The Curator, page 41
D sat up, but otherwise stayed where she was, listening to them gather: their rigid footsteps in their different shoes and slippers and boots, their coarse pants swishing, their patched skirts rustling.
She listened, and she stared at the pool of blood from the dead man and the triangular pattern of nail heads. They had become lustrous under the red. The wood of the museum floor beneath her palm felt unnaturally warm and she could feel something flowing along the grains of the boards. It was as if the life that had departed her neighbor’s body had been absorbed by the triangular symbol, and the symbol had redirected it into a new body—the floors and walls and beams of the museum.
A stiff hand touched her shoulder.
She inhaled and looked around.
Robert’s severed head rested on the mechanic’s wax neck, above the gore-coated shoulders of the mechanic’s jacket, and atop the mechanic’s body, but he was still, immediately and distinctly, himself.
His mouth parted into a full-toothed smile.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” D said.
He placed his wax hand against her cheek. The fingers crackled as they bent, flaking bits of wax skin. Despite being animated, the hand seemed even less lifelike than it had been. The wax felt as if it had hardened into something stony. There was no warmth at all in it, of course, not like real skin.
D sobbed. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby…”
He put the wax hands under her arms, and gently lifted her to her feet, and held her with the bloodless body.
Crowded around them in a circle was the population of the museum: the sawmill operator–engineer, the soldier-clockmaker, the bicyclist-printer, the bricklayers, the sailors, the clamdigger, the farmer and his dog, the engineman, the fireman, the telegraph operator, the wheelwright, the future miner, the woman Gucci, the surgeon, the surgeon’s patient, the skinners, the fruit picker, and all the other workers, in their ragged but clean clothes, glossy-faced, some one-eyed, some carrying their tools. Their countenances ranged from sober to melancholy to joyful, but a confidence radiated from all of them, a solidity, a strange and authoritative goodness. They were awesome, but she was not afraid of them.
Beyond the crowd, she saw Joven’s vessel. The Morgue Ship had beached itself at the foot of the gallery, where it lolled against the wall. It fit comfortably in the high-ceilinged room. Water streamed from its sides to the floor.
The stories had been true: the ship had not sunk, but continued to sail. Now, it seemed that the souls that had been aboard it had found new bodies—the wax bodies of the workers of the National Museum of the Worker.
From a floor somewhere higher in the building there was a grinding rumble, wood and glass breaking, the peeling moan of metal on metal, like train wheels on train tracks. D thought she knew what it must be.
“What will you do?” D asked Robert.
His cracked lips slowly shaped three words. He repeated them for D, and repeated them again.
“ ‘We will protect,’ ” she said.
He nodded.
“The people, you mean?” D asked. “Out there?”
He nodded again.
The rumble that had begun somewhere above was louder, the crushing of wheels reverberating through the shaft of the stairwell.
“Be careful, darling,” D said.
Robert winked.
* * *
The wax army swung around, and shuffled from the museum.
Behind them, the metal wagon drove from the third floor, thundering its way down the stairs. It smashed through the doorway to the first floor in an explosion of brick and lath. The wagon rolled the length of the gallery in a humming crackle, plowing through exhibits and benches, knocking some aside and demolishing others beneath its huge wheels, and shedding clouds of debris. As it passed her, the soldier with the painted face who manned the huge gun atop the machine swiveled toward D, his uniform coated in plaster dust, and saluted.
It drove on, spraying fans of water where the Morgue Ship had drenched the floor, and went jouncing down the last flight of stairs. D heard it bash its way out into the street.
Friends
“I’ll slay you in one step.” Zil wagged a shard of jagged glass at the figure that loomed in the smoky entryway of the ruins.
Len jumped from a pile of rubble with a shout of war and hurled his shoe at the threatening silhouette. The figure yelled in pain.
Ike emerged out of the smoke with a bloody lip, and grabbed Len around the neck. Zil was immediately pained to see that Ike’s wonderful brown suit was torn at both knees.
“I thought you were someone trying to get us!” Len fought Ike’s grasp, but Ike didn’t let go.
“You hit me in the face with your shoe!” Ike ground his knuckles into Len’s skull, and rubbed them back and forth.
“Ah! I got a hurt foot!” Len hopped on one leg, keeping his bare foot off the ground.
Never one to miss an opportunity to point out the lesson in a situation—especially when it came to Len, who had an obstinate streak—Zil remarked, “There’s throwing rocks laying around everywhere and this one chucks his shoe.”
“What are you rotten stupid children doing in this place?” Ike released the boy.
“We came to make a Social Call!” Len said angrily.
“That’s the truth,” Zil said.
Ike was nonplussed. “What the bright shiny fuck is a Social Call?”
“It’s what people do, Ike.” Len rubbed a tear from his eye and sniffed. “It’s custom.”
“That doesn’t explain why you’re here. I told you I’d be at the museum.”
“There was a Volunteer coming up the street,” Zil said, “and we had to hide out. We made ourselves a spot and laid low. Once we started thinking about being off, the bombing and the shooting started up.”
“And there’s all these cats. If you believe in all that, that means it’s safe.” Len gestured toward what was, indeed, a remarkable number of cats. There might have been two dozen just in the vicinity of the ruined building’s empty front doorway. They crouched and lolled, statuesque, on the stones, on the broken walls, on the odd juts of scorched wood. Not one seemed even mildly indisposed as the smoke and mist licked around them.
Along with the damage to Ike’s suit, Zil noted that he no longer wore the pretty white scarf they’d given him. Along with the blood on his lip, there was also something disconsolate in his face, a careworn quality that was different from the shrewd poise that he had exuded in previous meetings.
“What’s happened to you, Ike?” she asked.
A terrible thought occurred to Zil that made her grow emotional. “She had another man, didn’t she, Ike? She had another man and he gave you a beating. Oh, I’m so sorry, Ike.” Zil threw her arms around him before he could respond. “You’ll find someone else.”
* * *
It was far easier to let Zil believe that Dora had thrown him over than to explain the truth, that he’d run from the terrifying man who’d surprised him in the museum. He’d run and left Dora to him.
“But you’ll have to tell me a few things first,” the man had said in Ike’s ear, and Ike, as calm as could be, as calm as if he were waiting for a piece of flotsam to come drifting out from the shadows of the No, calmer than he’d ever thought he could be, had said, “I’ll tell you whatever you want, mister. I don’t want any trouble.”
This earned a chuckle from his ambusher, and Ike sensed an infinitesimal relaxation in the body that was pressed up against him. He dropped a hard heel on the man’s bare foot and ran. The scarf burned across his neck as the man snatched it, but Ike escaped. At the stairs, he’d thrown a look back and seen the man full-on, big as a statue, black beard like a nettle bush, grinning and holding the scarf.
“I’ll have my interview, Ike!” he’d called.
Ike had fled home to the Lees, only to learn that his friends were dead. Good old Rei and good old Groat, the closest to parents he’d ever had, and Marl too. Though they’d only been murdered that morning, they’d already been dragged out, shrouded, and given to the Fair to take away. He’d never see them again.
To allow Ike into the Still, the soldier on guard had demanded the diamond ring off Ike’s finger, the one that was meant for Dora, and he’d given it. Blood was everywhere, and all of it crawling with bugs. The smell in the air was of iron and loosened bowels and alcohol. Ike had rushed outside without going up to the crawl space to fetch his things, and puked in the street.
The soldier on guard laughed. “Rich, ain’t it?”
Since then, Ike had kept moving. He had no idea if the enormous, bearded intruder at the museum was somehow connected to what had happened at the Still—he couldn’t see how that was possible—and he didn’t know what, if anything, the murders might have to do with himself. To wait around, though, was plainly dangerous. The man knew his name.
Nights he’d spent under the bridges. Days he’d spent wandering the Bluffs, halfway contemplating leaping off to the rocks below. Every second Ike felt breathless, felt trapped inside himself. His cowardice nagged him, clawed at him with the wind on the cliffs, sniffed at him with the noses of the rats that scurried up beside him in his sleeping places under the bridges. Ike felt that he had been gravely mistaken about himself.
Dora could take care of herself, but she was no match for the man who had nearly got Ike. He had never stopped thinking of her, not since he’d met her, but he wished he could. In his mind, the man with the black beard choked her until she turned dead-blue.
It was only once the cannons and the fusillades of rifle fire had commenced that he had summoned the courage to return to the museum. The churning noise—not just of the fighting, but of the people fleeing and screaming and shouting—had seemed to block out his own castigations, and he finally felt strong again.
His progress uptown to Little Heritage was slow and disorienting. The city was phantasmic, smeared by the smoke and the mist. It seemed as if one wrong turn might take him into a whole other city altogether, one that shared certain traits with his own, alleys and saloons and museums and theaters and folks who had a lot and folks who had none, with the Fields and the Fair but by other names, where Ike would be a stranger to everyone, the sole speaker of his language.
As he came to the city center, the roar of the cannon blasts became louder, there were crowds, and people knocked against him. Ike kept on, telling himself that maybe Dora was all right, maybe the bearded man had not harmed her at all, or maybe he was keeping her prisoner. He fantasized about killing him and freeing her. He eventually found his way to the museum, its bland soaring face materializing through wisps of smoke.
It was only when he pressed his hands to the jutting hammerheads of the front door that his nerve failed him again. How could he defeat a man like that?
Ike scratched at his wrists with his nails, bit at his hand, punched his own shoulder, attempting to batter himself into trying the door latch. It will probably be locked, and you can go away, he bargained with himself.
Even that was too much of a chance, too much of a risk to his sorry, cowardly life. He’d retreated, screaming inside at his own weakness—and spotted the flicker of a silhouette in the empty doorway of the neighboring ruins.
* * *
The young ones were relieved when he told them he’d lead them back to the Lees, well away from the fighting. Ike didn’t have the heart to tell them that if the fighting made its way downtown, there’d be nowhere to go after that but the bay.
They held hands as they picked their way across the smoky lawn to the street. Ike held Zil’s and Zil held Len’s. Zil’s hand was sweaty.
“Why do kids always have such greasy damn hands?” Ike asked.
“I don’t know why for other kids,” Zil said, “but for me, it’s because I rub them around in piles of shit.”
“That’s why for me too,” Len said.
Ike said, “I want you to know that I won’t let anyone harm you two. That’s a privilege I’m reserving for my own self.”
A stiff clomping, a marching cadence, gathered somewhere behind the fog. Ike hissed. They halted, clustered together, somewhere near the corner of Legate. Bolts of smoke unraveled around them. There was the lump of a corpse on the ground a few feet away, a poker sticking up straight from its torso.
“Are we gonna be all right?” whispered Len.
“Yeah,” Ike said. “But be ready to run.”
A human shape appeared. It had a flowing mane. There was a familiarity in the imposing curl of the shoulders.
He almost laughed. “Rei? How the—”
The clamdigger from the museum cocked her head at Ike. The shadows had shortened her to Rei’s height, but she was as tall as ever, and her ferocious smile, molded and painted onto her face, was framed by pure white hair, not Rei’s black-and-silver.
One of her wax hands dropped onto Ike’s head and ruffled his hair.
His breath had caught when he saw her clearly, but now he let it go—for there was nothing to be afraid of. The feel of her hand was cold and inhuman, but it was familiar too.
“Rei,” he said, because it was her. Ike knew it. She was the closest thing to a mother he’d ever had, or would have. He’d know her anywhere.
The clamdigger—Rei in a new form—nodded, shoved him ungently aside, and disappeared into the smoke. Zil and Len hid behind Ike. Other figures from the museum passed by, emerging from the smoke, swinging their rigid arms, rocking on their jointless legs, before being swallowed.
A hunched wax figure with the head of a woman and the body of a roly-poly man appeared. Their expression was humorless. Ike had never noticed them in the museum before, but the figure’s hunch belonged to Groat.
“Groat?”
The figure gave Ike a not entirely friendly thump of acknowledgment in the chest. No sooner had this new embodiment of Groat vanished into the smoke than there came a bellowing crash of metal, and the grinding of rubble being reduced to powder. A wagon-sized box of green steel rolled out of the smoke on shining black wheels. Brick fragments and wood shards were littered over the machine’s front. A wax man in a green uniform stood through a hole in the roof, wielding a rifle that was as long as a cannon. The smoke sucked the massive vehicle into itself after a second, but Ike could still hear its mighty wheels as it swung onto Legate and headed for midtown.
Len had buried his face in Ike’s jacket and was crying.
“What do we do?” Zil asked.
“Take it easy now,” Ike said. “We’re just going to go in the opposite direction. I don’t think we’ll have any problem from those ones, anyway. I’m friends with some of these people.”
* * *
A cordon of Gildersleeve’s infantry had rounded up a trio of suspects and put them against a wall by the crossing of National Boulevard and Legate. They leveled their rifles upon them. “For the crime of disloyalty,” the commanding officer said.
A teenaged girl in the suspect group screamed that she wasn’t anybody. “I’m just trying to get home!” Another of the suspects, an older woman, slumped down to the ground in a puddle of skirts. “Oh, fuck all of you, you fucking bootlickers,” said the third suspect, Brewster Uldine. His tram had broken down and he’d stayed with it, like a driver was supposed to, and Gildersleeve’s men had yanked him off and put him under arrest.
He announced, “I’m not a revolutionary, but if you’re going to kill me, then consider me joined!” and gave them the finger.
The clatter of hundreds of hollow footsteps echoed from amid the clouds of smoke that obscured Legate.
“Redirect!” ordered the commanding officer, and his line of a dozen men swiveled to aim their rifles into the smoke that swathed Legate.
As the marching steps came closer, the smoke seemed to vibrate. “Fire!” cried the officer, losing his nerve and breaking the protocol against engagement before making visual contact. The soldiers unleashed a full volley into the smoke.
The clattering footsteps continued, unaffected, and the veil of smoke billowed open to reveal a formation of civilians, glossy-faced and glass-eyed, propelled by stiff limbs. Several bore bullet holes from the volley, but none were bleeding.
“Those aren’t people,” said one soldier, and threw aside his rifle, and fled.
“Halt!” the commanding officer ordered the oncoming figures as they overwhelmed his men, but they did not heed him.
While this was happening, Brewster guided the other two suspects to a doorway, and into a building.
“Who are those that showed up with the weird faces?” asked the girl who had only been trying to get home. The tram driver looked back and saw the huge green wagon rip out of the gloom, spitting fire from the rifle on top, and Gildersleeve’s men dancing as the bullets shredded their bodies. He screamed over the deafening chatter to just keep going, keep going and don’t stop.
The Hunt
When they had gone, the wax people with their human souls, walked and driven out the museum’s front door and into the city, D gripped the head of the drill bit where it protruded from her neighbor’s temple and yanked. It came out glistening blackly with whatever had been inside the monster’s skull. She wiped the bit on her filthy skirt and returned it to her apron pocket for just in case. She lifted the pliers from her neighbor’s dead grasp.
D made her way through the gallery. Her shoes splashed in the water that had rained from the barnacle-snarled sides of the Morgue Ship.
The wagon had destroyed the wide doorframe and dragged the front doors made of melted hammers into the street.
D stepped out into the gloom. She felt something soft and warm twine impatiently around her ankles, and she followed it to the left, in the direction of the Society’s ruins.
* * *
Inside the Vestibule, D scraped her hand over the triangles etched in the wood, feeling her way through the dark to the deep dark. There was no need to cut herself this time; blood from her broken nose was all over her face.
