Needless to say, it worked, else Gus’s abhorrent creations would not have roamed the earth these ninety years. Asterion introduced Gus to an ice-white and ghoulish lady—La Merveilleuse, as she ludicrously called herself—who protested her ignorance. Oh, she had heard of these specialized heartstrings that could stabilize and pierce ghosts, of course, but they were rare, very rare, probably unobtainable! Then she slipped a scrap of paper into Gus’s pocket when the minotaur turned his back. Gus returned later to tip her for her service, as I expect the deluded minotaur did as well.
On the slip was a name, a vague address. We went there directly, and a sort of practice horror involving a large violet rat ensued—
Never mind. I cannot avoid telling you, my self-deluded reader, of what I did to Christopher Flynn, not if I want to lead you to the necessary conclusion, to that violence of mind I require in you. Let that story suffice.
When Gus left the umbrathurge’s shop, we walked straight to Margo’s, but once we were close Gus stopped. He had learned by this time to throw up a sort of sonic shield to mask my screaming from ears other than his own. The difficulty was that, when he stifled me, his own voice was silenced as well; such was the price of our regrettable connection. So the trick wasn’t often terribly useful.
He employed it now.
Margo had dragged a chair outside to supervise her latest beamer child at its piano practice—for Gus remained so enamored of his own talent that he was careful always to instill it in his beamers. Margo lacked the funds to buy a piano and had no space for one in any case, but Gus allowed her enough talens to regularly summon instruments from among the herds that roamed the streets.
The piano that had answered on this occasion was rather ill-mannered and rambunctious; it was a beast of a thing with hooves and a bristling golden coat, its keys slick with saliva. The little Angus lay sprawled facedown atop the lid, its arms stretched down to reach the keyboard, and in that unlikely position it played a waltz. The restive piano pawed the ground, switched and jumped at the high notes. The beamer child slipped a little and scrambled with its knees to regain its place, laughing and whooping the while, and managed somehow to play its waltz unbroken. The music reached Gus and me, distant but distinct and, I must admit, very beautiful for all that the player’s small hands were often jarred. Tattered passersby stopped to listen. Margo, by now well-schooled in desolation, watched her Angus with what I can only describe as ruinous tenderness, with the sort of love that issues from a mangled heart.
This was what passed for a charming domestic scene in Nautilus. Gus and I hung back in an arcade and studied them unobserved. I was not in the best of states, to put it mildly; I was a wilting rag of ectoplasm with what felt like a wide, shredded wound at my center. I had sworn, I reminded myself, to stay alert, engaged; to watch carefully Gus and his scheming, in the hope that some impossible opening would present itself, and I could find a way to act.
But, please recall, I had been watching for a very long time. Despair was never far from me.
It was a bit soon, I thought, for Gus to seize his latest beamer. It was hard to measure their lifespans in the slurred and dayless time of Nautilus, but from our forays to the unworld I had gathered that they were remarkably regular. Gus allowed each beamer child exactly one unworld year before dispatching it, whether to meet some magical requirement or from mere habit I did not know. In consideration of his new plans, though, would he make this child an exception?
I focused, as I so often did, on Margo’s face. Deprived as I was of literature, faces had become my reading material. I would like to claim that I studied Margo only for diversion, absorbing the complex and subtle suffering of my enemy with pleasure. But that would not be true. I had never managed to free myself of my unwanted sympathy for Margo, even as I went on hating her.
When she thought herself unobserved, her face hung blank as a mask. But the mask was thin, a mere silken wisp, so that her fine, sharp features betrayed an inner buckling, a warp and distortion. It was as if a human visage draped across a second face nearly demonic.
Then the beamer child would call to her to look, look! And her chin would lift while she forced a benevolent smile, a kind gaze. With each new beamer, though, the benevolence grew more shopworn.
The piano’s prancing was now so hectic that the child could barely hang onto its lid, giggling and reaching to slap at random keys. It did not seem to me especially conducive to learning the piece. Margo must have thought so as well, for she hauled herself to her feet and decisively backhanded the piano across its hairy fallboard.
The instrument gave a piteous clang and thumped down onto all four feet, only shuffling a bit in protest.
But I had seen something else, something unprecedented: when Margo raised her hand, the little Angus flinched.
With that I understood, and inescapably, that Margo had taken to beating these creatures she had long cherished.
It was only justice, of course; I knew it to be justice. Any projection of Gus, even Gus as a child, deserved every conceivable punishment for what he had done to me. For what he meant to do to others. Those creatures of his were designed for murder. I should not ache for them.
Why, then, did Margo’s new brutality affect me like a betrayal? I gaped at her, heartsick and disbelieving. Had I clung to her adoration for the little beamers as the sole and certain sweetness in my own undying existence?
Why did I want to pull the beamer child into my arms and shelter it from her? Why did my thoughts all shout at Margo for her brutality?
I can’t say if Gus noted any of these details, for his look was low and dark and gave away nothing. He watched them from under his weedy pale eyebrows, his mouth set tight and flat. Something else then occurred to me. Once the last beamer child was mulched, once Gus launched at last his grand project of crafting young men to carry his malice back to the unworld, what more use would Margo be to him?
Having come this far, my ever-reborn reader, I suppose even you must have guessed that I am not writing this autothanatography simply to pass the time. I have no particular faith in your intelligence; Gus’s mind is far more limited than he supposes, and in his insecurity he restricts yours even more. Still, you must grasp that this narrative is designed with an end in view, and if it is to achieve that end I cannot avoid the facts merely because my spirit buckles at their approach.
To wit: we are drawing near the death of Christopher Flynn.
Gus was at last becoming chary of employing Asterion, and after some hesitation he undertook the abduction himself. Asterion, I believed, didn’t know yet that Gus had located the umbrastrings he needed, much less tested his ideas; I assumed that the minotaur still clomped along in blissful ignorance, sure that Gus must accept his outrageously expensive propositions before too long.
We had by then slipped along beneath the ordinary currents of history for some time, and when we popped up in the unworld it was perhaps 1923. Congressman Volstead had had his way in the interval, and Gus was likely to have better luck in a city, where Prohibition was not so strictly enforced. We made several visits to New York City in rapid succession, Gus armed with gold and jewelry stolen from his father’s strongbox decades before. A fistful of gold he converted to ready cash. He had himself shaved, his unruly hair clipped short. A top hat was acquired, and he was fitted for a tailcoat and trousers that hugged his ill-fed frame. He spent freely and the tailor grew familiar enough, by the second visit, to refer Gus to a suitable establishment.
I suppose all these preparations were a sop to his nerves, as well as a way of procrastinating.
Eventually, though, he worked himself up to the necessary pitch of callousness. He spent a few lit on a school of glassy pink flying fish that clouded around his naked body and devoured every speck of dirt and dead skin, which left him so pinkly pure that he looked nearly flayed. He dressed in his unworld finery. He spent a few more lit to order a sheet of air into mirrored brilliance, and therein he inspected himself.
I watched the corners of his mouth fall, and knew that he had expected the effect to be more pleasing. The cleaning and polishing had only laid bare his sickly, ravaged appearance. If he was not yet old, neither did his face have the soft clarity of youth any longer.
Gus twisted to stare at me, fluttering faithfully behind him. “Look what you’ve done to me,” he said. “Look! This is the toll of love denied: these lines, this brokenness. Is it enough to make you regret your coldness? Do you care at all?”
Oh, I cared, though not in the way he meant.
“No,” Gus said, staring at me—and if the eternal rictus of my scream was not wonderfully variable, I could still flash hatred with my eyes. “No, I see it’s still not enough. Oh, sometimes magic seems like such a vain enterprise, if it can’t make you see—but we’re about to change that!”
He nodded sharply. And since every city of the unworld is adjacent to Nautilus and equally porous to those who know the way, he had only to walk a short while before he reached the right exit. Where the wall bore the legend NEW YORK CITY under an arched lintel he pressed through and straight into a cellar. The local guardian, a whiskery man in green who sat perched on a barrel, gave us a bored nod. We’d been there several times recently, and I knew that cellar down to the oyster shells scattered thickly on its floor.
We climbed a damp flight of stairs and burst out on a darkly glittering view. I saw an upright slice of the Hudson, looking as tall as a tower between the somber buildings. A thousand snakes of moonlight crossed its darkness, a patient, writhing weave of bright and black.
I felt a wild windiness in myself, as I always did when we arrived in the unworld. The pale oppression of Nautilus rolled away, even beneath a range of eerie towers that were so unlike my home. I would have liked to explore New York under other conditions; I had longed to see it as a girl. But Gus dragged me four meager blocks to a townhouse nearly tripping into the hungry river and spoke a few odd words to a man behind its black door.
We sidled up narrow stairs to what might have ordinarily been a modest parlor but was now a device for the compression of drunken bodies, nearly medieval in its sadism. Never had I seen so many limbs and torsos folded into so little air; satin skins crossed tailored sleeves like knife blades whickering, and women squirmed behind the clack of immense feather fans. The flash of bleating instruments seemed to swim through the smoky haze, as disorienting as will-o’-the-wisps.
I was not as surprised by the scene as one might suppose. I had observed the changes in fashion on our previous visits, had rather envied the short hair and liberated calves, if anything. Women had shed a great weight since I was young, and I sometimes imagined that Gus was actually a long and heavy skirt encumbering my lower body, catching every wind like a sail and so dragging me to and fro.
But I did not envy the women in this room their sweaty skins and airless inebriation. There was a desperate note to the laughter, or at least I thought so. I watched one spangled girl fighting to escape a man’s heavy paws on her bare arms, and was no longer sure how much ballast had dropped away.
An unsteady brunette approached Gus, but he shrugged her off. He scanned the room for a target more to his taste.
You might wonder, as I did, if Gus could not have used a woman for his project. He could have, of course, for women and men are composed of the same meat and sinew. Likewise a sailor would have served him as well as an aristocrat. But when it came to making his own simulacrum, Gus grew decidedly squeamish. I watched his gaze catch on a tall, handsome blond boy who loomed several rows of heads back—a boy much taller and broader than Gus himself had ever been, as if my former friend thought it would be best to have surplus materials. The boy was pink-cheeked, with a vapid, infantile expression that suggested he could only be the child of great wealth, indulged to the point of idiocy.
Slowly, patiently, Gus insinuated himself through the stifling crowd until his elbow jarred the blond’s arm, slopping spirits across his shirt cuff. The boy shrugged in annoyance, but Gus affected not to notice.
“Champagne!” Gus bellowed. “The best you have! Nothing’s too good for my friends.”
Nearby heads swiveled with greedy expectancy. A bottle appeared, and Gus filled the glasses at hand in a mazy stream, feigning drunkenness himself. Foam splashed upraised knuckles, trickled over pearls like a brook over stones. As if by chance, the blond and his two companions—rich, callow louts like himself—were especial beneficiaries.
An hour and three bottles later, Christopher Flynn and his friends had their arms around Gus’s shoulders while glimmering girls shimmied against them, shrill with false laughter as Flynn whacked their rumps. Two hours, and Flynn’s friends were conveniently entangled with those girls in the corners. Flynn watched them go with an expression nearly bereft, like a sickly lamb goggling after its shepherd, and clung to Gus’s arm.
You may observe, at this juncture, that my portrait of Christopher Flynn is not the most flattering. Quite so: I despised him to my flickering core. Allow me to remind you, though, that I have had unworld decades to cultivate my contempt for him, and I have made the utmost use of that time. I’ve tended my contempt, nurtured it, fed it choice morsels: how Flynn’s hazel eyes rolled like a calf’s, how he began to gaze at Gus with blubbering admiration.
Ah, but my disdain is highly motivated. I seethe with the desire to believe that Christopher Flynn was worthless, an absolute blot of a being. That his death tended if anything to improve the world, to cleanse it of all the selfishness and stupidity that one tall, teetering body can contain.
So perhaps you should distrust my account of him. To be truthful, I distrust it myself.
“I’m ossified,” Flynn observed, which expression both Gus and I were obliged to decipher from context. His round pink cheeks shone with an oily iridescence in the lamplight. “Let’s blouse.”
“I know another joint,” Gus said, waving his new vocabulary like a flag he could not keep quite upright. “It’s close. But let’s have another round of jag juice first.”
The champagne was long gone, and Gus plied him with liquor that even I could tell was highly dubious. Gus himself kept misplacing his glass. And once his target stumbled and sloped sharply to the left, Gus paid the bill over a deafening lack of protest on Flynn’s part. From Flynn’s widened eyes, I gathered that the figure was stunning and Gus’s liberality impressive.
Flynn had no way to know that unworld dollars were not the currency Gus cared for.
They staggered together down to the street. Hoops of moonlight danced and merged on the river’s current. Oh, I was enamored of the air, the night, the moon’s sparrow-footed perch on a distant rooftop; in Nautilus night fell rarely, and only when the whim seized some sorcerer with magic to burn.
All this beauty was a sorry consolation. I knew what faced me on our return.
I stayed anchored to Gus’s shoulders—as indeed did Flynn, whose frame now swagged as limp as bunting with my murderer as his sole support.
“It’s right this way,” Gus said. “You’ll see. It’s … the duck’s nuts.”
They entered the dim stairwell from which we had emerged earlier that evening. The man in green looked up and cocked an eyebrow at the intrusion of Gus’s distinctly unmagical companion. Gus nodded as if to say that he knew it was irregular, but that he would explain presently.
Then he drew back the arm around Flynn’s shoulders, and shoved him down the stairs.
Flynn screamed and tumbled with a horrible knocking sound and at least one resounding snap, then lay still.
Does this sound like a rather crude attack for a sorcerer? Gus’s skills were highly specific, and he did not know the precise magic for knocking a man unconscious. Moreover, we were not in Nautilus, where almost any magic is for sale.
“Oh, so he’s lumber then? You’ll still have to pay the import fees,” the man in green drawled.
“It seems there’s a fee for everything,” Gus rejoined sourly. “Can you get his feet?”
Once in Nautilus, a fleet of beetles was hired to carry Flynn to our destination. He groaned sometimes but did not wake, not then and not when the beetles deposited him just inside the umbrathurge’s shop. And now I cannot delay describing that personage any longer.
As was the case with so many citizens, his chosen appearance cloaked whatever he had been in the unworld. He looked like a twelve-year-old boy with damson-dusted skin, a shock of black hair, and immense, searching blue-black eyes. His manner was studious and impish by turns, and he went by the name of Sky.
The contrast of Sky’s delicate loveliness only made what followed more grotesque.
“Hi, Gus!” he cooed at our entrance. His smile was a sweet and knowing thing, made for cradling secrets; his accent was English and, I think, upper-class. “You got one! Nice work!”
A dozen umbrastrings hung artfully looped across the wall; evidently they were not so rare as Asterion had claimed. Such a fine gray glimmer they made, the barest tracery, like the scrawl that long-ago horror leaves on the mind and that time’s flow can never quite erase!
“It was easy,” Gus said. “I can’t believe I ever thought I needed to wait on Asterion’s help.”
“Oh, Asterion!” Sky giggled, rather overdoing the air of childish mischief. “He dupes nearly everyone for a time when they’re new—everyone he thinks is worth duping, that is. Consider it a compliment!” He cocked his head and regarded Flynn, now glazed in perspiration and shivering violently. “Looks heavy. We’ll need to suspend him at just the right height. Maybe two, three talens’ worth of lift? How thrilling it always is to try out a new technique! Millennia of magic, you might think we’d have reached the end of what it can do. But there’s always, always more, just waiting to be discovered. Let’s get started!”
Gus balked at this hastiness. “I greatly appreciate your assistance, of course. But aren’t there matters we should discuss before proceeding?”
Sky beamed, politely baffled, though he certainly must have known what Gus meant. “Matters like what?”
“Payment.” Sky’s feigned obtuseness clearly ruffled Gus into suspicion. He crossed his arms.
“Oh! Don’t be silly. What, you think I’m another Asterion, a paw in everyone’s pocket? I have talens enough of my own, thanks. This is fun.”
No one in Nautilus ever had enough talens. Gus’s arms stayed tight against his crisp white vest and shirtfront, both now rather blotched. Sky’s boyish brightness grew tarnished. Calculation slipped through his face like shadowy fish.
“Well, if you like, you could do me a favor sometime. After all, I’m doing one for you.”
“A favor.”
“I’d like to borrow Catherine. Just now and then. I’ll give her right back to you when I’m done, I promise.”
Both Gus and I jerked at this bewildering suggestion.
Here I would like to mention that Sky never once looked at my face, not then and not later. But unlike Margo, he did not seem to be at pains to avoid my gaze. No; one might have supposed I did not even possess a face, so far as he was concerned, any more than a rug does. It made the sound of my given name on his lips all the more jarring.
“Borrow her?” Gus stammered. “But that’s not possible! We’re linked, inextricably and forever.”
“Oh, I can unlink you.” Sky delivered this stupefying pronouncement so casually I hardly understood at first. “And link you right back up after, like I said. I’ll even throw in an umbrastring like Asterion’s, so you won’t need to bother with him anymore.”
Gus’s eyes widened as this supposedly unobtainable treasure, this rare and refined device, was offered up like an unloved toy. And I? I surged with alarm, I rolled and flared with dread. My attachment to Gus took on a perverse character of safety—if Sky wanted me so badly, his reasons could only be horrifying.
And at the same time I remembered the grayish ghost collector, Nemo. There must be a method for separating ghosts from those they haunted, if Nemo was able to gather us up like so many gilt clocks. Perhaps he had made use of Sky’s services.
“I’m the only one in all of Nautilus who knows how to make them,” Sky added. “They’re my own invention. If you don’t get an umbrastring from me, you won’t get one anywhere.”
Gus glanced from him to me. It did not need to be said that, if Asterion could no longer claim a third of my production, Gus could enrich himself at my expense far more quickly, and he was plainly tempted. But simply handing me over for another sorcerer’s experiments went against his long-established habits of possessiveness. I watched with relief as Gus’s mouth compressed.
“Catherine is mine,” Gus said decidedly. “I’d rather pay a fee.”
For half a moment, Sky looked very old indeed, or so it seemed to me. I looked down on an ancient, thwarted, malign thing in a childskin—and though the memory disgusts me, I must confess that I was briefly grateful to my murderer for sparing me Sky’s molestation.
Of course, Gus had initially resisted Asterion’s proposals as well.
“Oh, pooh.” Sky’s boyish mask reasserted itself, now wearing a pout. He flourished a dismissive hand. “I told you, payment like that doesn’t interest me. Tell you what, we’ll sieve this fellow now, and someday we’ll come up with a favor you don’t begrudge so very much.”
Did Gus know, as I did, that Sky was in no way giving up his designs on me? No doubt, but the implied contract was so vague that he must have thought he could evade Sky’s demands. “All right. Let’s get it done.”
And with these words my gratitude and relief came to an end. Flynn’s wilting body was levitated with the same commonplace magic harmlessly deployed on teacups; Sky’s shop was an elegant, airy, vaulted space of the kind granted only to the affluent. Flynn rose beneath its fluted dome, his pink face glossed in the omnipresent pale glow. There was a brief pause while Gus jiggered him roughly upright and adjusted his loft, bringing him in line with me. Then Flynn’s bruised and drooling mouth hung inches from the screaming void of mine. It was a strange and unwelcome intimacy, given how used I was to flapping above everyone’s heads.
I don’t doubt that my appearance would strike terror into nearly anyone. But I was the one who reared back from the coming confrontation, tilting away like a tree in the wind.
Sky squealed excitedly and levitated himself high enough to jab an umbrastring’s rain-colored prongs straight into the crown of my head, while Gus thrust another into my ankle. A single umbrastring thus inserted always produced a thrumming and thickened sensation, something like the coursing of blood around a wound. But a pair of them—how shall I describe it? I felt—no, I became—a violent oscillation between the two points, an internal race so fast that I thought I might explode. I became night and day colliding again and again without the cushioning interludes of dusk and dawn. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that the collision was between life and death, or even that the amalgam of unlife and undeath composing me began to beat against its own unresolvable paradox.
As Gus had hypothesized, the power of what I was, pinned in this way, was tremendous. I contained force enough to flatten the whole city—but oh, I could not control the powers now articulated in myself, could not even catch them, no more than a hummingbird can write a novel with the blur of its wings.
Gus inched toward Flynn’s dangling feet, once and then again. I flapped backward as hard as I could, maddened though I was with pain. But I could not stop myself from rebounding upright. My captive energies purled against Flynn’s cheek.
The pitiful boy would have done better to stay unconscious. How often in my imagination have I railed at him for having the poor judgment to wake up at just the moment when his flesh began to buzz apart like a cloud of gnats? He hadn’t seen or heard me in the unworld, but in Nautilus that small mercy was denied him. My eyes were nearly touching his and their flash must have been blinding. His feet kicked desperately at the empty air; the right foot passed straight into my shin. It instantly disintegrated into a vibrating mist, motes of bone and blood and even his shoe shivering together in the pulsation of my power.
Flynn’s scream met mine in a hot blast of his breath, and Gus advanced again.
Gus crept forward with merciless slowness. Perhaps he feared that, if he moved too quickly, he would botch the job. Flynn proved able to keep screaming first without lips, then without teeth, then without tongue, palate, or jawbone. The tone only became windier, something like a broken flute. And even when the scream was at last extinguished it was not much of an improvement.
I had been used as a sieve, as Sky put it, in their preliminary experiment on a cherub-faced rat. That employment had left me feeling as if there had been some detonation in the area of my stomach, where the rat was forced through me. But Flynn was much larger, and that earlier experience had not prepared me for how it would feel to shred a man entire. He was enough bigger than myself that, when Gus finished dragging me all the way through him, a bloody rind remained hanging around the hollowness cut by my passage. The levitational magic was still in effect, so the blood did not drip but rather wafted in crimson tendrils. Flynn’s blond hair stood out in a feathery nimbus.
And the rest of Flynn? That was inside me, particulate and humming. He had become nothing but a tempest of matter pitching in my immaterial currents.
“Amazing!” Sky cheered, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He clapped his hands and crowed. A blue cat oozed up his back and wrapped itself around his rib cage. Its silver eyes peered over Sky’s shoulder, its peaked ears twitched. “Your Catherine packs a punch, oh yes she does!”
I was in no state to observe the irony that I, long since murdered, had now killed in my turn.
No; I only knew that I had killed. That knowledge took me over, left no room for anything else.
“I’d better get her home,” Gus observed, far more coolly. He looked at my black and white, now intermixed with carnage as fine as floating dust. “And … the materials. I expect they’re best when they’re fresh.”
Perhaps you will say that I had killed against my will, and was therefore blameless? I’ve tried that line of persuasion on myself, of course. More times than I can count.
It only makes everything worse. What, am I to find solace in my own helplessness? In the fact that Gus had reduced me first to a ghost and now to a thing, an implement that could not turn away from the vicious uses he made of me?
My ghost held Flynn’s corpse, such as it was, suspended. A cloud, a tremor, ten million cells unmoored from form and function but still warm in my agitated energies. I held him and wondered who in the unworld loved him, who was at this moment waiting anxiously for him to return home.
It had been a very long time since I had held anyone.