Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (15 page)

She felt his approach, and tilted her head, a little, to listen to the sound of his bare clawed feet against the rocks and sand. “Are they all dead then?”

“Most of them.”

She considered that. “Should I be sorry?”

“Would you have chosen differently?”

“No.”

“Then no. You are what they made you.”

“I feel cold,” said the virgin. “Broken. My love is gone.”

“Yes,” said the monster.

“But you are still here.”

“Yes,” the monster said again, smiling a wide white scimitared smile. “The virginity is as important as the sacrifice, you understand.”

The virgin made no response for a moment—she was not human, to nod, or draw back, or make a noise with no meaning to it. Then she said, “Yes,” and began to undo the buttons of her dress.

The monster broke the manacles off her wrists before they made love on the remains of the rock those manacles had chained her to.

For monsters can love.

Did you doubt it?

snow falls in her open eyes

Her name is Clair. She wears black, no jewelry, and has long straight hair, dyed a dark reddish-purple, the color of the foundries’ breath against the night sky. If she feels any emotions, her eyes never reflect them. She does not talk about herself, and she has never cried.

Her apartment is enormous and bare, and your footsteps echo hollowly off the parquet floor, giving the impression of even greater vastness, greater emptiness, as if you walked through a palace made of ice, cyclopean and uninhabited. The walls and the few pieces of furniture are stark, sterile white, like untouched snow. Clair moves like a shadow through the whiteness of her rooms.

your hatred, like a sleeping beast

It was a great city once, and powerful. It has power still, dark, corrosive power like smog. The foundries and factories are mostly shut down now. Those that still operate stain the sky with billows of black and gray; in some quarters of the city their roaring can be heard all night long, and they throw bruised and blurry rainbows against the clouds. A river flows through the city’s heart, sullen and sluggish, but brown and hungry and strong. And the city itself is a snarl, a brawl, a festered wound. It seethes and roils and bides its time.

the stings of winter wasps

Beyond the window, snow fell like frozen drops of poison.

Clair looked at him, her eyes clear and pitiless. “It’s very nice, Sean,” she said.

“Nice?” he said. “That’s it? Just ‘nice’?”

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry.” Her laugh, the sound of icicles shattering. “It’s lovely, Sean, of course it is. I’m very impressed.”

“It isn’t finished,” he said desperately. “I mean, I know there’s weak spots, and I . . . ”

Her eyes were a strange color, milky gray with touches of blue and green: dirty, dead-of-winter ice. Her gaze always upset him, dazed him; in the depths of his heart he knew that it had enchanted him. Now, cold and hard and full of light, her gaze silenced him, and when she was sure he would not speak, she said, “I’m not saying you’re not talented, Sean, because clearly you are. But I think you’ve maybe overreached yourself just a trifle. It’s such an
ambitious
project. I know you’re very serious about it, but I think—”

“You think it’s no good.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s what you meant, isn’t it?
Isn’t it
?”

And she looked at him, not alarmed by his nearness, his anger. His gaze dropped first. “I think it’s awfully . . . traditional.”

“You mean clichéd.”

“Do I?”

“Well, don’t you?”

“You’re still young, Sean. It’s all right to model yourself on the poets you admire.”

“But I’m not!”

“Oh, please. Darling, I don’t want to be cruel, but there’s no sense in letting you delude yourself. You’re dripping T. S. Eliot from every page.”

“Thank you, Clair,” he said with stiff irony.

“You’re
young
,” she said. “Give yourself time.”

“Are you saying my writing’s immature? Come on, Clair, say what you mean!”

“I thought certain passages were just a little . . . naïve,” she said, and the cold clear eyes watched his reaction without changing.

“I’d better go,” he said, aware of the blood mounting to his face, aware of the hot prickle of starting tears

She let him leave; only as he was opening the door of her apartment did she say, softly, almost laughing, “You’ll be back.”

silver ribbons for my love

The river runs through the heart of the city, and braiding around and over and under the river, the city’s rail system is a welter of tarnished silver ribbons. The tracks sear through the city with a fine disregard for its geography, soaring above and plunging below the streets as the whim takes them, sometimes following the lines laid by the major boulevards, sometimes running alone through empty lots, sometimes cutting a swath through residential districts so that top floor tenants could, if they were so inclined, reach out from their back windows and have their arms ripped off by the force of the passing trains.

It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city’s tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit’s compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.

These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal. Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer—and even some who don’t—insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets.

starless night

For days after Sean’s suicide, Bram Bennett walked around without being aware of what she wore, what she ate, what she did. Her whole head burned with words to which no one would listen. She looked at the people she knew on campus and was dully astonished at how little she liked them. The idea of talking to her parents was merely ludicrous, and she had gladly lost contact with the few friends she had had in high school. There was no one she could tell, no one who would understand her grief. She felt like a woman standing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, surrounded by debris and corpses, the only living thing for five miles in any direction and herself dying, dying of the radiation she could neither see nor feel.

the twilight water

The subway station is a long, barrel-vaulted hall, an echo chamber for sounds which seem to have no origin. No passengers board trains here. The iron benches sit desolate, their only company the illegible sheets of newsprint which fly and flap and skitter and scuttle from one end of the platform to the other.

Those who disembark at the Court of the Clockwork Kings do not linger.

velvet death

The interior of the train car (Bram thought) was a very good imitation of a Metropolitan Transit train done by someone who’d never actually been inside one. All the colors and shapes were right, but the textures were wrong. The walls were papered with something silvery that felt like velvet; the seats were upholstered in blue satin. The floor was carpeted in black brocade, the ceiling was pressed tin, and Bram wasn’t sure, but she thought the poles and safety fittings were solid silver. It made her feel small and grubby and excessively herself. Her black clothes were too obvious, and surely everyone in the car could tell she dyed her hair, that her light hazel eyes would never belong with hair that black. The rings in her ears and nose felt like something she’d done merely because everyone else did. She was morbidly certain that the black rose tattoo on her back, safely covered by her T-shirt and leather jacket, was nonetheless radiantly visible to everyone who looked at her. She sat on one of the blue satin benches, worrying that she was getting it dirty, and clutched her guitar in its case across her lap.

The other occupants of the car mostly ignored her. There was a horde of children with cat-heads—kittens, she supposed, since none of them could be more than four years old—playing some elaborate game up and down the aisle; she counted two Siamese, three brown tabbies, two tortoiseshells, and one white Persian. They were dressed like Victorian children in velvet suits with broad lace collars. Their round eyes, green and amber and gold, looked at her with perfect trust and perfect indifference; to them, she was merely one more obstacle to be incorporated in their game.

At the far end of the car from where Bram sat, there was a woman, naked except for an opal choker around her neck, green-skinned, her eyes the luminous white of clouds—so beautiful that her beauty was like pain. She was clearly watching the child-kittens, with sharp attentiveness rather than the amused tolerance of a stranger, and Bram wondered if this woman, whom any culture in the mortal world would have worshipped as a goddess, was employed as a child-minder by a group of cat-headed parents.

Just down from the green-skinned woman were a group of creatures who looked as if they were made out of tree-roots; twisted, hunched, and knotted, they huddled together and talked in high, scratchy voices, like twigs against a windowpane. Bram couldn’t understand what they were saying, and from the vindictive cunning in their tiny red eyes, she was quite sure she didn’t want to. Across the aisle from them was a giant, black as moonless midnight, with a bull’s head and hooves, his horns brushing the roof of the car, his long, rat-like tail sweeping out into the aisle and restlessly curling and uncurling itself around the nearby poles. The child-kittens treated the tail like a hurdle, jumping over it with exaggerated, giggling caution. The minotaur ignored them completely; he was immersed in a small, crumbling book bound in cracking green leather.

At the other end of the car sat two tall, grave, chalk-white gentlemen, dressed in chalk-white business suits and each with his hands folded over a chalk-white briefcase in his lap. Bram would have taken them for angels, remembering the stories Sean had told her about the seraphic trains, except for the crusted blood at the corners of their mouths. Their eyes were of no color that she could discern; they looked and spoke only to each other, studiously ignoring everything else in the car, including, on the bench nearest them, a group of giggling young women, golden-haired and warm-eyed, dressed in old rose and gold and burgundy velvet, their ears as delicately pointed as cathedral spires. Every time Bram looked at these young women, one of them was looking at her, and she had the horrible feeling that she was the cause of their giggles.

And directly across from Bram, there was a dead girl. The girl’s hair was lank and brittle, her eyes sunken, her nails dark and splintered against her pallid, blue-tinged skin. And Bram could see the ragged, black-edged hole in her temple, not quite concealed by her hair.

The fifth or sixth time Bram snuck a glance at the dead girl, she met her eyes. Red-faced, ashamed, Bram twitched a smile at her. The dead girl looked down at once, and Bram fixed her gaze resolutely on the silver pole opposite and slightly to the right of her.

And then the dead girl raised her head, and Bram’s gaze was instantly drawn back to her. They stared at each other, and Bram could not help feeling kinship with this girl, the only other mortal in the car, even if she was dead.

“Your music’s really neat,” said the dead girl.

“Thanks,” Bram said, blushing again. “Thank you. Really.”

“It’s a stupid thing to say.”

“No, it’s not. It’s nice of you.”

“No, really. You don’t need me telling you you’re good. I mean, the train stopped for you, didn’t it?”

“That’s not what caused it,” Bram protested. That couldn’t be true; she, Bram, could not have succeeded where Sean had failed.

The dead girl glanced up at her and away, and Bram felt the force of her disbelief even through the filmy congealed deadness of her eyes. “Oh, come
on
,” the dead girl said. “You gotta know how good you are. What else were you doing out there playing at the trains anyway?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“
Looking
for someone? Either you’re on crack or you’re pulling my leg.”

“No, I mean it. Someone . . . someone like you.”

The dead girl’s eyes were like stones behind the filthy curtain of her hair. “Someone dead?”

Bram took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“Can you help me? Can you tell me how to find him?”

“I can tell you you don’t want to.”

“I
have
to. Please.”

The girl leaned forward and put her dead, grimy hand on Bram’s knee. “Please, chickie, believe me. You don’t want to. You want to go with those girls who are checking you out and live forever in Faërie or some shit like that. Or don’t get off the train. Just go right the fuck back where you came from and get a record deal. You don’t want to go to the Court of the Clockwork Kings.”

“Is that where I’ll find him?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“I am, I promise, and I really appreciate your concern. But this is what I have to do.”

“And I thought
I
was fucked in the head. But whatever it is you’ve got is way worse than a bullet. Okay. Yes. That’s the stop you want. The Court of the Clockwork Kings. But, I mean, really, what good do you think it’s going to do?”