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 creat
ures 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?”
“I’m going to bring him back,” Bram said, articulating for the first time the plan which had sprung full-formed into her head as soon as she had seen the open doors of the seraphic train, and the dead girl, after a disbelieving moment, rocked back on the bench and went into a terrible dry spasm of laughter that sounded like someone choking to death on a bone. The two tortoiseshell child-kittens stopped a moment, staring at her with grave wonder, but the green-skinned woman called to them, and they ran to her.
“Man, you are just fucked up,” the dead girl said, and after that she would not speak to Bram again.
our story crumbles in my hands
When you go to the office of the city’s oldest paper, the Telegraph-Clarion, and ask to see their archives, you will be admitted to a room crammed to bursting with the huge black ledgers in which the city’s entire journalistic history is preserved. In those grim and brittle ledgers, you will find births and deaths and marriages, records of parades and speeches—a relentless marching army of facts that will not surrender up the answers you can sense, like rats in the wainscoting, behind the bland, prosperous wallpaper of the articles’ words.
But even the Telegraph-Clarion has not always been able to flatten the oddity out of the city’s dark flourishing. In the 1870s a factory girl living in Prosper Park was reputed to tell the future. Not major events such as wars or assassinations or stock-market crashes, but predicting the number of kittens in a litter, or how many tries it would take a boy to hit a target with a stone. In 1877 she threw herself under one of the Metropolitan Transit trains and died. The brief popularity of apocalypse preachers at the end of ’77 can hardly be coincidental, a fear that her tiny, trivial talent had shown her something too dreadful to be borne. But no such calamity ever occurred.
Similar cases abound: a classics professor who chased rainbows until his disappearance in 1964; Caroline Hayward, who was discovered weeping in Asherton Park in October of 1905, her hands stained with blood that was not hers. No victim was ever found, and Caroline Hayward could speak, stammering, sobbing, only of falling leaves.
And there is the story of Phoebe Gruenstahl.
Phoebe Gruenstahl was institutionalized in 1909; she was seven years old. Her parents told everyone that she had died, and in time, freed from their strange, mute, savage child, they came to believe it. She was an inmate of St. Catherine’s for twenty-nine years, and then one sweltering August night in 1938, she escaped. No one, then or later, ever discovered how.
The city was in a panic for seven days. It became generally accepted that she had gotten into the sewers, and there were expeditions with dogs and rifles to bring her out again, but no luck. In fact, there were no confirmed sightings of Phoebe Gruenstahl until February 1939, when her body was dragged out of the river less than half a mile from the then newly completed Enoch J. Hopkins Bridge, the first bridge to allow the Metropolitan Transit trains to cross the river above the ground.
Cause of death could not be determined.
Everyone who examined the corpse remarked on its astonishingly beautiful smile. In life, Phoebe Gruenstahl had never smiled, never once.
your face, dark behind the glass
Sean Lacroix was born and raised in Prosper Park, one of the city’s oldest and grimmest neighborhoods. When Sean was seven, his parents moved the family from their increasingly cramped apartment to a house backing onto the Metropolitan Transit tracks. Sean had a tiny bedroom to himself, at the rear of the house; if he stuck a broom handle out his window, he could bump the tracks with it. The noise and shaking of the trains bothered him at first, but quickly became a mere fact of existence.
One
night in July, Sean sat by his open window, watching the trains go past and trying not to listen to his father yelling at his mother in the room below. The trains roared by, and Sean pretended they were fabulous monsters, but he knew they were just trains.
At 1:39 a.m. he heard an approaching train, although the next train wasn’t due until 1:50. Curious, he leaned forward even as the train let out a chuffing yowl like the hunting cry of some great beast.
It roared past in no more than five heartbeats, so fast that Sean had no idea of it overall, but individual images, like fragments from a kaleidoscope, lodged in his heart and would stay with him until the moment of his death.
A dead woman, wrapped in a blood-stained shroud, tenderly stroking the hair of a sleeping child.
Two tall, beautiful people—whether men or women he could neither then nor later decide—dancing together, their wings trailing behind them like iridescent gossamer.
A saber-toothed tiger yanking at its chains with human hands.
Two queens, crowned and jeweled and with the heads of foxes, playing chess.
In the last car, a man with the head of a white stag. The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man’s dark, lambent eyes met Sean’s, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that that stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life ever would.
And then the train was gone.
wings, torn from cloudy moths
Lying together in the darkness.
They had just had sex, awkwardly and uncomfortably, on Sean’s narrow dorm-room bed. It had not exactly been Bram’s first time, but it couldn’t count as more than her second. She hadn’t said anything about that to Sean, but she was afraid he’d been able to tell anyway.
“Sean?” she said into the darkness.
“What?” Sean said. He sounded sleepy, maybe a little irritated.
“Oh, nothing. I just . . . was I okay?”