Mr. Kingsley had not spoken to anyone for a week, and for some time he did not speak to Mr. Munroe, either. But finally, as the shadows were drawing down and Mr. Munroe was preparing to leave, Mr. Kingsley looked up at him and said, “Finally I understand poor Horry.”
Only this and nothing more.
lying under the gallows-tree
The noctares brought Bram to a building she recognized; she had to cram her fist against her mouth to keep back a spasm of hysterical giggles. Of all the things she had expected to see in the underworld, the absurd Victorian gazebo from Lafayette Park had surely been last on the list. But there it sat, a debutante in an abattoir, looking self-conscious against a dark byzantine tangle of girders and pipes whose function Bram could not imagine.
Then she saw the figures waiting beneath the gazebo’s arches, and her laughter withered and turned to dust in her mouth.
There were twelve of them, tall men robed in dark blood-red. As she came closer, she could see that they each wore the same mask, a stark, stylized face in unpainted white porcelain. The eyeholes of the masks were empty, but behind them she could see gears and cogwheels meshing and turning. She swallowed hard and stared at the steps of the gazebo to keep from being mesmerized by the endless spinning clockwork. The noctares let go of her arm, and when she looked around, it had vanished.
One of the twelve Clockwork Kings stepped forward and said, “I speak for all.” Its voice was the voice of a clockwork mechanism, full of rust and oil, dust and dead spiders and fragments of macerated time. The other eleven bowed their heads and stepped back into the shadows of the gazebo, but she could still see slivers of light glinting off the moving clockwork in their eyes.
There was silence; unlike mortals, the Clockwork Kings did not shift or grumble or even breathe. Only the clockwork, ever moving, revolved and revolved, but it made no sound.
Bram licked her dry lips and said, “I’m looking for someone. Sean Lacroix.”
“And what will you do when you have found him?” said the Clockwork King.
“I want . . . ” She had to stop, wrench her gaze away again from the whirling gears. “I want to take him back with me. To the world.”
“He is dead.”
“There’s ways around that, aren’t there?” Bram said and flinched at her own boldness.
“A few. But why should we do this for you? Why is your love greater, your pain deeper, than that of any of the thousands of people grieving in the city above?”
“The train stopped for me,” Bram said, knowing it was not enough.
“It stopped for your music, not your errand.” One of the other Clockwork Kings made some tiny motion, a bare rustle of fabric, and the first said, “And yet you have answered our question. Play for us.”
“Play for you?”
“Play for us. And if your music pleases us, we will let you talk to your friend, and you may take him back if it is what he wishes.”
Hands shaking, barely daring to breathe, Bram took out her guitar, tuned it, and began to play. She played a song of her own, “Soaring Jilly,” that she’d played often and always to generous applause. But the rapture that had possessed her on the Grandison Station platform was gone; she was aware that her playing was no more than adequate and her voice was thin and strained and tending to sharp, and the Clockwork Kings were watching her with their arms crossed. She began to imagine she could hear a clock ticking, and then to be sure that she really did, although she could not tell where the sound came from; she had only a limited amount of time to catch the Clockwork Kings’ attention before they would dismiss her and her request, and she would have to go back to the world, to life, alone.
A strange thing happened then, and unlike the other events of that terrible night of wonders, it happened in Bram’s head. The situation flipped upside down, and she realized that that ticking clock, imaginary or otherwise, was running every time she stepped up in front of an audience. There was always that narrow window of opportunity to make them care, make them listen, and, despite everything, this was no different. She straightened up, took a better breath, and vamped her way down from “Soaring Jilly” into the song of hers that Sean had always liked best, “Cast Shadows.” And now she’d got to the place inside herself where she needed to be; the music opened up and let her in. She felt the difference, and she could tell that the Clockwork Kings felt it, too; they were listening now, not judging, and she knew she had won.
When she had finished, the Clockwork Kings bowed their heads gravely in thanks, and their speaker said, “Are you sure? Our kingdom holds other pleasures.”
“I want Sean,” Bram said.
Again the Clockwork Kings nodded, and they all said, with the single great voice of a tenor bell, “As you wish.”
the starling’s path
Regardless of what you may be told, there is no phantom in the city opera house.
corrosive kisses
It was a nightclub in a city where night never ended. The dance floor was packed with writhing, twisting, gyrating bodies which did not sweat and did not breathe. They were young men and women, beautiful in death, powerful because they did not live. They made way for Bram, separating as she came near, turning to stare at her with lightless, filmy eyes, like the dead girl in the train car. Bram asked for Sean, and they shook their heads and slipped away to other parts of the dance floor. She became aware of their scent, faint and sweet and reeking.
Finally, the twentieth or thirtieth or hundredth time she said, “I’m looking for Sean,” the boy she had approached, a tall snake-sinuous blond with a livid rope-burn around his neck, nodded and pointed. There were alcoves along the walls, and in one of them, she now saw, there was a group of people dancing together, creating their own world of rhythm and sound.
“Thank you,” she said, but the blond boy was already gone. Bram crossed to the alcove through the dancers, aware of their dead, empty gazes on her back. As she approached, the people dancing in the alcove felt her presence and turned. There were six of them, beautiful and dead: three girls, two boys, and the sixth was Sean, like a king in their midst. There was a tattoo across his chest that had never been there in life, the stylized mark of train tracks, and Bram felt suddenly cold and queasy.
“Sean?” she said, in a tiny voice.
“Bram?” Sean’s eyes widened, but they weren’t his eyes—not the rainwater gray eyes, full of light, that she had loved. The rest of Sean had become brighter, straighter, more beautiful, but his eyes had truly died These were dull gray stones, dry as drought-parched earth.
“It’s me,” Bram said. “I . . . I came to find you.”
“You aren’t dead.” Sean and his cadre of dancers drew away from Bram a little, as if her vitality might be contagious.
“No. I . . . ” But she had to say it; Sean would figure out the truth anyway. “A seraphic train stopped for me.”
“Did it?” Sean said, with a bark of laughter as dead as he was. “And you came here? Why?”
“For you, Sean.” Unnerved, scared, she rushed into speech. “The Clockwork Kings say you can come back. I played for them, and they agreed to it. You can come back with me.”
The silence lasted until she realized that the throbbing, thrashing music was no longer playing. She turned around; the dancers were all standing still now, watching her with their dull, dead eyes.
She turned back to Sean. There was no joy on Sean’s face, no relief, no gratitude. He was staring at her as if he had never seen her before.
“Sean?”
“What? Am I supposed to say thank you? Am I supposed to fall at your feet weeping with gratitude, a good little Eurydice? Has it occurred to you, Bram, that I might not want to go back?”
“You don’t? But—”
“No. It’s over, Bram. Clair doesn’t love me—I realized that at last. And I’m not a poet. I’ll never be one. There’s nothing left up there for me except defeat and pain, and I don’t want those.”
She did not know who C
lair was. “But, Sean . . . ”
“What?” Sean said. He was smiling a little. Two of his cadre came up beside him, a girl on the left and a boy on the right. Snake-like, they twined their arms around his waist, and he put his arms across their shoulders.
Bram felt the anticlimax coming and could not help it. There was nothing else left for her to say. “I love you.”
“Do you?” Sean said, without interest. “And why do you imagine that matters?”
It was a terrible echo of the Clockwork Kings’ question. She said, “It’s love. It has to matter. Sean, look, I know I’m not like you. I know I’m not really worth your while. I’m a poser, a wannabe, wearing black like it was peacock feathers. My name isn’t even Bram. It’s Michelle, all right? I don’t know why the train stopped for me. It shouldn’t have. It should have stopped for you. But I love you, and I came here to bring you back, and don’t you even care?”
From all the dead dancers in the nightclub, there was a long, mocking round of applause. Bram stood still beneath it, her cheeks burning, stubbornly refusing to drop her gaze from Sean’s face. And Sean looked back at her, with those murky gray eyes that were not his, and said, “Honestly, Bram—Michelle, if you like—no, I don’t. Your love meant nothing to me when I was alive. It means even less to me now. Go back to the world, Bram. There’s nothing for you here.” He turned to the girl on his left and they kissed, open-mouthed, imitating passion they could no longer feel.
Bram flinched back, and Sean’s cadre moved in between them, Sean’s armor against life and risk; from somewhere, the music started again. Bram was left with no options, nothing to do except turn around and leave. She stumbled through the throng of young men and women, who would never age, never be ugly, never grow, never be able to open their hearts to anyone or anything. And even as they writhed and strutted, the dead dancers watched her all the way to the door.
why do you linger?
Sean climbed out the window of his old bedroom and scrambled onto the roof of the house; it was five to midnight, but the dark didn’t bother him. Once on the roof, he opened his backpack and took out a flashlight and the battered manuscript of The Stag of Candles. Clair’s scent was still on it, or perhaps that was just his memory of what she smelled like.
He stood, holding The Stag of Candles to his chest, and waited for the 11:59 train.
It howled past in a stink of oil and stale air. Midnight. Sean turned on the flashlight, folded the top page of the manuscript back against its binder clip, and again waited, like a captain’s wife on her widow’s walk, watching the sea for her husband’s sails. When he heard the next train coming, the 12:20, he began to read in a hard, clear, angry voice.
Sean read a poem from The Stag of Candles for each train that passed. He kept his voice level and firm, although after about 1:45, he crouched down on the roof between trains and sobbed in choking whispers, clutching the manuscript to him like a hurt child.
At 3:12, a seraphic train screamed by. It did not stop, and the people inside did not even turn their heads. Sean scrubbed his eyes with one grimy hand and waited for the next train.
He read poems about the foundries, poems about the art museum and the coldly echoing rotunda of the public library. He read the poem about St. Christopher’s, and another poem about his own confirmation and the angels that did not sing to him. He read poems about the interstate, about the city’s storm drains, which were supposed to prevent floods but never quite did. He read a long poem in Spenserian stanzas about St. Catherine’s. He had written a corona of eight poems, one for each of the city’s eight public parks, and he read the corona to the trains, which were no more impressed than Clair had been. He read his sequence of sonnets about the river. Now, nearly 6 o’clock, he was no longer stopping between trains, just reading and reading from this bloated leviathan of a manuscript, which he had been working on in one form or another since he was fifteen.
At 6:39, a second seraphic train hurtled past; the roar of its passage sounded like mocking laughter. Tears were running down Sean’s face, but he kept reading, embarked now on the long narrative poem about Sophia Walters, the early twentieth-century mystic who predicted the terrible fire of 1922 and died in it.
At 7:29, Sean read the last poem in The Stag of Candles, a villanelle dedicated to Clair. He stood on the roof, dry-eyed now, although his eyes and throat and nose were raw. It was over; there was nothing. He had been tested, and he had failed. The seraphic trains would not stop for him. His poetry was a bouquet of dead, rotting roses, a sickness, a canker, a stupid, self-indulgent delusion. There was no worth in him.
At 7:31, the sun rose.
At 7:32, the first daylight train passed the house at 2981 Lynn Street. Still clutching The Stag of Candles in a white-knuckled grip, Sean threw himself off the roof and onto the tracks just before the wheels of the train.
The pages of the manuscript flew free briefly and then were swallowed by the city, which would not mourn. The Stag of Candles became another sacrifice.
Lost in the city and never recovered.
the company of stone-eyed watchers
There are nine sundials in Lytton Park, each purchased and installed by the philanthropist W. W. Maddox, who died in 1920. By the terms of his will, there were to have been four more sundials installed, for a total of thirteen, but as the Maddox estate was immediately and inextricably mired in litigation between his second wife and his son, each contesting the inheritance of the other, this ambitious scheme was never brought to fruition. Both the son and the second wife accused their opponent of encouraging Maddox in his passion for sundials, which the son described as “morbid” and the second wife stigmatized as “unnatural,” and as the Municipal Park Board confessed that in its heart of hearts it did not desire any more sundials, that clause of the will became part of the complicated evidence adduced by both sides to prove Maddox was not of sound mind, and was eventually, thankfully dropped.
If you acquire a map of Lytton Park and plot the positions of the sundials, you will see that the form an incomplete circle. The third sundial is set awkwardly into the side of a hill, and the sixth is buried in deep shade among a stand of cypress trees. You may begin to wonder whether Maddox’s beneficence had some darker, ulterior motive, but if either the second wife or the son knew anything about that, they never said a word.
Not one of the nine sundials shows the correct time.
roses she gave me, and columbines
Bram Bennett returned to the mortal world on a seraphic train that was empty except for her and a man crouched in the corner, sobbing and sobbing. Looking at the two livid, bloodless wounds running from shoulder to waist on either side of his spine, she could understand why. It was all she could do not to join him.
The train stopped again at Grandison Station in the cool, serene darkness before dawn. Bram got out. No one had to tell her that the seraphic trains would never stop for her again. She knew it in the marrow of her bones and the beating caverns of her heart.
She stood on the platform, her guitar at her side, and wondered what to do. She supposed wearily that she could throw herself under the next train to come along, as she had originally planned, but that seemed stupid and futile; even this terrible spiny knot of pain, compounded of grief and humiliation and anger, was better than the mechanical frenzy of the pink neon nightclub.
She made her way along the platform to the stairs. She remembered that she had finished “Why Do You Linger?” in the night, and it was still in her head, raw, vital, imperfect—but complete. She could go write it down; maybe later, when the mute, stupid weight of grief had lessened, she could play it. But not at Café Xerxes. She would not go back there; it was as barren and futile as the nightclub, and she realized that that was why Sean had gone there: because it might be dead, but it was safe.
Somewhere dangerous, she thought, going down the stairs. Somewhere alive. Somewhere new.
The oak trees saluted her with their stark but living branches, black against the
luminous sky. Suddenly, laughing, Bram raised her arms and saluted them in return.
reaching for your reflection
Clair stands in front of her picture window, gazing out across the night-bejeweled city. It is impossible to tell if she has posed herself deliberately, aware of the picture she creates, or if the angle of her raised arm, the geometry of her fingers against the curtain she holds back, the tilt of her head, the position of her feet, are merely accidental. And you would not dream of asking her.
In a moment Clair will turn away, turn back to you where you watch her from the long, low, white couch, but for now she stands, gazing out at the city which is more truly her beloved—her lover, master, servant, self—than any mortal who has ever touched her.
Fiddleback Ferns
“Are these fiddleback ferns, Mommy?” Cindy asked.
“Fiddlehead, honey,” Marjorie said absently. “Fiddlebacks are nasty spiders.” It was only later that she would realize that Cindy, for once in her vacuous Barbie-obsessed life, had been exactly right.
Fiddleback ferns indeed.
Marjorie dismissed them as weeds at first—the plants she cared about bloomed prettily and smelled nice—rooted them out, planted pansies instead. But a week later, the pansies were dead, and those nasty purple-green shoots were visible again.
“Darn it,” said Marjorie, who never swore, and dug them out again.But the more of them she uprooted, the more there seemed to be. Their smell was like something burning rather than something growing, and it was strong. Ron complained of headaches and did even less yardwork than usual. Marjorie consulted her gardening books, consulted Mrs. Higgins next door, even got Daniel to show her how to Google. But she couldn’t find anything that looked like the things growing in her yard. Daniel, who watched too much TV, said, “Maybe they’re alien spores or something,” and Marjorie said, “Do your homework.”