes to see if I could discern whether she'd contracted the plague in recent days and survived to now be mad, but I didn't have the courage.

Although I tried to disguise my reaction, she must have felt me tremble slightly, because she immediately said, “Lash, believe me, I know how odd this sounds. I fully expected you not to believe me, but this really happened.” Only then did I look into her face, and she smiled.

“I believe you,” I said, “go on. I want to hear the rest.”

“What it came to,” said Millicent, “was she'd summoned me, not for any illness but to tell me what was about to happen.”

“Why you?” I asked.

“She said she admired earnest people. The Prisoner Queen told me that what we have been considering the most terrible part of the disease, the blending of memory and the imagination, is a good thing. ‘A force of nature,' was how she put it. There's disorganization and mayhem now, but apparently the new reality will take hold and the process will be repeated over centuries.”