Madame Laudine did not come at once. The Catherine in the locket and the Catherine in your eyes seemed to watch each other across the divide between worlds, to reach toward a mirrored brilliance where, against all expectations, their hands met no glassy barrier but rather diffused and merged, fingertip into fingertip. I tried to reassure myself that Laudine would come, the same soothing phrases chanting on both sides of my split mind.
Then I worried that my letter had gone astray, or even worse that Madame Laudine might have taken offense at my plan—for I had been explicit that we must keep our actions secret from Anura. I was gambling that Laudine would be as anxious as I was to protect Anura, since the love between the two of them was painfully clear to me. Even if it meant defying Anura’s express wishes. Even if protecting Gus was unwelcome collateral. I was gambling that Margo hated Gus enough to disobey him, or loved him enough to defend him, or perhaps a combination of the two.
In the closed locket I couldn’t see anything but a fine sickle of light along the joint, but I could feel Margo’s dispirited shambling and the sway of her shoulders. I could hear her muttering to herself at home and hear other voices in a cloud around her when she went out. Meanwhile the unworld hours ticked steadily by. The Catherine in your eyes reported their passing to her remote self with increasing consternation, until it was nearly the time appointed for Asterion’s visit. Where was Laudine? Asterion was surely seeking some way to steal Anura’s heartstring with its subtly inscribed evidence. Once he succeeded I would have no second chance.
Margo rose from her chair and shuffled as far as the alley. It sounded as if she was weeping quietly.
Then I heard a soft step approach.
“Good evening, Margo.” There was a pause long enough for Margo to smudge her tears with a wrinkled paw and look up. “My name is Laudine.”
She had come, she had come, she cherished Anura just as I did! I should have known that what I asked of her would take some effort; of course she could not manage it immediately. I would have liked to spring up, to sing, to throw my wraith’s arms around her. Instead I throbbed against my confinement, screamed to my metal walls.
“And what are you peddling?” Margo snapped after a moment. “Those fish you have in place of brains? Don’t need any.”
Margo was out of practice with social graces, of course. But I thought her asperity trembled with lonely yearning. It was all she could do not to pounce on Madame Laudine, clasp her knees, and beg her to stay for some tea.
Laudine’s dress gave forth a soft splashing sound as she lowered herself to sit on the bare alley floor beside the miserable old lady, just as if she had heard the same note of invitation I had.
“Are you an art collector, Margo? If not, you can rest assured that I’m not trying to sell you anything.”
Margo considered that. “You’re here for some reason. And whatever it is, it’s not to help me.”
“What help do you need?” Laudine sounded surprised, and in fact my letter hadn’t addressed Margo’s difficulties. I pitied Gus’s aunt, but intermittently, when I found room in my thoughts for her forlorn and wasted state. The burst of passionate sympathy I’d felt when she lost her beamer child had faded long ago, and I told myself her own choices had brought her to this pass.
It was presumably the same strategy she used to nullify my suffering.
“I want to go home and die there. The house is long gone, Gus says, razed to the ground. Well, a hedge will do me fine, any old ditch. I don’t care where I stop breathing, just so my last breath is real human air and not this magical stink. But Gus stuck something on me that keeps me from getting out of this place.” Some enchantment, she meant, probably one that sealed the exits against her. Of course he had.
I could not see them, but I heard a gentle sloshing and imagined Laudine was tilting her head as she mulled the question. “That kind of magic is far outside my area. But I can arrange a visit from someone who knows how to break spells of that kind. In return for your absolute discretion, that is. And your cooperation.”
“It had to be something,” Margo muttered. “Cooperation with what?”
“Murder.” I jerked in my tiny prison, hearing that; I’d expected Laudine would gloss our intentions in euphemism. “But I promise our target deserves it.”
There was an extended silence.
“Our.”
“I’m working with someone you know very well. You’re not the only one who’s endured confinement at the hands of Gus Farrow.”
I felt a twitch as Margo stiffened. “I don’t know anyone in this horrible city. You’re either lying or out of your mind.”
There followed a delicate rustling. “It’s been quite a while since you’ve seen her handwriting. But maybe you’ll remember it anyway.”
I hadn’t intended my letter for Margo’s eyes and flinched at the intrusion; I did not like to risk Gus discovering that I could write. If I demanded Laudine’s help, of course I must trust her to persuade Margo as she thought best—only this was too much, it left me too raw—
Margo gave out a stifled shriek and grabbed the locket, so that I pitched dizzily and then jerked to a stop. The darkness quivered in her clenched hand.
“How is this possible?” It was nearly a scream.
“How, really? Remember where we are,” Laudine rejoined softly. “How many supposed impossibilities have you met with in the streets of Nautilus? Catherine Bildstein is not alive, and I wouldn’t call her well. But she still has herself.”
“And that’s what she wants to do with this self she has? I can remember when Catherine thought of herself as too pure and exalted for such business. Dedicated to the highest ideals you could shake a stick at, singing in harmony with the planets as they spun. Now the best she can think of to do is wanton murder?”
“It’s going to be a very idealistic murder,” Laudine replied in sly and smiling tones. “I don’t see the contradiction.”
Margo leaned back and I sloped softly on her bony chest. “What do I have to do, then?”
“Almost nothing. Let me take the locket and get Catherine arranged, and then there will be nothing to do but wait. She won’t even leave your room, and you’ll be able to tell Gus perfectly honestly that you never left her more than a few feet away from you. He’ll ask what happened, of course, but you can tell him she got into your wall somehow and you didn’t see it, and we’ll make sure that’s true. A few unworld hours, and we’ll pack her back up.”
“And for that you’ll help me escape from this place?” Margo didn’t sound happy—she was rightly afraid of angering Gus with some misstep—but she also sounded desperate.
“For that I’ll pay to break Gus’s binding spell. Making it out of the exit is up to you. But there’s a way through to Cairo just down the block, if that will suit you.”
Margo considered. “I wanted to go home. But Cairo might be a decent enough place to die.”
“Spend long enough in Nautilus and all the unworld becomes home to you. Whether the home you long for, or the home you’re glad to leave behind, it’s all one in abandonment,” Laudine said gently. And Margo drew the locket’s chain up over her head.
The doorways of Nautilus stand demarcated by lintels or posts on the glowing walls, but to a casual eye nothing else distinguishes them from every other surface. On stepping through the wall, its bright substance engulfs you in its pearlescent ooze, as if you were subjected to some celestial digestion. But then you pop clear on the other side, and the suction of that smeary, disorienting nacre is nearly forgotten.
This was the first time I had stood upright in the substance of a wall, embedded and still like a vein in marble. I waited. The locket still anchored my lower extremities, but I unfurled above it, nearly concealed by the wall’s opacity. Laudine had said that my flashing was dimly visible from without, but only if you looked for it.
As you may have guessed, I waited in considerable pain. Laudine had turned her simulated friendship with Sky to good account and successfully stolen two umbrastrings from his display. With many apologies she had inserted the prongs of one in the region of my ankle, and the other in the crown of my head. Using talens I gave her, she spelled the wall so that my scream did not penetrate to the outside air. Then she removed herself to a distance where she could watch.
It was only when I was pinned in this way that I felt the full extent of my power—that I felt what I was. Death undying, life unlived, trapped in an amalgam whose internal and eternal violence could not rest. Oh, I understood then why Darius thought my ghost could rise as a new ruler of Nautilus! My power, caught in this terrifying oscillation, was that of a dark goddess of thresholds, the force of liminality itself. I was the unresolvable in-between, always torn by the pull of life and death and confounding the two in my fleshless flesh.
Where that power vibrated, a shadow approached. Man’s frame, bull’s head, crescent horns. I saw Asterion as if he were drowned in luminous milk, an opalescent burr around his contours. I watched him pause as he touched the door-zone and transferred the talens that would break Margo’s inadequate lock, and I knew the success or failure of our plot waited in the coming moment—but my charged suffering was such that I could barely remember why I wanted him dead.
He paused. Had he seen me? Did he understand the trap set for him? No, he was merely adjusting his collar.
Then Asterion barged straight into the wall, which meant that he also plowed into me. What I wanted was no longer relevant, because my power instantaneously committed itself to his disassembly. He was a buzz of blood, a swarm of carnage, and even if I had wished to spare him it was too late. His brisk intrusion made his death much faster than Flynn’s had been, and therefore much kinder. The suffering the minotaur had inflicted on me had been incalculably greater, I swear it.
Asterion let out a single bark of astonished pain, and then he was gone—except, that is, for a large sweep of his bull’s head, hollowed out like a helmet where I passed through him, which thudded bloodily onto the floor of Margo’s room. I’d also missed most of his left leg, which had entered the wall just outside my borders.
That leg stayed beside me, teetering its way to equilibrium; I could see it as if through a shining fog. It looked as if it had been sawed off at a steep angle halfway down the thigh. Asterion’s purple velvet trouser leg was sliced as well and slipped down to bunch around his ankle, just as if he were getting ready to seat himself on a toilet—and my scream bucked with the hysterical laughter that was denied me. His remaining boot sat under the trouser leg’s drapery, and it was a lovely one: I saw a pointed toe and alternating stripes of leather, black and gold and fuchsia, rising in a spiral like a barber’s pole. The minotaur had done very well for himself, until he did a bit better than he should have.
The grains of Asterion’s devastated flesh remained inside me, a revolting cloud, until Laudine came running to remove me from the wall and yanked the upper umbrastring away. She hid it promptly in her dress. Then Asterion’s materials drizzled down, bone and eyeball and intestine alike reduced to a wet, indiscriminate gray-red dust. It fell in a gritty rain, reeking of iron and shit and stomach acid, and coated the street with a thick paste.
Margo and Laudine both screamed and wailed and enacted horrified amazement for the spectators, who were gathering fast. I was dutifully rolled back up and stuffed in my locket, with many loud recriminations and wonderings as to how I could have managed such a thing. A talking peacock was dispatched to fetch Gus, and Asterion’s more recognizable remains were gathered just outside Margo’s home. The look on her face as she hauled out the dripping, hairy rind of what had been Asterion’s head was not one I will forget.
There was no keeping our murder a secret, so all that remained was to hide the involvement of my living coconspirators. Murder was technically illegal, even in Nautilus. But since I myself was not legally an entity, there was nothing anyone could do to me—no more than if Asterion had been crushed by a falling star.
“Ghosts are slippery bitches, aren’t they?” and “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving beast,” and “Guess somebody’s having a bad morning,” were among the ambient remarks, and none of them seemed cause for concern. The story spread with such force across the city that its widening ripples were nearly palpable, a crawling on my skinless skin.
I sat in my tiny dark cell, trembling with my own scream, and though words were still beyond my reach in Nautilus, I knew that I had sent two very loud and unequivocal messages. The first, of course, informed Darius that I put no faith in his promises and had no interest in ruling Nautilus with him in any case, thank you kindly for the invitation. A body of my own was a vicious temptation. It was very nearly irresistible—but I knew, oh how I knew, that Darius would claim his price for it. In one way or another, that price would be too high.
The second message was to Anura, and I would have refrained from sending it if I could. It amounted to this: There is nothing I won’t do for your sake, and no crime I won’t commit in your defense.
And this: I never promised.
And this: Live as your true self, my own, my dearest one. Even if it means that others die.
Laudine slipped away, no doubt to have a roaring fight with our amphibious friend. Since Laudine now had your address in Greenwich Village, I expected that soon enough I would be called to account for my actions as well. What could I say to Anura, except that I could not have done otherwise? I boiled with shame at my violation of a promise ungiven, and at the same time I blamed Anura for demanding it. If she could not bear to expose the crime she shared with Gus, how could she ask me to allow Asterion to do the same?
I expect that you will have trouble believing it. How could Gus be so dethroned in my thoughts? But in truth I was so preoccupied with imaginary arguments I might have with Anura—and with the larger, sharper, unmanageable question of whether she would forgive me—that I completely forgot to wonder how Gus would view my conduct.
I was presently illuminated.
“Let me through! Let me through this instant!” His voice came bowling through the crowd, shrill and urgent. I heard what sounded like shoving and stamping, cries of irritation and yelped obscenities. Then Gus reached out and snatched the locket off Margo’s neck, and held me in his fist for a moment, breathing hard.
I sat in my metal clamshell, so docile and quiescent that no one would ever imagine how recently I had turned a minotaur into a cloud. I thought I could feel his stare fixed on me behind my wreath of blue enamel flowers.
“Forget-me-nots,” he said after a pause, and then he broke down sobbing. I was bathed in unctuous, unwelcome warmth and knew that he had squeezed the locket against himself, perhaps his cheek or his heart. “Forget-me-nots. She had to open the locket, reach the wall, somehow stabilize herself enough to interact with flesh—all with no help! It would seem to be impossible. But for those who don’t forget, nothing is impossible. Oh, Catherine!”
It was so ridiculous that I failed to comprehend at first. Then Dawn with her bloody fingertips scaled my mind, as it were, and I realized that there had been a misunderstanding.
Gus thought I’d murdered Asterion for him.
Soon enough all Nautilus was in agreement. Sky spread the story of how Asterion had seemed to threaten Gus in my presence, with what he didn’t say. And soon thereafter—well. The word went ’round that it was ill-advised in the extreme to annoy Gus Farrow, or else his loyal ghost would shred the offender.
In some ways the story was convenient for me; it obscured the true object of my protection, and that in turn made it less likely that suspicion would fall on Madame Laudine. As you sat up in your narrow bed at two in the afternoon, brushed your teeth and combed your hair, I even entertained the frantic hope that Gus would consider Asterion’s death a sufficient demonstration of my love and recall you. That he would mash you down and forget the foul bundle in a corner. What reason did he have to send out his beamers, to continue his campaign of murders, if I had gone so far as to kill for him?
If my actions ended Gus’s murders rather than enabling more of them—surely Anura would forgive me then? But then how would I talk with her henceforth?
Hopes invested in Gus are generally misplaced, and this hope proved no different. He crooned over me, but left you where you were. You bathed, dressed, ate, stalked the streets of Greenwich Village. You singled out a girl, a Polish immigrant named Anya, and coaxed her into going to Coney Island with you. A thirty-foot giant loomed over the pair of you, clutching a sign that read ASTROLAND; you knocked over a painted cat with a ball and presented it to her; and seagulls stole your knish as you sat on the boardwalk with your arm around her shoulder.
I managed to scrawl Anya, run! He’ll kill you on the beach with your fingertip. Then a scampering child’s foot landed in the middle of my message with a rush and scatter of sand, and you and Anya got up and walked to the parachute jump. You made the ascent hand in hand, then floated softly down together.
By the time you reached the ground, Anya was dying.
It does no good to say that Gus’s exile would not have saved her; you were already in motion, like some vicious wind-up toy, and would not stop until your gears ground out their impetus.
Anya would have died regardless, that I can say with certainty. But Gus was already getting on in age, and I can’t deny that his exile would have cut off the scroll of your murders at some unknown point—before now.
Maybe long before now. Why did he keep sending out his beamers, why did he keep killing? It must have been more than mere habit. Possibly, for all his joy over Asterion’s atomization, he still knew in his heart that I did not love him. Possibly he even guessed at whom I did love, though his arrogance prevented him from admitting it.
No. His true reason was this: Gus could not afford to give up his obsession, his endless killing. To do so would confront him with the utter, grotesque, desolate waste he had made of both his life and his magic.
It would leave him with nothing to do. What did he truly care for, after all?
Whatever his reasons were, I had made myself his accomplice. With every death beyond that point I felt guilt settle on me, cloying, adhesive, hot with shame. Each time Lore has killed you, she’s spared me the toll of another young girl doomed owing to my choice; each time you’ve eluded Lore and killed again, I’ve known that Lore and Anura must think with disgust of my share in that crime. If Lore is working with me, and she is, it does not follow that she likes me—no more than I like myself.
Lore did begin to track down your manifestations far more often once I mastered the trick of slipping letters directly through the membrane that separates the unworld from Nautilus. And in chasing her, Gus aged quite a bit—until he decided he could no longer take the risk.
Call me a necessary evil, if you wish. I’ve called myself worse. At least in that crucial respect—necessity—I remain superior to you who are a worthless evil, a pointless blot. Let this narrative, written with a stolen hand, indict and damn us both!
As for Anura? I’d given Laudine your address in Greenwich Village. Anura had to know where I was; she had to. You’d butchered Anya very early in your allotted year, and there was a long span of existence in front of you. It was unwonted bounty: more than three hundred nights remained when you would have to sleep, when Anura and I could converse with the whisper of pens on paper! I knew I would welcome Anura’s anger, assume all the blame with gratitude, if only she would come.
She did not. Night after night I waited in vain.
In the months that followed, I learned how to cry with stolen eyes.